In Walt Whitman's poem 'Eidolons', the poet recounts meeting a seer who advises him to look beyond the surfaces of objects, the arts and the senses in order to try and access the higher reality of an eidolon. This idea, a familiar one in Eastern religions, and Western philosophy since Plato, suggests that the things around us are mere ciphers of a more meaningful or true reality. Whitman returns to the word 'eidolon' in the last line of every verse, however its insistent repetition only underlines that the concept is (aptly perhaps) slippery.

[There a different interpretations of it but it is usually taken to mean phantom or apparition that represents an ideal form of a thing in the world. It is in these mysterious phantoms that lie behind things that we normally perceive where true reality is located.]

Georgie Wilkin approaches making a painting as a process where the final imagery only gradually reveals itself. She starts from sources that range from art history to sheet music read as visual iconography through to Victorian death photography in this series. The latter daguerreotypes taken of individuals just after they died with their living family posed around them and which were a popular genre of photography to create memento mori of loved ones in the Victorian ages.

As Wilkin moves away from her source material, a rhythm emerges between what was once a more coherent image. She works intuitively on each painting, trying to bring out what might have been previously unseen relationships in and between the source material. She works on all the paintings in a series she is doing at the same time gradually bringing out the relations between each beyond the confines of the canvas. As the source material fades from view or is deliberately blurred, the world she articulates becomes more about the series of forces between objects rather objects in themselves.

The individual self, separated from the world, dissolves into a flux, a blurring of identity with what surrounds us.

Whilst the body is glimpsed in many of Wilkin's works it is a body that often seems to be undergoing some sort of transformation. They dissolve or merge into spaces and the objects around them. There seems something temporal going on here, as if the painting depicts an ongoing process of flux, of becoming or negating. Elements rise to the foreground whilst others recede giving a push-pull effect on the viewer's gaze. In this sense the paintings have an effect that is the opposite to that which was desired by the people who commissioned Victorian death photography. For they were trying to fix in perpetuity the image of a body, that of the person who had died. Ironically the long exposures involved in early photography meant that the dead figures in these photographs are often seen more clearly that the slightly blurred living figures, because of their lack of movement of the former. Their clarity haunts those images, leaving the living in a slightly indistinct haze by comparison. Perhaps this haze of the living is what Wilkin's paintings gesture to.

This notion of the temporal might be understood more by referencing the idea of hauntology, a phrase associated with the writing of Jacques Derrida but used in fruitful and varying ways by different cultural theorists since. The term usually invokes the idea of lost futures as well as things being lost in the past. Writing in 2012 Mark Fisher stated: "The future is always experienced as a haunting, as a virtuality that already impinges on the present." Wilkin’s paintings gesture both backwards and forwards in both space and time, their protagonists are momentary captured within an ongoing flux. They haunt the viewer with the possibility that life is around us but always beyond our immediate comprehension, somehow just around the corner or beyond the form. The best we can do is look for those fleeting moments that perhaps we only realise happened when they are gone.