BELTANE

Artist : Tim Shaw
Title : ‘Obby ‘Oss
Medium : bronze (ed of 8)
Dimensions : height 40 cm


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Tim Shaw RA’s sculpture is often dualistic, incorporating current affairs, societal complexity and human conflict with ancient, mythical, metaphysical and primal concerns. Shaw’s powerful oeuvre connects these elements to create wider, timeless portraits of humanity. The tension between ancient past and a prosaic presence, between solidity and breakdown, becomes an organic part of his worldview, whether he’s looking at human transgression or the enlightenment of primitive ritual.

Shaw is a British artist, born in Belfast, he currently lives in Cornwall. He was elected an Academician at The Royal Academy in 2013 and made a Fellow of The Royal British Society of Sculptors and a Fellow of Falmouth University the same year. Shaw has had a number of significant solo shows throughout the UK, Ireland and internationally. Most recently the major public solo exhibitions ‘What Remains’ and ‘Something is Not Quite Right’ a collaboration between The Exchange and Anima-Mundi, ‘Mother the Air is Blue, The Air is Dangerous’ was held in the F.E McWilliam Gallery in Northern Ireland, ‘Black Smoke Rising’ toured from Mac Birmingham to Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Back From the Front presents: Shock and Awe – Contemporary Artists at War and Peace at the Royal West of England Academy. He has undertaken a number of public commissions including ‘The Rites of Dionysus’ for The Eden Project, ‘The Minotaur’ for The Royal Opera House and ‘The Drummer’ for Lemon Quay, Truro. A more political side to his work became evident in a number of sculptures responding to the issues of terrorism and The Iraq War. ‘Tank on Fire’ was awarded the selectors prize at the inaugural Threadneedle Prize in 2008 and the installation ‘Casting a Dark Democracy’ was reviewed in 2008 by Jackie Wullschlager of The Financial Times as ‘The most politically charged yet poetically resonant new work on show in London’. Shaw has been supported by the Kappatos Athens Art Residency, The Kenneth Armitage Foundation, The British School of Athens,The Delfina Studio Trust through residencies in Greece, Spain and a fellowship in London. Most recently as an Artist Fellow at the Kate Hamburger Centre for Advance Study in the Humanities of ‘Law and Culture’ In Bonn, Germany where he began work on ’The Birth of Breakdown Clown’ an existential sculptural work utilising sculpture, robotics and AI.

Artist : Tim Shaw
Title : ‘Obby ‘Oss and Dancers
Medium : bronze (ed of 8)
Dimensions : height 28 x width 66 x length 50 cm


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Tim Shaw RA’s sculpture is often dualistic, incorporating current affairs, societal complexity and human conflict with ancient, mythical, metaphysical and primal concerns. Shaw’s powerful oeuvre connects these elements to create wider, timeless portraits of humanity. The tension between ancient past and a prosaic presence, between solidity and breakdown, becomes an organic part of his worldview, whether he’s looking at human transgression or the enlightenment of primitive ritual.

Shaw is a British artist, born in Belfast, he currently lives in Cornwall. He was elected an Academician at The Royal Academy in 2013 and made a Fellow of The Royal British Society of Sculptors and a Fellow of Falmouth University the same year. Shaw has had a number of significant solo shows throughout the UK, Ireland and internationally. Most recently the major public solo exhibitions ‘What Remains’ and ‘Something is Not Quite Right’ a collaboration between The Exchange and Anima-Mundi, ‘Mother the Air is Blue, The Air is Dangerous’ was held in the F.E McWilliam Gallery in Northern Ireland, ‘Black Smoke Rising’ toured from Mac Birmingham to Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Back From the Front presents: Shock and Awe – Contemporary Artists at War and Peace at the Royal West of England Academy. He has undertaken a number of public commissions including ‘The Rites of Dionysus’ for The Eden Project, ‘The Minotaur’ for The Royal Opera House and ‘The Drummer’ for Lemon Quay, Truro. A more political side to his work became evident in a number of sculptures responding to the issues of terrorism and The Iraq War. ‘Tank on Fire’ was awarded the selectors prize at the inaugural Threadneedle Prize in 2008 and the installation ‘Casting a Dark Democracy’ was reviewed in 2008 by Jackie Wullschlager of The Financial Times as ‘The most politically charged yet poetically resonant new work on show in London’. Shaw has been supported by the Kappatos Athens Art Residency, The Kenneth Armitage Foundation, The British School of Athens,The Delfina Studio Trust through residencies in Greece, Spain and a fellowship in London. Most recently as an Artist Fellow at the Kate Hamburger Centre for Advance Study in the Humanities of ‘Law and Culture’ In Bonn, Germany where he began work on ’The Birth of Breakdown Clown’ an existential sculptural work utilising sculpture, robotics and AI.

