Rebecca Ness finds people in everything, even when they are not literally present. In The hunt (2025), a cat prowls around the corpse of a pigeon. The scene is ordinary, almost banal, and yet it startles: the shock of death flaring up inside the everyday. We are used to it, of course – animals kill each other all the time – but familiarity does not blunt the horror. Just as death happens constantly, and still it alarms.

The pigeon, a recurring motif in her work, embodies this attention to what is usually disregarded. Ness presses it into service as a proxy for human drama. In Massacre of the Innocents (2024), a pigeon is mauled by dogs, a brutal spectacle of death’s violence. In The hunt, by contrast, the emphasis shifts to dying itself: what remains once the struggle is over, the strange endurance of the world after the end.

The hunt also gestures towards the recent loss of Ness’s mother, framing her project as both intimate and expansive. In this way, it is at once universal and acutely specific. The shadow of the cat fixes the scene to a precise time of day, rooting death and grief in the texture of daily life. This attention to the ordinary is not a diminishment but an insistence that meaning resides in small details, in the cast of light, in the fragile body of a bird. Ness is a narrative painter, and what she shows us is not simply a pigeon, or a cat, but the ongoing negotiation between presence and absence, love and its loss. Her work recognises that the world continues after catastrophe, and in that continuation – quiet, unremarkable, and strange – there lies its deepest truth.