In this pop-up exhibition of paintings, prints and sculpture, Six Artists explore subjects including the body and health, emotional loss, memory, grids and abstracted landscapes. The artists’ varying practices and wide variety of approaches to these subjects makes for a dynamic conversation between the works. Intent on capturing both emotional and physical sensation, each artist’s careful selection and manipulation of materials creates a visceral response to the world and their experience of it.
The artists are a multidisciplinary group with practices ranging from painting and printmaking to sculpture and assemblage, collage and portraiture.
Caroline Ingham’s bodily sculptures, constructed from distemper-impregnated paper, invite us to explore surface and structure and to consider how physical form holds traces of experience, trauma, resilience, and transformation. She approaches the body not as a literal subject but as a vessel of vulnerability—something resilient, beautiful, and exposed.
Catherine James’ practice is grounded in print and combines traditional techniques with digital technologies to produce works made with paper, textiles and film. The sequence of work in Heartbeat explores the material properties of grids and the (im)material properties of pixels.
Gill Lucas draws on images from the natural world, aiming to represent emotional and physical sensation. Her paintings in this exhibition were created within the past fifteen months and reflect her desire both to work abstractly and to engage with the original image.
Octavia Milner paints abstract landscapes and makes sculptures from found materials that she picks up on walks, often along the coast. The sculptures she subsequently makes and has around her in the studio often inform the paintings. The works shown in this exhibition, however, are part of an ongoing response to, and expression of, the recent fundamental emotional loss in her life.
Tabitha Powles’ main inspiration is taken from the human form and working closely with the body, expressing a scrutiny, a discomfort, an awkwardness of how ideas around women, mothers and death and dying are viewed. Based on personal experience of becoming a mother, Tabitha draws parallels with her work as an HIV nurse and palliative care nurse, examining bodies.
Terry Barber’s work is generally concerned with found objects, stories, myths, and forgotten histories, often using non-traditional or recycled materials as they offer the chance to work freely and experimentally. Since the loss of her mother three years ago, she has been taking inspiration from objects found in her family home, which has housed five generations. Among these is a collection of books from the 1960s, which she has been carving into to represent the house as she remembers it as a child.