Liquid Love considers desire, intimacy and emotional instability within the fragmented conditions of contemporary life. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s writing on liquid modernity, the work reflects on how affect is increasingly shaped by circulation, consumption and technological mediation. At its centre is the idea of digitally derived emotional landscapes: environments in which feeling is not simply represented, but constructed through systems of image, rhythm and material tension.
Starting from fragments of Baroque frescoes, most notably drapery and fabric, Houldsworth digitally deconstructs and reconfigures these motifs into chromatic systems before translating them into upholstered forms. The sensuality, theatricality and ornament of the Baroque are displaced into a contemporary visual language shaped by pixelation, repetition and saturation. Images of beauty and desire are recast as material objects, collapsing distinctions between image, commodity and longing.
Colour operates in the work as both structure and affect. Drawing from the disciplined palettes of Baroque painting, Houldsworth uses chromatic relationships to organise perception and intensify emotional charge. These systems of order are progressively destabilised, producing landscapes that feel at once immersive, unstable and emotionally charged, landscapes that embody the pulse, rhythm and structure of addiction, obsession and beauty.
Rhythm and repetition further articulate the condition of digitally mediated intimacy. The works echo the accelerations of scrolling, circulation and continuous stimulation, while also drawing on the syncopated structures and layered intensity of jungle music. Within this logic, pattern becomes compulsive, moving through tension, accumulation and release and the visual field begins to operate like an emotional system in motion.
Material contrast is central to the series. Velvet absorbs light and colour, carrying associations of softness, sensuality and luxury, while raw metal introduces weight, rigidity and containment. Distorted cage-like structures impose order upon the surface, generating a persistent tension between attraction and restriction, desire and control. These are objects embodying the illusion of control, structures that appear to contain, frame or stabilise emotion, while simultaneously revealing its instability.
Across Liquid Love, beauty, obsession and discipline become inseparable. The works occupy a space between seduction and unease, intimacy and distance, surface pleasure and psychological pressure, a space in which digitally derived emotional landscapes are staged through rhythm, repetition and the unstable promise of control.