In Between
Hermine Patch
2–7 July 2026

Essay by Sophie Nowakowska

There are rooms that do not seem to belong to any city, any hour, any ordinary day. Hermine Patch photographs those rooms, and the figures who find themselves inside them. Slovakian-born and based in London, she presents In Between, a selection of images that feel less like pictures of places and more like places themselves, holding the people within them suspended in time.

Her eye is shaped by architecture and design, by the cool geometry of interiors and the strange promise of science fiction. A photograph often begins with a real space she has searched out, somewhere that already holds a feeling she recognises. Other times the feeling comes first, and the right room appears to meet it. Within them, a figure waits, or a group gathers, alone together, as if caught between one moment and the next.

What she is really after is stillness, and the things that stillness uncovers. We have grown afraid of being alone with ourselves. We fill the silence, we keep moving, we mistake busyness for living, and in all that motion something in us goes unmet. Patch slows the world down. She makes a space where time loosens its grip, where the present moment becomes wide enough to stand in. The people in her images seem to know this. They are simply there, held in a pause, and whether one or many, each remains turned inward, alone inside the same quiet.

And when the motion stops, something surfaces. There is peace in her work, but it is not an easy peace. It is the kind that lets buried feelings rise, that holds calm and discomfort in the same frame, that lets a person be both at rest and exposed. To be in between is to float without gravity, to be held and unanchored at once, present and adrift, found and a little lost. Her figures live on that threshold, the border where a person meets the parts of themselves the noise usually hides.

In a world that never stops speaking, In Between offers a silence you can enter, and a moment long enough to find yourself in.