Vivien McDermid’s love letter to animism

Vivien McDermid, The way things get darker, 2026

By SIVAN LAVIE May 11th, 2026

Vivien McDermid’s pictorial world embodies two simultaneous perspectives: one is introspective, a woman enjoying a candidly crisp British countryside morning; the other is excited, a child gawking at the wondrous world of saturated ephemera. 

McDermid’s choice of subject matter is a joyfully surprising mix of capitalist relics: birthday candles, marbled balloons, marbles, fast-fashion flower-motif women’s underpants and sweaters, silly straws, makeup kits, shells, fruit, Easter eggs and chunky-heeled shoes. Each object is within your reach of affordability; you may even already own some of them, but have not paid such close attention to them. What’s exciting, therefore, is the love and care they are imbued with, as well as the lead roles they play in these paintings—  she whispers objects to life. 

Each item is gentle, feminine, breakable, yet sturdy and durable, shining with saturated color and seen through a flickering light. Its position in space is fixed in twitching focus, as if the object is perceived by many different pairs of eyes, simultaneously considered from every possible angle. Perhaps the painter, every person who owns such an object, and other objects surrounding it are all the observers whose perspectives we feel pulsing through the painting as we try to pin the image down on its myriad axes.

Vivien McDermid, Not On This Rock, 2023

The subject matter shivers as if painted by virgin eyes, not only a fresh pair of eyes but also one that is in love with tactility, examining objects through a multi-sensory lens. This is reminiscent of Degas’ tutus, painted with the frothy airiness of many-layered tissue paper cradling a precious gift. It can likewise be compared to Monet’s water, every brushstroke of which undulates, reflecting back every speck of color it may have picked up by other water particles, surrounding greenery, buildings, people and the sun’s pastel Parisian rays. McDermid equally uses many quick and staccato strokes, etch-like, to create a yummy and dynamic, breathing surface in which every inch’s precise coloring and texture is important.  

The anonymous women sometimes present in the paintings exude satisfaction. Their bodies appear soft, feminine and calm. There’s a quiet harmony between them and the sensual world of objects. This is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’ poetic universe of lush items belonging to his wife, whose attractiveness and desirability are described solely through his felt interactions with these sensual relics, like the “pink slippers… [that] lie together under her bed’s edge. Shivering, I catch sight of them and smile.”¹

Vivien McDermid, Seaweed and Streamers (Gigafactory, Pipeline, Ancient Weather Pattern), 2024.

Many of McDermid’s paintings are set outdoors, depicting the sky, a rainbow, the moon, trees. These scenes feel unmediated, cool and brisk, as the British countryside often does. This provides a lovely complement to the kitsch of McDermid’s foreground subjects. Her opalescent landscapes are built with sheer, thinned layers of paint, resulting in blurry and merely suggestive places based principally on how it feels to be in nature. An intimacy is created by the cold temperature of the colors, a bluish hue tinting the pastel pinks and dark browns and night skies with the color that suggests early morning or dusk, the two times we often spend completely alone. 

McDermid’s nature is ethereal, alluding to the symbolic and spiritual; her use of natural elements functions in a similar way to Forrest Bess’ nature, his paintings often including abstracted color gradients as the sky, and simplified, Gestalt natural shapes like a crescent or the sun to create an image that is symbolic in essence. Bess lived in isolation as a fisherman, spending much of his time outdoors with his visions and, McDermid, too, describes her childhood as an extended lonely residency in Scotland’s unbound nature.² This could be a contributor to the enigmatic nature of her work, also akin to Hilma af Klint’s, who equally professes a spell in a feminine secret language.  

McDermid is able to bring forth these visionary panoramas as locations for her contemporary foreground images, nature becoming a layer that further buttresses her love letter to animism. 

Vivien McDermid, Grand Circle (Subsoil), 2024

References

1 Williams, William Carlos. “The Thinker,” Poets.org, April 25, 2019. https://poets.org/poem/thinker.

2 Sherston, Claire. “Vivien McDermid on the Sensory Nature of Creation.” Responsa Foundation, October 23, 2024. https://responsafoundation.com/2024/10/23/vivien-mcdermid-on-the-sensory-nature-of-creation/