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In Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen, Susan Eyre approaches the visible world as a threshold rather than a certainty. The exhibition takes its title from a proposition attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, suggesting that, despite the limits of human senses, the hidden structures of reality may still be approached through careful observation and speculative thought. Drawing on scientific enquiry, ancient cosmology and material experiment, Eyre’s works ask how we might attend to realities that surround and pass through us, yet remain beyond direct perception: from dark matter and magnetic fields to molecular movement, distant horizons, light and the silent activity of the Earth itself.

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For Eyre, this proposition becomes both a philosophical ground and a working method, as her practice creates situations in which matter seems to react, shimmer, distort, reveal or withhold itself, allowing scientific ideas to be encountered through material presence. Mirrors absorb and fracture the viewer’s image; water holds floating fragments on the edge of disappearance; magnets draw invisible force into pattern; crystals reveal hidden internal structures through polarised light. Across these works, perception becomes less a matter of looking at objects than entering into relation with forces already at work around us.

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Light is central to this inquiry because it allows the world to appear while remaining elusive in itself. We encounter light through what it touches or brings momentarily into view. In Eyre’s work, light becomes visual, material and relational at once: a form of contact between the body and a wider universe, cosmic in scale yet intimate in its effects. Her works draw attention to the conditions of visibility itself, asking what enables seeing, what escapes it, and what might be felt before it can be fully understood.

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Within the Chapel of Brompton Cemetery, these questions become especially charged, as the space is already shaped by thresholds between interior and exterior, stone and sky, memory and matter, the living body and the absent body. In submīrārī (earthbound), Eyre’s images of angels appear through water as unstable, trembling presences, released from fixed memorial forms into a more fluid state of becoming, where the spiritual and the scientific become parallel languages for approaching what cannot be fully held in view.

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Appearances invites a slower form of attention, asking us to look again at the ordinary world and recognise its mysteries that are traversing us continually and  instantaneously. From Eyre’s early pursuit of paradise in the everyday to her contemplation of cosmic and subatomic realities, her practice has developed a deep awareness of interconnectedness across human and non-human experience. In the Chapel, among light, stone, water and reflection, Eyre’s works open a quiet field of speculation, where what appears before us may be only the visible edge of a much larger, stranger intimacy.

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About the artist

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Susan Eyre is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, video, installation and print processes, creating work to encourage a sense of wonder in the everyday and an awareness of an entangled universe. She explores cosmological and geological phenomena with a particular fascination for cosmic rays and magnetic fields. Ecological concerns at the human disconnect with the natural world, led her to creation myths and the idea of paradise as a state of bliss which has been lost. Turning to particle physics for an alternative origin story she found a cosmic, subatomic and quantum world equal to any ancient mythology in its fantastical nature.

She has collaborated with academics and astro-physicists, the UK High Altitude Society and Imperial College Space Society on cross discipline projects, receiving funding from Arts Council England, The Institute of Physics and The Science and Technology Facilities Council. She was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2024 and the Artangel Open 2025. Recent exhibitions include Cosmos: the art of Observing Space at RWA Bristol. Born in Suffolk, with a background as chef and computer programmer she is based in London with a studio in Woolwich.

Exhibition Publication