Daisy Parris: Fist Full of Dreams

A solo exhibition curated by Guest Curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley and Simon Oldfield

Daisy Parris will present Fist Full of Dreams, a solo exhibition curated by Guest Curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley and Simon Oldfield in a newly developed ground-floor gallery at Wolterton. Bringing together a new body of paintings made in response to the house and landscape alongside the artist’s first large-scale textile installation, the exhibition establishes a dialogue with Phyllida Barlow’s sculptural interventions elsewhere in the building.

Since graduating from Goldsmiths in 2014, Parris has become known for bold, emotionally charged paintings characterised by thick impasto, gestural mark-making and fragments of poetic text. Their works foreground raw surface and immediacy, inviting viewers to encounter an intense emotional register through paint. Inspired by the expansive skies and open horizons of the Norfolk landscape, the new works will bring a raw expressive force to Wolterton’s formal interiors, where structure meets gesture and authority meets vulnerability.

At the centre of the exhibition is Kiss the Storm, a five-metre textile installation, marking the first time Parris has worked in this medium. Commissioned through Textorial, a collaborative initiative extending contemporary artists’ practices into textile production, the work translates the urgency of Parris’s painting into woven form. Initially hand-knotted by a specialist studio in India, the textile installation was later worked back into by the artist through extensive hand stitching, creating a layered dialogue between traditional craftsmanship and the artist’s own intervention. There is a history of textile work within Daisy’s family, generations of women who knitted, sewed and made their own clothes. The sustained labour of stitching fostered a tangible connection to that domestic lineage.