On July 18th, Andrew Reed Gallery opens the second part of Holding Time, featuring two large-scale paintings and a watercolor by Maine-based artist Kate Bickmore. In Part II, Bickmore shifts the focus to Socotra, the isolated Yemeni island often referred to as the “Galapagos of the Middle East" to which the artist traveled for two weeks in spring 2025. Bickmore has spent the subsequent time reflecting upon her experiences amongst the endemic species of the island, incorporating her reference material into an immersive diorama (seen in Part I), watercolors, and their corresponding paintings. The two paintings in Part II are a study in near and far, with the tactile specificity of Crystalline Light Settles on Nocturnal Breath juxtaposed with the spatial grandeur of the Socotra landscape in A Blush of Apparitions Opens at the Edge of Recognition. 

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In A Blush of Apparitions Opens at the Edge of Recognition, Bickmore brings together plants, bodies, and landscape within a space that is difficult to locate at a single scale. Translucent petals pass across misted mountains; flowers emerge from the landscape, hover within it, and alter the light around them. Areas of close description give way to washes, haze, and passages in which forms become hard to discern from their surroundings.

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The painting continues Bickmore’s interest in “relational aliveness”, a term she uses to describe the sense that living things exist through their responsiveness to one another and to their surroundings. The painting creates this sense of responsiveness through translucent, overlapping petals, plants that appear to engage with or look toward one another, and passages of translucent medium and shadow that shift in and out of visibility as the viewer moves around the painting. Bickmore has long been interested in the sublime, but increasingly locates it in experiences of closeness and sustained looking. At the center of the work is the Adenium socotranum, commonly known as the Socotra desert rose. Endemic to the island, the tree has a swollen, curving trunk that stores water and produces bright pink flowers during its blooming season. Bickmore was drawn to the strange physical contrast within the plant: the weight and bodily presence of its trunk beneath flowers that appear almost weightless. 

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Bickmore’s approach developed partly through thinking about the legacy of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and, in particular, the Hudson River School. Artists such as Frederic Edwin Church traveled extensively, gathering sketches and observations that were later combined into large-scale paintings in the studio. Church’s The Heart of the Andes, assembled from studies made during his travels in South America, is one historical precedent for this way of working.

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Like these nineteenth-century painters, Bickmore travels, photographs, gathers visual material, and reconstructs landscapes after returning to the studio. She is interested in what it means to work from this tradition as a contemporary woman artist, particularly given the history of landscape painting as a way of surveying, representing, and claiming distant places. Socotra is reconstructed from memory, photographs, botanical observation, and the experience of having been a visitor there. 

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A Blush of Apparitions Opens at the Edge of Recognition is shaped by Bickmore’s experience of Socotra as both astonishingly alive and, at times, profoundly unfamiliar. The island’s endemic plants appeared otherworldly to her, but her own presence there could feel equally conspicuous. As a queer white woman traveling through a conservative Muslim culture, she was conscious of being a visitor and of the limits of her own understanding of the place. The landscape never fully gives itself over to view. 

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Meanwhile, in Crystalline Light Settles on Nocturnal Breath, succulent plants emerge from darkness through dew, shadow, and reflected light. The painting draws partly from Dutch still-life painting and Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro, while treating the plants as living organisms rather than objects arranged for display. Some forms are sharply described; others disappear into darkness or become difficult to separate from neighboring plants. 

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The painting features echeveria, mangave, and aloe species, many of which use Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM), a photosynthetic adaptation that allows plants to open their stomata, or pores, primarily at night, reducing water loss during the heat of the day. Bickmore became interested in this nighttime exchange of gases and the idea that processes essential to the plants’ survival were taking place in darkness.

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Her interest in this process became connected to her own awareness of breathing. Since Covid, Bickmore has sometimes experienced anxiety around her breath and the feeling that breathing must be consciously monitored or controlled. Sleep, darkness, and time spent around plants have often had the opposite effect, allowing breathing to recede from conscious attention. The painting grew out of her thinking about the difference between consciously monitoring her own breath and the largely invisible processes taking place in the plants at night.

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The title Crystalline Light Settles on Nocturnal Breath emerged from Bickmore’s attention to dew and reflected light on the plants’ surfaces. The droplets make visible something that otherwise cannot be seen: the humid atmosphere surrounding plants whose pores are open at night.

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Bickmore was also drawn to the cosmic quality of these species — their spiraling geometries, reflective surfaces, and slow, queer cycles of propagation through both sexual and asexual reproduction. Dew becomes a connective atmosphere between their bodies, holding the plants in suspension: balancing intimacy and vastness, microcosm and cosmos. 

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The final painting in the cycle will be exhibited in Other Realities, a group exhibition at Andrew Reed Gallery opening during Art Basel Miami Beach later this year. ​​​

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