Caragh Thuring’s paintings are, in Jennifer Higgie’s words, “meditative, playful, and deeply enigmatic and compelling images.” Asked what first drew her to art, Thuring recalled how she encountered, as a teenager, a painting by Frank Stella at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and realized, “there’s something here that’s sort of beyond my comprehension or beyond my life.”

Her path to becoming an artist was far from straightforward. She did not enjoy art college and stopped making art almost immediately after graduating. “Painting was extremely unfashionable at that time,” she remembered. “Work that was being made was so-called conceptual and very removed from the hand, in a way, and very loaded with theory. And I thought, how do I sit in a studio all day long on my own making work? It just seemed an impossible task.”

It was nearly ten years later, as she was running an art gallery in London, that she decided to leave her job, borrow money, and have a go at making art again. She admitted, “It took quite a long time to make anything that was remotely interesting.” In her studio, she started investigating “what it was to make a painting” and how to undermine, in her own “tiny little way,” the artistic canon.

One of the most revealing aspects of the discussion concerned Thuring’s process. She does not begin with preparatory work for her paintings, but starts painting immediately.

As Higgie observed, she is effectively “drawing immediately with paint.” Finding the right starting point can take time, as Thuring explained: “I’m sitting in the studio, there’s all this work to be done, and I can’t actually do anything.” But once it emerges, the painting develops through what Thuring described as “a conversation or a relationship with the thing in front of you.”

When Higgie visited Thuring’s studio last spring, around five paintings were underway. Why so many? “They are waiting”, Thuring replied. Some works may come together within days, but it is rare; most take weeks or months to complete.

Storm, the largest painting in Thuring’s current exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery (June 5–September 19, 2026), was years in the making. It shows a submarine, a motif that emerged early in her work and one of several recurring ones alongside volcanoes and bricks.

What links these images is that they “come from underneath and emerge on a surface and then have some sort of effect above ground,” Thuring explained. “I’m always interested in what you don’t see, what people don’t give you, what is not presented,” she added. “I’m always fascinated about what is not there, and then that interaction of the human with the landscape, and the human in their environment, and how those two things come into play.”

Dutch Angle, also included in the Thomas Dane Gallery exhibition, took almost a year to complete. In this painting, a sausage became “the solution” to Thuring’s desire to “paint something very visceral and bodily.” Connoting both a phallus and a mouth, and painted so it looks “almost cartoonish and menacing and silly at the same time,” the sausage appears interrogated under a lamp. It is easy to believe Thuring when she commented that “I enjoy personally playing with all those different things.”

In the exhibition, the smallest painting opens onto a vast space crowded with satellites. The show also includes The Close Friend, a self-portrait that reveals the artist’s face from the street and the back of her head from inside the gallery. In Test Bed, planes release bombs that could also be sperm or fish, while another work reimagines The Annunciation.

Thuring’s practice revolves very much around “looking at the overlooked,” she concluded. Whether considering a speck of dirt, a rivet, a submarine, or a celestial network of satellites, she is interested in “making and breaking down the hierarchy of those things. Really not thinking one thing is more important than another.”