Behind the Work: Tide Table (Grey to Grey)
One painting, seen from two sides of the archive, the maker’s record and the owner’s.
A small demonstration of how a single work lives differently in the artist’s catalogue and the collector’s.
In Maya Laurent’s studio archive, ‘Tide Table (Grey to Grey)’ is listed plainly: acrylic and pigment on linen, 160 × 130 cm, 2023, the anchor work of her ‘Tide Tables’ show. A private note records that it was reworked four times, and that the fourth grey, the one that finally held, is ash.
In Oliver Bennett’s collection, the same painting is a different object. Here it is an acquisition: bought from the show in 2024, hung in the stairwell of his London house. His note is not about pigment but about light: “The grey moves across it all afternoon.”
Neither record is more true than the other. The painting is both the sum of its making and the sum of its living, the weeks of sanding, and the years of afternoons. An archive that can hold both, from the maker’s side and the owner’s, is closer to the truth of a work than either alone.
It is a small thing, this doubling. But it is the whole idea: that a work is not finished when it leaves the studio, only handed on.