Four watercolour paintings on wooden board, the Shadowscape series explores states of interior saturation. The works function as a form of condensation, registering what quantum structures feel like when metabolised by a human nervous system.
The paintings were presented alongside three works by J. M. W. Turner as part of Heaney’s solo exhibition Shadowscapes: Heaney, JMW Turner and Quantum at Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham (2025-26).
Across sketching, coding, writing, and movement, Heaney engaged Turner’s paintings as sites of atmospheric intensity rather than narrative source material. His handling of light and dark, the blurring of objects into forces and the suggestion of movement without fixed form resonate with Heaney’s ongoing interest in instability, interference and non-representational experience.
Each painting contains concealed handwritten text on the reverse, written during the making process. These texts operate as residues of attention, rather than explanations, traces of a parallel attempt to attend to what remains unseen or unintegrated.
The works were painted while listening to Heaney’s accompanying sound installation Shadowscapes (Wilderness Within) (2025), allowing sonic and painterly processes to co-evolve.
As with earlier series, Heaney works in watercolour, applying successive layers that partially dissolve what came before. No layer fully replaces another, inviting a reading of the self as non-stable, closer to a quantum system than a coherent psychological unit.
For the first time, Heaney painted on wooden board rather than paper. The paint resists absorption, pooling on the surface, spilling over edges, and remaining mobile longer than expected. These material behaviours mirror the difficulty of stabilising both shadow and quantum phenomena: neither submits easily to observation.
Heaney’s engagement with Turner’s paintings, The Vision of Jacob’s (?) Ladder (c.1830), The Hero of a Hundred Fights (1847), and Rocky Bay with Figures (1828), situates belief systems, technology, and nature not as subjects, but as psychological and atmospheric conditions. In this way, the paintings operate as interior landscapes that are also natural: unstable, unruly, and unresolved.
