This exhibition reunites the multidisciplinary Six Artists group in a display of their latest work, spanning painting, print and sculpture. Through distinct practices and diverse approaches engaging with themes of the body and health, emotional loss, memory, and abstracted landscapes, their works enter into a lively dialogue, revealing both shared concerns and individual perspectives. Often autobiographical, these personal stories are subtly revealed through the work – the secret ill body given voice through the textures of materials of sculptures and the universal pain of loss conveyed in powerful self-portraits and captured final moments.
United by an interest in evoking both emotional and physical sensation, each artist employs materials with precision and intent, producing work that offers a deeply felt response to the world and their lived experience of it.
Catherine James’ practice is grounded in print and combines traditional techniques with digital technologies to produce works made with paper, textiles and film. The series of work in this exhibition is based on the secrets and revelations encountered in the process of family tree research.
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.
Gill Lucas draws on images from the natural world, aiming to represent emotional and physical sensation. Her paintings reflect her desire to work abstractly while still engaging with the original source.
Octavia Milner paints abstract landscapes and portraits, and assembles sculptures from found materials that she picks up on walks. The paintings and sculptures shown in this exhibition are part of an ongoing response to, and expression of, the recent loss of her husband. The portraits address the secret or hidden self, expressing what cannot be put into words.
Tabitha Powles’ work is rooted in the human body — its intimacy, its vulnerability, its stories. Drawing on her experience as an HIV nurse, palliative care nurse, soul midwife, and mother, she returns to the same territories: attitudes towards women, motherhood, death, dying and grief. The series of paintings in this exhibition are acts of witness, drawn from memory of people she encountered as a community palliative care nurse, each one a fragment of a life held still. The sculptures extend this enquiry into the body – clay forms shaped intuitively.
Terry Barber’s work is generally concerned with found objects, hidden or forgotten stories, memories, myths and secret histories, often using recycled materials as they offer the chance to work freely and experimentally. Since the loss of her mother, she has been taking inspiration from surfaces and objects uncovered in her family home, including a collection of vintage books, which she has been using in a variety of ways to represent the house as she remembers it as a child and the people who have lived there, reconnecting the past with the present.