Bookmarks: Kim Spooner

In Kim Spooner’s debut exhibition with Nanda\Hobbs, she brings us a suite of paintings and drawings born from her own manuscript—a reflection on her life, her generation, and the shifting cultural currents that have shaped both. What began as a physical need to paint and draw whilst writing soon evolved into a distinct visual language; one full of metaphors, puns, and poetic associations which chart the pages of social history through Spooner’s personal lens. BOOKMARKS emerged, quite literally, in the margins: spontaneous visual responses to phrases, pauses, and moments of emotional punctuation within the text.

Each triptych in the series functions like a stanza: a visual refrain that echoes, amplifies, or playfully distorts the written word. Spooner’s long-standing practice of coupling literature and image finds new expression here. Each bookmark acts as an autonomous visual meditation, suspended between memory and commentary.

There is no doubt that Spooner is deeply intelligent and unabashedly witty. She delights in the pun as a mode of understanding; playfully teasing as language slips into image and back again. She is also precise in her selections, distilling a phrase or idea into palpable visual metaphors. This format allows Spooner to emphasise rhythm and duality: the repetition of motifs, the tension between irony and sincerity, the layering of image as a form of thinking.

The underlying manuscript that inspired BOOKMARKS is, in Spooner’s words, “a dialogue of cultural events of my life—a social history—rather than a biography.” Across its chapters, the narrative traces her endurance through decades of social transformation, connecting the artist’s personal experiences with broader cultural phenomena from the 1950s to the present. Spooner’s reflections on displacement, belonging, motherhood, and artistic survival unfold alongside the social icons and upheavals that defined the baby boomer generation. The resulting story is by turns humorous, tragic, and deeply human. She explores how one navigates the precarious balance between freedom and responsibility, individuality and history.

Viewed together, BOOKMARKS form a constellation of moments; fragments of a life refracted through cultural memory. They are visual footnotes to a manuscript that is itself an act of self-archiving. Placed together, Spooner’s choices reflect how the residue of words can materialise as image, and how art can act as both mirror and map for a life lived between eras. In this act of resilience, Spooner reminds us of a practical truth: a bookmark can be many things, but at its core, it provides us with a place to pause before turning the page.