Behind the Brush: A Two-Month Conversation between 3t Vakil & Gessie Houghton on The Spandrel Spaces Series (art inspired by life in the rainforest). June 2025
🎤 Interview by Gessie Houghton, October Gallery | Blog by 3t Vakil
After nearly two months of exchanging thoughts across oceans, I’m delighted to share a conversation that has left me feeling seen in ways few interviews ever have. Art writer Gessie Houghton of the October Gallery—the London space that helped shape my early journey—recently interviewed me about Spandrel Spaces, the series that has emerged, almost ferally, from the tangled aftermath of climate upheaval and personal transformation.
Gessie didn’t just ask questions—he excavated. He dug through the outer layers of paint and daily life until we were talking about the pulse beneath it all: awe, process, memory, and the liminal zones that birth something new.
“All I wanted to do was paint — as though my very life depended on it.”
— 3t Vakil, on painting after Hurricane Fiona
The interview begins with Fiona. After that storm, I wasn’t just exhausted. I was altered. I describe it in the interview as an “awe-ma”—a term that emerged spontaneously, because what I felt wasn’t trauma. It was a kind of cracked-open reverence. Everything in my world—mud, roots, wreckage, sky—was vibrating with some larger, ferocious intelligence. And I just wanted to respond to it. With a brush. With color. With a hand that moved faster than my mind.
“At night… I become the willing recipient of a universal download.”
— on the creative process
We talked about how these paintings come—fast, sometimes within a single night. Gessie was stunned when I told him I’d made 71 pieces between April 2024 and January 2025. But I couldn’t stop. Not when the muse was breathing down my neck and whispering secrets in the form of gestures, textures, and botanical phantoms. These aren’t tidy paintings. They’re events. Surges. They’re the visual equivalent of listening hard to the rainforest, and letting it speak through you.
“The emergent forms could exist in tension with themselves…
The canvases didn’t need a center or even a fixed orientation.”
— on letting go of traditional composition
What I loved most about Gessie’s approach was that he didn’t flatten my work into just one narrative. We spoke about the ways each piece evolves—not from a concept, but from a collision of sensation, intuition, and movement. Sometimes a brushstroke that was meant to be canopy becomes root. Sometimes what I think is emergence becomes descent. That’s the beauty of the Spandrel: it exists in the margin, the byproduct, the evolutionary detour. Just like me.
“Spandrel Spaces… are important arenas where the marvellous begins to manifest.”
— on naming and the concept behind the series
We even talked about naming—how every title in Spandrel Spaces carries the echo of a botanical genus/species. It’s part taxonomy, part poetry. Part invented Latin, part metaphysical joke. Naming, for me, is a way to anchor mystery—not to resolve it, but to give it a place to stand.
Read the full interview here → https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-WsjdMr2lgee5YImxDheBqxtRi1SEeUa/view?usp=sharing
I hope you’ll take time to read the full piece. It’s generous, layered, and full of unexpected turns—just like the series itself. Thank you, Gessie, for drawing this out of me. And to those of you who’ve been following the work from the shadows or the sidelines: here’s your backstage pass.
See you in the spandrel space.
—3t
Gerard Houghton is a writer, art-critic and videographer based in London. Graduating from Churchill College, Cambridge, he spent two years in West Africa working as an interpreter. In 1980, he moved to Japan where he taught Literature and Linguistics at two of Japan’s more prestigious universities. On his return to London, in 1994, he became Director of Special Projects at October Gallery, a central-London gallery specializing in contemporary art from around the planet. As well as writing essays, articles and catalogues he has edited a number of publications on the many international artists October Gallery represents.
