Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke Embraces Error

Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke’s exhibition at SMAC Gallery is modest in scale yet reflects the artist’s ambition to give agency in her artistic process to error and accident. Installed in a single room, the show brings together three discrete bodies of work: five large-format paintings on polysatin, a suite of nine rice-paper works encased in resin and a series of eight fabric sculptures.

Her monumental paintings dominate the space. Made using ink, liquid pigment and silk paint on a glossy synthetic fabric, shimmering, pink-keyed works such as Red Line (2025) balance intention with accident. As detailed in a statement for her show ‘EXIT STRATEGY’ at 99 Loop Gallery in 2024, Lardner-Burke purposefully waters down her paints, occasioning spills, runs and pools of colour. This methodology creates a gestural vitality in her compositions, which she further develops by incorporating drawn elements, interpolations that augment the underlying images.

Sometimes the marks emphasize contours and intersections, as in My Little Pony (2025), a standout piece featuring filigree neon-yellow lines that subtly map diaphanous clouds of pink, yellow and blue. Elsewhere, the lines operate more cryptically. In River Crossing (Fish Love Wine) (2025), an emphatic yellow stroke runs horizontally across the darker bottom part of composition, suggesting intent without resolving into narrative. Similarly elusive, in the more chromatically varied Bird-Dream Sort-of-Boy (2024), a network of stuttering red lines activates the upper right of the canvas. Opposite, a pooled mass of darkening colours is suggestive of a latent human form.

In 2021, while still a student at Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, Lardner-Burke produced an untitled suite of abstract paintings based on reverse-searched Instagram selfies which she rendered using pigments such as food colouring, bleach, edible glitter and medical tinctures. These early experiments with digital detritus and non-traditional materials presaged her ongoing interest in exploiting error.

Lardner-Burke’s compositions, marked by seepage and chance, align loosely with what theorist Legacy Russell describes in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) as ‘the causality of error’ – in particular, the glitch’s ability to produce new and unexpected images. While Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique is an obvious precedent, physicist Karen Barad’s notion of ‘diffractive practice’, which values entanglement and material intra-action, is a more direct influence on Lardner-Burke. Her abstract paintings build on these various notions – of stains as both error and productive liaison – while holding onto the possibility of a figural subject.

Heads with sunken eyes and faint mouths float in and out of recognition in Lardner-Burke’s rice-paper paintings in acrylic, six of which are displayed along a window ledge. Ladylike (2025), the most figurative of the group, presents a doll-like face with smeared mascara and glossy red lips; its liquid form echoes Marlene Dumas’s 1990s ink portraits. The abundant sunlight intensifies the works’ ethereal presence, softening the gory hues of paintings such as Soothsayer Battered Prognosticator (2025) – a wounded face emerging from an accumulation of dense stains and outlines.

Sculpture is integral to Lardner-Burke’s practice. Composed of knotted ribbon, gauze, foil, coiled tape and dressmaking detritus, her untitled assemblages read as propositions rather than polished forms. Among the pieces in the central installation is a Madonna-like figure made from wound, peach-coloured tape who wears a crown of pearl-head pins. Nearby, a suspended work drapes translucent gauze in blue and pink, strung with knots and trailing an umbilical-like ribbon into a pair of swaddled objects on the floor. It recalls formative works by Igshaan Adams and Nicholas Hlobo, in which textile, gender and ritual are tangled and sensualized. As with her paintings, Lardner-Burke is not interested in a stable form, but rather in how materials behave, cohere into images and sometimes fail.

Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke’s show is on view at SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, until the end of July 

_{Main image: Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke, Give it Horns, 2025, ink, liquid pigment and silk paint on polysatin, 189 × 128 cm. Courtesy: SMAC Gallery}