Andrew Reed Gallery is excited to announce Holding Time, a two-part solo exhibition featuring large-scale paintings, watercolors, and an immersive floral installation by Maine-based artist Kate Bickmore. Holding Time explores plants as vessels of healing across different scales of time: from the intimate plants which the artist lives alongside in Maine (Part I), to the ancient, endemic species of Socotra (Part II). Moving between near and far, the work mirrors Bickmore’s own process of healing as something that unfolds across places and years.

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Through layered surfaces and attentiveness to growth, the paintings reveal how plants and people alike carry temporal knowledge in their bodies, holding experiences of injury, resilience, and repair. In this way, Bickmore bridges healing from the immediate to the generational and the intimate to the planetary, while remaining grounded in patience, duration, and reciprocity. Tendrils reaching toward one another, or orienting themselves toward light, become quiet records of learned responsiveness: gestures shaped by past contact, endurance, and care. In this way, growth is not presented as linear progress, but as a relational intelligence formed through time.

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Bickmore’s art historical influences stem from the specific qualities which she parses through and expounds upon in her own oeuvre. From the Pre-Raphaelites, the artist takes from their sensual devotion to nature. Hudson River School painters such as Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole depicted the grandiose and awe-inspiring untouched American frontiers of the nineteenth century; here, Bickmore turns to her pristine environs in Maine (Part I) and the Yemeni island of Socotra (Part II). Marianne North, the trailblazing Victorian-era botanist, traveled the world and hiked mountains, faithfully depicting and documenting that which she saw, including several previously unidentified species. And from William Morris, another Brit from the Victorian age, Bickmore extends a lineage of social activism and appreciation of the everyday via her artistic prowess. 

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In the front gallery of Holding Time, we are presented with a seemingly otherworldly landscape, replete with arid terrain and succulents. The aperture of this landscape models the proportions of the two paintings in the second gallery space. As we approach, it becomes evident that this a floral installation. With this installation, the impulse is imaginative: to orchestrate light, color, and composition, treating flowers as actors on a stage, drawn from art history, floristry, and symbolism. 

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The paintings and watercolors in Holding Time are as much a meditation on the act of painting and draftsmanship as they are the environs which Bickmore experiences. The artist’s astute awareness of these respective media allows for her to push the bounds of what is achievable. In the sister paintings in the show, Bickmore layers from burnt umber and red ochre undertones to the vibrant surface layers, thereby heightening the intensity and gradation of color. Time to meditate with the paintings in the exhibition is effectuated by the time in which each subsequent layer of oil paint dried in the studio. The watercolors, meanwhile – standalone works which each correspond to Bickmore’s paintings – see the artist only introducing minimal liquid to the pigment, thereby allowing for maximum precision in a medium often requiring a relinquishing of control. 

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Both oil paintings in the show depict plants Bickmore saw frequently encountered on her walks on the waterfront of Rockland, Maine. In Reaching For Her Golden Nectar, Hidden in the Undergrowth, the cup and saucer vines (Cobaea scandens) are anthropomorphized, opening to the sun and looking for support of one another through their tendrils. The vine was famously studied by Charles Darwin in 1875, who subjected the plant to stimuli such as light and touch, and was impressed by their exceptional strength. The vine unfolds as a meditation on feminine desire, vitality, and interdependence. Its chalice-like blooms evoke receptivity and nourishment—forms that hold, offer, and invite. Historically ornamental and feminized, the plant becomes a quiet symbol of women’s labor, pleasure, and resilience: beauty cultivated to serve, yet irreducible to function alone. In this painting, yellow radiance signals warmth, energy, and renewal—an insistence on joy and relational strength as modes of survival. The work honors the intelligence of bodies that grow in relation, adapt through touch, and flourish through care.

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Beyond the Veil of Weighted Stillness, meanwhile, depicts an opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), operating at the threshold between relief and control, sleep and wakefulness, healing and extraction. Long associated with rest, pain management, and the regulation of women’s bodies, the poppy becomes a charged emblem of care systems that both soothe and discipline, reflected in its smooth, refined petals casting shadow on one another: an exemplary instance of Bickmore’s mastery of detail and translation of volume. Its softened pink hue resists the violence of commodification, returning the flower to a space of tenderness, vulnerability, and surrender. Set within darkness and turning toward light through a smoke bush, the poppy evokes the porous boundary between dreaming and consciousness, pleasure and numbness, autonomy and oversight. The painting asks how comfort becomes a site of power—who is permitted relief, under what conditions, and at what cost—while holding space for rest itself as a radical, embodied necessity.

The first iteration of Holding Time will open on Saturday, January 31st, with two large-scale paintings, several watercolors, and a floral installation in collaboration with Samuel Thomas. The second part will follow in July of this year. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following her much-acclaimed After Rainfall in December 2023. 

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Kate Bickmore wishes to thank the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for its financial support.