Chloe Early, FUTURES, Corey Helford Gallery

Chroma (oil on aluminum panel, 60.25” x 72.25”)

By Laura Hines

Stepping into “FUTURES” at Corey Helford Gallery, a fluorescent paradise appears. Bubblegum pinks and electric blues reverberate in peripheral vision, an otherworldly vapor of saturation that stretches from end to end. Young girls tenderly emerge through the humming veils of color, on roller skates, in boats, accompanied by white horses. They glide through implied, abstract spaces: clouds, foliage, water, roller rink. They move with purpose and freedom, flying to the margins in a blur like a well-worn VHS tape. As they drift, horizons expand, time suspends, dilates, compresses; a sense of immense girlish joy pervades. In the dreamy mists of this roller rink at the edge of time, memory and myth, nostalgia and possibility, are indistinguishable. 

Arcadia (oil on aluminum panel, 60.25" x 72.25")

This series emerged from artist Chloe Early’s nostalgia for her childhood in Cork, Ireland. Fascinated with the idea of a timeless island paradise, she modeled the imagined world of her paintings after the ancient Irish myth of Tír na nÓg, a supernatural isle where youth and beauty live eternal, and time passes differently from the mortal realm. 

“I haven’t lived in Ireland now for 25 years,” says the London-based artist. “I’m revisiting those stories and myths and things to do with that place. But it’s from a distance. It’s revisiting things and seeing them in a slightly different way.”  She cites the tale of Oisín, a young warrior who falls in love with Niamh, a fairy beauty of Tír na nÓg; to marry her, a magical white horse carries him across the sea to the mystical land of his beloved. Three years in paradise becomes three hundred when a homesick Oisín returns to an unrecognizable Ireland, only to fall from the protective saddle of his magic steed while helping a group of old men move a boulder. Upon his fall, the horse disappears and Oisín shrivels with age, never to return to Tír na nÓg. 

Just before he dies, Oisín encounters Saint Patrick and tells him all the stories of his now forgotten people, a race of mythic warrior giants, to ensure their memory lives on. This transmission of myth and memory through the rosy, amplified lens of distance and decay similarly imbues Chloe’s work with a familiar longing. “I had the idea I was going to have a slightly retro thing with the 80’s and 90’s, when I was young,” says the artist, “as a way of bridging this ancient myth with something of our time, bringing it into the realm of my own experience with this layer of nostalgia towards my own youth.” 

Tide (oil on aluminum panel, 54" x 48.25")

To this end, Chloe paints her figures turning away, gliding toward unseen vistas, their far-off gaze reflecting a precious moment in time when nothing is known and the future is unlimited. Nostalgia becomes a tool of eternity, simultaneously looking backward and forward at the same time. As she explains, “I think the older we get, the more the future becomes known, but there’s a point in time that I remember when you don’t know any of that, where anything could happen. It’s a brief moment, but it’s one full of possibilities. And that’s where I was at with these works, the range of possibilities where the journey could go.”

Inspired by Oisín’s magic steed, white Connemara ponies figure prominently along the journey. These quiet, luminous companions mirror the directional movement of Chloe’s figures. They walk in tandem as dreamlike reflections of the young girls’ unbridled sense of freedom, grounding the work in myth and physical space. 

Route 2 (oil on paper, 37.5" x 27.75")

But where ponies walk placidly, the girls move with speed, power, and joy on their roller skates, hovering above the endless rink like Oisín in the saddle before the fall, a paradise of possible futures calling. Breathless and carefree, they act as proxies of girlhood, mythical visions suspended in an eternal pocket of memory and feeling. Their expansive joy echoes throughout the work, a reprieve from the scars and strains of time. 

(L) Trace (oil on aluminum panel, 16.25" × 16.25"),(R) Relay (oil on aluminum panel, 16.25" × 16.25")

“The older we get as women, there’s a lot of darkness that comes in,” says Chloe, “so there was a bit of an escapist fantasy for me involved in the paintings.” The mother of two explains, “it’s less about me as an individual, or my youth. You sort of have to park that little bit of yourself in order to give to the next generation. But I think that’s why I had a real nostalgia for that time. And that’s what drove the paintings. It was sort of running parallel to that life.” 

Astral (oil on aluminum panel, 72.25" x 60.25")

Alongside her nostalgia, Chloe indulged a curiosity: what if color was as important as image in a painting? Using quintessential ‘girl colors’ from her youth in the 80’s, color becomes an incandescent veil, her very reason for painting: “You can put meaning and emotion and all those kinds of things into this painterly layer that sits on top (of the image.) I spent a lot of time thinking about this push and pull with figure and color.” The image sits behind a chromatic shroud, vibrating between figurative contours and saturated color fields, like a fleeting glimpse of Tír na nÓg through filaments of spectral mist, the moment of transition between worlds. 

Shore (oil on aluminum panel, 48.25" × 54")

FUTURES resounds with a poignant, profound, and necessary joy that only exists in a liminal state of inbetween-ness, when freedom and possibility abound, youth and memory of youth perhaps the most potent and universal passageways. Chloe’s joyous exaltation of girlhood is a stark contrast against the unthinkable wickedness of certain powerful people and venal institutions; her compositions prove that in times of distress, myth and nostalgia not only comfort, but transmute. Through the veil of time, on the mysterious shores of myth and memory, eternal truths are remembered and felt: audacity, hope, self-determination, delight. Limitations dissolve, pink horizons open, and skates pick up speed with no clock or destination.

This exhibition remains on view at Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, through March 28th, 2026.