Artist : Eleanor Faye Woods
Title : Havin’ A Party / The Wild Rumpus
Medium : raw pigment & acrylic on canvas
Dimensions : 225 x 150 cm


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Eleanor Faye Woods is a Scottish artist currently living and working in West Yorkshire. Her symbolic artwork acts as a love letter to her own experience, full of life’s joy, absurdity, humour, loss and fear. Recent works explore her own personal journey through grief, one she describes as dark, weepy and often hilarious. She hails her work as a tangilble form of inner catharsis. Using raw pigments and acrylic ink she forces rich colour into the grain of the canvas, blurring edges with copious amounts of water or using thin layers of oil to blend the figures with their backgrounds creating an ethereal presence. As Woods says “I try to bring attention to the surreal aspects of life and the way the oddness of experience manifests within individuals and how that manifestation then affects me. In my vulnerability I crave strange moments of intimacy. I imagine drinking straight from the tap of all emotion, drinking so much of it, I take on too much and I’m sick and everything I spew out ends up in my work.”

Artist : Henry Hussey
Title : The Best And Worst Parts Of Ourselves
Medium : ccreen-printed flags, dyed linen, dyed yarn, embroidery
Dimensions : 165 x 95 cm each (diptych)


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Henry Hussey’s artworks are often emotionally and physically raw, yet contrastingly beautiful and intricate, created with force through often paradoxically laboured mediums, including textile, glass, ceramic, paint and film. Whether through an expanding vocabulary of quasi-mythological symbols, or in embellished lines of text extracted from performative situations, Hussey explores personal and national identity in response to aggravating relationships and events. Recent experimentations reveal a deep concern with control and chaos and the sweet spot in between these two distinctive states.

Henry Hussey is a British artist born in London in 1990 where he still resides. Hussey studied Textiles at Chelsea College of Art before completing an MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art. His work is widely respected and has been exhibited in notable exhibitions including The Textiel Biennale 2017 at Museum Rijswijk in the Hague, a solo presentation at Art Central in Hong Kong, the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2014 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Royal Academy London and Volta New York and the Young Talent Contemporary Prize at the Ingram Collection in 2016. Hussey has participated in residencies at La Vallonea, Tuscany, Italy in 2018 and participated in a residency at Palazzo Monti, Milan in 2020. His work is held in collections worldwide including Simmons & Simmons, Hogan Lovells, The Groucho Club and Soho House.

Artist : Luke Frost
Title : Supervolts Yellow and Grey
Medium : acrylic on canvas
Dimensions : 100 x 91 cm


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Luke Frost is a British abstract painter living and working in West Cornwall. Despite his notable heritage, as Son of the English painter Anthony Frost and the Grandson of the celebrated Modernist painter Sir Terry Frost, his paintings could be seen to instead echo a formality found in 1960s American hard-edge, post-painterly, abstraction. However Frost has developed his own means of exploring complex colour relationships, be they harmonious or provocative, and their impact on their surroundings alongside an internal and more contemplative space.

Frost began exhibiting in 2003 following studies at Falmouth and Bath Schools of Art. His work was featured in ‘Art Now Cornwall’ at Tate St Ives in 2007 and in 2008 he was awarded a Tate St Ives artist in residency during which time he worked at Porthmeor Studio No. 5, formerly occupied by Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron. His solo exhibition ‘Paintings in Five Dimensions’ was shown at Tate St Ives in 2009. He has since exhibited in Cornwall, London and USA, with essays written on his work by Matthew Collings, Tony Godfrey and Michael Klein.

Artist : Claire Curneen
Title : (Three Faced) Head of Gold
Medium : porcelain & gold lustre
Dimensions :  20 cm height


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Claire Curneen’s iconic sculptures are poignant contemplations on the liminal and precarious nature of the human condition; exploring themes around death, rebirth and the sublime. Universal and profound states of fear, loss, suffering and sacrifice fuse with devotion, desire, wonder and mystery to underlie each intricate, porcelain figure. Their translucent and fragile qualities offer potent, metaphoric abstract narratives. Porcelain, terracotta and black stoneware create a grounded vulnerability to these works, with dribbles of glaze and flashes of gold to embellish denoted sacred qualities.

Claire Curneen was born in Tralee, Co. Kerry, Ireland in 1968 and currently lives and works in Wales, UK. Works have been exhibited internationally and appear in many notable public collections including The Crafts Council, London; Shipley ArGallery, Gateshead; National Museum & Gallery of Wales, Cardiff; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, Wales; Cleveland Craft Centre, Middlesbrough; Oldham Art Gallery and Museum, Manchester; York City Art Gallery, York; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Eire; Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Eire; Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland; Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece; Clay Studio, Philadelphia, USA; Mint Museum of Craft + Design, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA; Icheon World Ceramic Centre, Gyeonggi-do, Korea; Taipei Ceramics Museum, Taiwan.

