My practice is concerned with the non-material, a reality we can access through contemplation and painting. The value of painting lies in its ability to induce a contemplative state in the viewer. As Walter Benjamin states ‘before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations’. Through my work I am interested in enquiring into the ways in which man may be related to the infinite. Upon the framework of this enquiry my paintings aim to investigate, among other things, notions of transience, intimacy, loss and hope. I use the external world as a trigger or metaphor for these experiences and through a period of gestation and distillation, I make a series of intuitive decisions that lead the work towards completion. ‘For the only equivalent for the universe within is the universe without’ Jung

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My recent series of paintings emerged from a sustained engagement with the Pacific Ocean, 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. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflection that “eternal life belongs to those who live in the present” underpins this exploration. My work becomes a meditation on presence itself - a fleeting instant rendered luminous. It speaks to transformation - to the quiet promise that illumination, however brief, can dissolve the shadow.

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MARGUERITE HORNER graduated with an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds in 2004. She is a painter working in oils and watercolour . She has been selected for many group exhibitions including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, The ING Discerning Eye and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour. In 2011 Marguerite exhibited at the 54th Venice Biennale and again in 2019 she exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale. 

 

In 2012 Marguerite's first London solo Exhibition ‘The Seen and Unseen’‘ was at The Pitzhanger Manor Gallery. In 2017 Horner won the NOA17 MS Amlin Prize. In 2018 Horner won the British Women Artist Award. She was shortlisted for the Ruskin Prize (2019) and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (2018).

 

In 2018 her work was acquired by the Yale Centre for British Art, USA. Her paintings are in a number of private and museum collections in England, USA and China. In 2024 a book on her work 'Numinous' was published by Hurtwood Press. In 2026 Marguerite was invited by art historian Prof Frances Spalding CBE FRSL to exhibit a solo exhibition called ‘All of your Demons will wither away’ at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, for which the novelist William Boyd CBE FRSL wrote an essay for the catalogue.