Herald St

Amalia Pica

Daisy Chain

Herald St | 2 Herald St, London, E2 6JT

19 March – 16 May 2026

PV: Thursday 18 March, 6–8pm

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Herald St is delighted to announce Daisy Chain, Amalia Pica’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Taking place at our Bethnal Green premises, this exhibition builds on Pica’s recent solo, Keepsake, at Cample Line in Scotland, which explored ongoing themes in her practice including early years education, history and representation, memory-making and material culture, shared action and collective enjoyment, and forms of common knowledge.

Bringing together painting, found object and video, the exhibition centres on a monumental installation of interconnected paintings of daisy chains which snake around the main exhibition space. The installation references Communal Daisy Chain (2025), a haptic, collaborative and seasonal artwork made on site at Cample Line and displayed last autumn. Pica invited members of the institution’s team, visitors and local schoolchildren to interlink daisies which were then pressed, tied together and pasted to create a 50 metres long chain, lining the interior walls of the exhibition space in a gesture she described as a ‘collectively constructed sculpture’.

The exhibition is accompanied by Amalia Pica: Keepsake, a recently-commissioned text by academic and critic Alejandra Aguado, which further explores the thinking and motivations behind Pica’s newest works.

Amalia Pica: Keepsake by Alejandra Aguado

For anyone living in Argentina before newspapers were mainly consumed digitally – when they were left on your doorstep or spread and shared on a breakfast table – the sight of a nineteenth century painting, in which the front page of the liberal periodical La Nación features so prominently alongside a bouquet of wild flowers, would easily take them back to that time and place. To anyone else, the newssheet might just provide a background for the lilacs and daisies it wrapped and held together and which might even be, given their symbolic meanings, the relevant carriers of the picture’s message. For Amalia Pica, the painting’s attraction would lay, on one hand, on the fact that it bridges two places and traditions: Argentina, where she was born, and the UK where she has lived since 2008 and where this painting was found. And, on the other, on the capacity with which it signals to two forms of communication: print journalism and the secret language of flowers, which became particularly prominent in the Victorian era, when the painting was made.

Adrift in a city where it could only tell one part of its story, the painting needed someone to identify its parts and to read into them with curiosity and empathy. That was Amalia. Spotted and purchased by the artist’s partner Rafael Ortega in a car boot sale in Dalston in east London, the painting signed by Andrea G. (a female name in Spanish) and dated 1891, quickly came forth as the image of her own transit. But it also portrayed a series of nostalgic and domestic details as well as signs that underpin aspects of her wider practice. For someone like Amalia who is always alert to coded languages and interested in portraying how we communicate, its elements offered her the possibility of thinking that it might try to say more than what it seemed to show. It not only depicts La Nación, one of Argentina’s earliest papers (a nod from home), but two other elements remain strangely clear within the otherwise loosely painted page: the paper’s date, which references the anniversary of Argentina’s day of independence, 9th of July, and the word ‘Telegram’, even if it appears to be missing a letter, which was the title of the paper’s section dedicated to news coming from the other side of the Atlantic. The details of the painting’s message remain unclear, but if we choose to believe this simple image holds a secret form of expression – is it a love letter tied to the joy of new beginnings? – they might be hidden in the selection of flowers.

If a large part of Amalia Pica’s work deals with the bureaucracy of language – particularly the exchange of information we enact with (and within) public bodies, academic institutions or corporations, there is another area of her practice that explores more organic means of communication, nurtured away from those formal spheres. These belong to the realms of motherhood, friendship and tend to evoke intimacy, cooperation and community building. They sometimes even recall clandestine ways of communication or more primal and private forms of expression that link us to our roots. Nothing more relevant, then, than an image that makes us dream of intimate messages hidden in the image of a bouquet of flowers unceremoniously laid on a table, to introduce us to this world. Almost all of the works in this exhibition, which spring from these interests and experiences, represent the emotional language of bonds.

But let us go back to Andrea G.’s painting. The daisies appearing at its centre, illuminating the bouquet, were also echoed in Pica’s reent exhibition at Cample Line. They were present in the form of a vast strong of daisy chains, dried and fragile, that had been made by local school children, members of the local community and the team at the institution. This collaborative element, rather than diluting a sense of authorship, encourages a wider, more profound feeling of ownership. A frequent summer activity shared between children, including Amalia’s own son, the making of daisy chains might feel universal but is in actual fact quite culturally specific. The chains installed at Cample Line carry the linear, methodical and rhythmic quality of language, created bit by bit by all the contributors to construct something larger as yet unknown. If coding is a language of intimacy under the public eye, these chains, insofar as they hold the memory of shared experience, can be powerful message carriers. I have sometimes got the impression that Amalia’s work functions as a slow game of Chinese whispers. It does not use words but instead figures, forms and actions that represent communication and are passed on through her practice from one time or site to another. They come before her and she passes them on, slightly transformed, to the viewer, who might recognise them and even use them, amused by their transformation into play. I still remember my first encounter with her work, back in 2005, when she was finishing her residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. One of her works involved transforming the Academy’s large bicycle parking lot into a field of flickering coloured light, as she had repurposed an array of flashing bike lights for the occasion so that they could signal a celebration and illuminate the way. Inside the building was a video made of found footage showing a multitude of people on the deck of a cruise ship just prior to departing for the other side of the ocean, waving white handkerchiefs to their loved ones on a never-ending loop, already sending signs from afar.

A language combining fact and folklore, sentiment and truth is something which persists throughout Amalia’s practice. These pieces have stayed with me, always murmuring something about our endless abilities to communicate and connect, to shorten distances and to leave traces which are destined to be picked up by someone other, creating a long conversation through time and space. Just as it happened for Amalia with the mysterious found painting, these signs can get us beyond the paralysing effect of not understanding, to rejoice in the fact that language has various ways, that we have the power to create and decipher them and that we can subvert the more formal and obvious channels of communication as we hide meaning even in the most minute of our actions.