Artist : David Kim Whittaker
Title : Portrait One
Medium : mixed media on panel
Dimensions : 86 x 80 cm


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Most of David Kim Whittaker’s paintings are based upon a metaphysical interpretation of the human head. These portrait portals, are often ambiguous, with the aim of representing the totality of the human condition - both the universal and the empathetic alongside personal experience. The works often juggle dual states of inner and outer calm and conflict, offering a glimpse of simultaneous strength and fragility, conscious and subconscious, masculine and feminine. The paintings express Whittaker’s constant focus on an attempt to express something far greater than oneself. Recent works depict the artists deep sensitivity and increasing unease when confronted with the compounding global tensions of this particlar moment. A dual reflection of hope and warning stares back at us from the frame. 

Whittaker is a British artist born in Cornwall where they  still reside. Exhibitions have been held internationally, notably including a major solo exhibition at the prestigious Fondazione Mudima in Milan in 2017. Works are in numerous museum collections, art foundations and international private collections. Whittaker was further acknowledged in 2011 as the recipient of the Towry Award (First Prize) at the National Open Art Competition.

Artist : David Kim Whittaker
Title : Portrait Two
Medium : mixed media on panel
Dimensions : 86 x 80 cm


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Most of David Kim Whittaker’s paintings are based upon a metaphysical interpretation of the human head. These portrait portals, are often ambiguous, with the aim of representing the totality of the human condition - both the universal and the empathetic alongside personal experience. The works often juggle dual states of inner and outer calm and conflict, offering a glimpse of simultaneous strength and fragility, conscious and subconscious, masculine and feminine. The paintings express Whittaker’s constant focus on an attempt to express something far greater than oneself. Recent works depict the artists deep sensitivity and increasing unease when confronted with the compounding global tensions of this particlar moment. A dual reflection of hope and warning stares back at us from the frame. 

Whittaker is a British artist born in Cornwall where they  still reside. Exhibitions have been held internationally, notably including a major solo exhibition at the prestigious Fondazione Mudima in Milan in 2017. Works are in numerous museum collections, art foundations and international private collections. Whittaker was further acknowledged in 2011 as the recipient of the Towry Award (First Prize) at the National Open Art Competition.

Artist : Miles Cleveland Goodwin
Title : Afterlife in the Garden
Medium : oil and blood on panel
Dimensions : 46 x 61 cm


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Miles Cleveland Goodwin’s upbringing in the American South is a recurring theme in his brooding paintings and sculptures. Goodwin draws parallels between the people he portrays, the rhythm of their rural ways of life, and the rugged landscapes that they inhabit. The artist frequently evokes themes of mortality, decay and solitude with a sense of phantasmagoric realism combined with a haunting stillness. Goodwin’s ‘Southern Gothic’ works conjure the ambivalent beauty of a  place that is both simultaneously desolate yet deeply soulful.

Goodwin lives and works in Georgia, USA. He graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon in 2007 with a BFA in painting and printmaking. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, the Grace Museum and the Amarillo Museum of Art among others and can be found in collections worldwide.

Artist : Phoebe Cummings
Title : Study
Medium : unfired clay
Dimensions : 20 x 15 x 20 cm


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Phoebe Cummings’ works predominantly using unfired clay to make poetic and performative sculptures and installations that emphasise materiality, fragility, time, creation, loss and decay. Her impressive interventions are often constructed directly on site, allowing an instinctive development of tensions between object and location. Cummings questions what we will carry forward into the future by producing intricate, hand made and exquisitely delicate sculptures based on ancient plants and primitive ritual, imbued with a sense of magic and mysticism. Drawing together elements of English Paganism as well as the aesthetic excess of Baroque and Rococo design, the resultant objects could be considered as dystopian ornaments of a future anthropology or fragile relics of an almost forgotten past.

Cummings is a British artist born in Walsall, England and currently resides in Stafford. She studied ceramics at Brighton University in 2002 before completing an MA in ceramics and glass at the Royal College of Art in 2005. She has undertaken a number of international artist residencies including a six month residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2010. In 2017 she won first place at the inaugural Woman’s Hour Craft Prize with work exhibited at the V&A Museum, before touring to venues around the UK. Cummings was selected as the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award in 2011 and awarded a ceramics fellowship at London’s Camden Arts Centre (2012–13). ‘Supernatural’ was her first solo exhibition at Anima-Mundi. In addition, Cummings’ work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including ‘60|40 Starting Point Series’ at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, ‘Formed Thoughts’ at Jerwood Space, London; and ‘Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design’ at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. In 2013, she had a solo show at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery in Honolulu and The Newlyn Art Gallery.

