ANNA SEBASTIAN | THE SAME DUST

- COMING SOON -

ANNA SEBASTIAN
THE SAME DUST

25 SEPTEMBER - 1 NOVEMBER 2026

PREVIEW:
24 SEPTEMBER 7-10PM

門前遲行跡,
Ménqián chí xíngjì,
[door] [front] [slow] [travel] [footprint]
In front of the door are the hesitant footprints of your departure

I am looking at two panels; paintings of an idyllic and nostalgic landscape. Familiar views that make me
feel at ease. As a member of the audience, I am positioned in the paintings from the standpoint
of the interior room. I am facing two windows that look out onto a rural scene –
now this produces a twitch at the edges of my perception – these twin portholes…
are they portals, a pair of binoculars or my mind’s eye? All is not as it seems…
I shuffle my feet, reposition my legs, adjust my body and focus again.
Rearrange and reorientate.

I’m in IMT gallery, but my presence has now doubled as I am also in the interior rooms of the two
paintings. Wait, reverse and look again. I’ve failed at first glance to notice the portals on the ground.
What I’d assumed to be vases, or still lives, is a cultivated patch of foliage which has emerged either
from the ground or table in the interior room, or antechamber.

Rewind, is it clear that I am inside… perhaps I am already outside
and the windows are looking in and not out?

一一生綠苔。
yīyī shēng lǜ tái.
[one] [one] [grow] [green] [moss]
one by one they grow green moss.

Translation speaks to movement; a sensibility that becomes material. In translating we are changed by the process as much as the original language is; an in-between space of becoming other with others. In Anna Sebastian’s paintings, a drawbridge is lowered between our lived reality with its observable forces and the atomic scale at which these laws breakdown. Sebastian is probing these scales, which stirs-up matter through her process of observing, depicting and painting. She is disturbing the laws of this world and creating another world inside of it. No turning back now. A black hole could appear; or in Sebastian’s canvases a crease or fold in the fabric of certainty.

I’ve just dipped my left foot in. I’m reminded of the threshold between black holes and our space-
time. Black holes which can touch our reality while being completely other to it. And can destroy it.
The water is up to my ankles now.
Two asymmetrical realities kiss, the saliva of one is swallowed by the other.
It may get a taste for this…

Saturated foliage suggests a nostalgia for a setting that you cannot place. You possibly feel a sense of pleasure laced with pain, a sweet hollow longing for landmarks that start to shift, slip and then morph. This is also how Jeff VanderMeer’s ‘Area X’ seduces the protagonists in his Southern Reach Trilogy; an area that crystallises the existing world by eating into its space-time.* One reality is burrowing itself into another. IMT gallery grows porous as another presence presses outward into the space. Sebastian’s paintings are displacing what was once there but also adjoin our lived reality and what is known. Touching our reality without destroying it, The Same Dust series has the potential – at some point – to absorb our perception and transfigure us in the process.

Gulp.
I am a fish out of water.
 A mammal without air.
Flesh becoming one with the canvas, as atoms rub up against each other.
Looking down at my skin glitching into painterly strokes.

Moss is deepening beside the gate, as we remain transfixed by the vista. Leaves fall. Butterflies are on the move across the water, their shadows flittering on the surface. Time is entering the landscape as we unfurl into the morning dew; a scent embroiled with notes of bark and damp soil. We pause and observe until the terrain itself appears to be waiting for us. Enveloped by the green sponge, our spines prickle with electricity but we luxuriate in the abandon.

Porous recollections are leaking out; drawing on my memories of growing up in the countryside
and visiting the Welsh coastal waters. Scouring for Hag Stones in the shallows. Portals in which I may find
my way back or through which I may never return. Warm in the hand, soft to the touch and moulded
by the sea. An archive of time elapsed. I can see you through the hole. Looking back at you.
Your gaze a pressure that tingles the skin and is felt in the gut.
Sloshing.
I can sense my viscera atomising, dissolving and reanimating, in an endless cycle.
Paintings with open mouths.
Swallowed.  

苔深不能掃,
Tái shēn bùnéng sǎo,
[moss] [deep] [not] [can] [sweep]
The moss is so thick it cannot be swept away

李白長干行 translation: Ballad of Changgan, by Li Bai**

Text by Kirsten Cooke 

*In memory of Diann Bauer – thank you for suggesting the trilogy when we worked on A.S.T.’s contribution to the exhibition Snow Crash at IMT Gallery (2019)

**Anna Sebastian’s new series of paintings take their starting point from the closing passages of The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, Ezra Pound’s version of a poem by Li Bai.

Anna Sebastian is a painter whose practice investigates alternative and imagined realities, myth, history, and religion. Her paintings explore imagined and emotional realities and challenge the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the evident and the merely perceived. Her work gives shape to the emotional states accessible in practices such as psychoanalysis and esoteric belief systems informed by non-Western traditions.

Sebastian studied fine art at Goldsmiths College, the Royal Drawing School, the Slade School of Art, and was a recipient of The Irving Wernick Memorial Scholarship. She has exhibited internationally including at the Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Libertine, Los Angeles, Tangent Projects, Barcelona, HBFK Institute, Hamburg, and in London including Somerset House, Auto Italia, and Harlesdon High Street. Recent exhibitions include: The House, IMT Gallery, London; Domestic Flights, Frestonian Gallery, London (2025), The Wicker Arms, Staffordshire St, London (2025), Figurative Impressions, Hurst Gallery, London (2024) and the solo presentation What We May Also Do at Verdurin, London (2024). Sebastian illustrated the The Weeping Hemlock, a book of poems by Reuben Dendinger, published by New American Poetry in 2024, and the cover art for Cursed Images, also by Reuben Dendinger, published by Hyperidean Press in 2023.

To accompany The Same Dust, the gallery will release a special limited-edition print, available exclusively during the exhibition.

- COMING SOON -