At a glance, the veined pink and faded crimson aubergine tones of Fiona Lowry’s expansive painting The ties that bind 2018 evoke a thin smoky sliver of flesh—like a medical specimen, brightly backlit, raw and laid out for examination or diagnoses. But only for a moment: the eerie realism of the scene is swiftly readable, even if the answer to the deeper question ‘what is happening here?’ remains elusive. We see a group of young people in the landscape, a bushland setting, blended, almost shimmering in Lowry’s trademark airbrush haze of colour.

Our eyes are trained to scan for the human figure, to read the expression on another person’s face. Here the arching trunk of a branch seems to be in conversation with the curve of a shoulder or the rounded volume of a thigh. While the depiction of the figure and landscape is naturalistic the colouration is not. The two blend into dappled camouflage.…