Recent exhibition Dark Romance by Kitty Horton sits nestled within Side Gallery's bright exhibition space, its moody paintings and sculptures transforming the gallery into something akin to a bramble-covered moor. Rich with Horton's distinctive mark-making, the works evoke the scratches, resistance and physicality of moving through rain-soaked marshland, where every hurried gesture carries emotional weight. Drawing on the atmosphere of Gothic literature and Romantic landscapes, Horton layers expressive marks and fragmented script across colour fields reminiscent of fog, woodlands, blood and dirt.

The paintings, in particular, feel less like classic illustrations of Gothic Romance than attempts to capture its emotional landscape. Through gestural abstraction rather than image, Horton conjures intensity, longing, memory and decay, allowing feeling to override narrative. They become meditations on obsession, weathered histories and the desire to be consumed wholeheartedly by a person, place or idea.

The sculptures, by contrast, offer more overt references to the visual language of Gothic architecture and devotion. Lattice-like ceramics recall crumbling cemetery fences, crackled altars verge on mausoleum crypts, and a pinnacle crucifix stands as a monument to forgotten rituals and enduring symbols of love, grief and loss. Together, they evoke the remnants of a world now encountered more readily through literature than lived experience.

Even within Side Gallery's bright, sunlight-dappled space, Dark Romance offers no neat resolution for us as viewers. Instead, Horton suspends us within a perpetual emotional landscape where longing, nostalgia and desire continually recur. Like the unresolved and fraught tensions of a Miss Havisham-esque fiction, the works in Dark Romance refuse closure, capturing us as viewers in the gallery in search of a resolution that will never arrive.