'All of Your Demons Will Wither Away'
A solo exhibition of oil paintings and watercolours at Clare Hall, Herschel Road, Cambridge University, CB3 9AL.
Marguerite Horner was invited to exhibit by Professor Frances Spalding CBE FRSL - here below is a selection of the 43 paintings in this solo exhibition.
Open to the public weekdays 9-4pm
16th January -25th February 2026
The writer William Boyd CBE FRSL has written a short essay on Marguerites watercolours for the catalogue.(see below)
MARGUERITE HORNER
By William Boyd
This all new, wonderfully beguiling exhibition of Marguerite Horner’s recent watercolours could easily have a subtitle of “Let there be Light!”, such is the amount of shimmering refulgence on show. These are paintings of the Californian Pacific coast. The artist is positioned on a bluff above the beaches below with a view of the vast ocean beyond, capturing the effects of a rising sun and depicting the play of the low-angled light on the water -- and its waves, wavelets and eddies- and the quotidian life of the passing human beings on the beach that the waves are gently breaking on.
What makes these watercolours remarkable, however, is that they are all painted “en grisaille”, as the fine-art term has it – “monochrome” as the rest of the world would describe it – utilising all the shades available from white to black with the various blends of grey interposing.
Grisaille painting is centuries old, ranging from Giotto to Picasso but what makes Marguerite Horner’s paintings so remarkable is that she has chosen this monochrome medium to celebrate and reproduce the effect of light on water. Horner’s technique is astonishingly subtle, meticulous and finely crafted. Look closely and you will see the multitude of decisions taken with the finest of brushes to achieve the myriad of effects desired. It is a virtuoso technical display of working in watercolour, very rarely found elsewhere in contemporary art. These extraordinary monochrome images of the Pacific and its littoral life scintillate with an otherworldly and enduring frisson.
ARTISTS STATEMENT
This body of work emerged from a sustained engagement with the Pacific Ocean, particularly along the shores of Del Mar and Malibu, where I often watched the sunrise at Big Rock. In those quiet hours, I became absorbed by the mutable relationship between light and water - a continual dialogue of reflection, rhythm, and dissolution. Through this experience, light revealed itself not merely as a visual phenomenon, but as a vessel for perception, emotion, and presence.
Here, light becomes both subject and metaphor - a way of approaching the numinous, that state of awe Rudolf Otto described as an encounter with the “wholly other.” I am drawn to the threshold where seeing transforms into feeling, where representation gives way to resonance, and silence becomes a language of its own.
My process is deeply informed by phenomenological thought, particularly the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who understood perception as a dialogue between body and world. Painting, for me, is an embodied act of witnessing - an attempt to hold still the shimmer of impermanence, to suspend time within gesture and light.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflection that “eternal life belongs to those who live in the present” underpins this pursuit. Each work becomes a meditation on presence itself - a fleeting instant rendered luminous.
The exhibition title, drawn from Fatboy Slim’s “Demons” (sung by Macy Gray), carries the lyric: “All of your demons will wither away, ecstasy comes and they cannot stay.” It speaks to transformation - to the quiet promise that illumination, however brief, can dissolve the shadow.
Marguerite Horner 2026
