Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is pleased to present Hawthorn, a solo exhibition by Haley Wood that weaves together myth, memory, and the quiet labor of grief. The twelve-part series traces the journey of a symbolic bear moving between dream and waking life, an allegory for healing, self-recognition, and return. Through this narrative, Wood examines how loss reshapes perception and how imagination becomes a space for survival.

Inspired by illuminated manuscripts such as Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, each work unfolds across two distinct yet intertwined planes: the upper register capturing the measured rhythm of daily life, and the lower revealing the bear’s passage through a surreal, fairy-like realm. This duality mirrors the tension between presence and absence, reality and reverie, a quiet dialogue between the outer world and the inner one retreats to when grief becomes too large to hold.

Wood began Hawthorn in the aftermath of her mother’s unexpected passing. The bear emerged as a vessel for her emotional landscape, hibernating, emerging, wandering, remembering. In Wood’s hands, this figure becomes both guardian and guide, embodying the cyclical process of mourning and renewal.

The exhibition’s title references the hawthorn tree, long associated with fairy folklore and with the heart, both anatomically and symbolically. In myth, it marks the threshold between worlds, in herbal medicine, it strengthens circulation and restores vitality. For Wood, the hawthorn embodies the act of moving through grief rather than away from it, bridging the invisible and the corporeal, the imagined and the lived.

Through intricate textiles and layered compositions, Hawthorn transforms private sorrow into a luminous meditation on love, loss, and the quiet courage of returning to the world. The works invite viewers to trace their own emotional topography and to recognize the beauty that emerges when we allow the heart, like the bear, to awaken once more.