Artist : Jennifer McRae
Title : Hospitalfield House, Sonya Sleeping
Medium : oil on linen
Dimensions : 122 x 91 cm


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Jennifer McRae is best known for her distinctive portraits. Inspired by both abstract and figurative artists, she works mainly from life in oil and watercolour on paper and canvas. The process of drawing remains of equal importance to painting in her practice. Her distinct style continues to be widely recognised and greatly admired. As a result, she has been commissioned to paint a number of well-known figures including Judi Dench, Michael Frayn and Sir Chris Hoy. 

Jennifer McRae is a Scottish artist currently living and working in London. Her work can be found in several public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Reading Museum among others and is included in private collections worldwide. She studied painting at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen from 1987-1992 and received a First Class degree in Fine Art. Over the years McRae has received numerous awards as either the Winner or Runner-Up including the BP Portrait Award, the Hunting Art Prizes, the Singer Friedlander and Kaupthing Watercolour prizes, the Morrison Scottish Portrait award and the Honorary Society of Painter Stainers Award. Since 1988 her work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions in Britain and America

Artist : Andrew Litten
Title : Rest
Medium : oil on panel
Dimensions : 85 x 55 cm


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Andrew Litten’s dynamic and gestural figurative artworks express a strong interest in the universal complexity of everyday existence. Dealing with humanistic themes such as love, sensuality, fear, anger, loss, nostalgia, mundanity, personal growth and perceived identity normality or disturbance. Works are created with an unguarded, empathetic attitude, like so many expressionistic artists, a rawness of approach combined with an often viscous application of paint is also key to the extreme experience felt from the work. Gesture and nuance inspire extreme emotive reading, perhaps subversive, tender, passionate, ambivalent, malevolent or compassionate, our response becomes one of allure or repulsion.

Andrew Litten is a British artist, born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1970. He currently works from his studio in Fowey, Cornwall. He is a self-taught artist leaving art college as a teenager having found it to be too restrictive to his aspired method of working. For a decade he created mostly small-scale works using humble domestic or found materials (including envelopes and assembled furniture parts). The work made at this time deliberately challenged ideas of art elitism and art as commodity. He then moved to Cornwall in 2001 and chose to begin exhibiting. Early success came when his work was included in an exhibition titled ‘Nudes’ in New York City, (along with Jacob Epstein and Pierre-Auguste Renoir), where his work was highlighted and reviewed by the New York Times. Shortly after he had four consecutive solo exhibitions at Goldifsh Fine Arts in Penzance, Cornwall. Other notable exhibitions included ‘Move’ at Vyner Street, London, during Frieze Art Week 2007, where his work ‘Dog Breeder’, created as a twisted and emphatic anti-art statement, was exhibited. He was also included in ‘No Soul For Sale’ at Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London in 2010. In 2012 he held a major solo exhibition at Millennium in St Ives, Cornwall and that year was given a guest solo exhibition at L13 Light Industrial Workshop, London. He has also held large-scale solo exhibitions at Spike Island and Motorcade FlashParade in Bristol. ‘Ordinary Bodies, Ordinary Bones’ was conceived with support from The Arts Council, UK and was exhibited at Anima Mundi in 2018. Works have been included in numerous international curated mixed exhibitions in Berlin, Dublin, Siena, Milwaukee and New York City and in Venice during the 54th Biennale. Most recently paintings have been exhibited in four major museums in China. Andrew Litten paintings feature in numerous international private and public collections. 

Artist : Lisa Stokes
Title : Wilt
Medium : oil, oil pastel, acrylic on board
Dimensions : 25 x 20 cm


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Lisa Stokes is a British artist based in Plymouth, Devon. Her practice draws on the fundamental themes of motherhood, psychology and loss. She combines these emotive elements with the patient use of contrasting mediums including oil paint, oil pastel, ink and charcoal,  to make paintings which weave all these elements together to create significant depth.

Stokes work has been selected for various notable exhibitions including the BP Portrait Award at The National Portrait Gallery, The Hunting Art Prize at The Royal College of Art, The National Open Art Competition, The Royal Academy Summer Show, The London Art Fair, The British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery and Spinneri Art Fair, Leipzig, Germany. The Ruth Borchard Collection recently purchased two paintings for ‘Ruth Borchard : The Next Generation Collection’ which includes works by Maggie Hambling, Celia Paul, Nicola Hicks, David Bomberg and John Keane. Her work is held in many private collections in the UK and internationally.

Artist : Andy Harper
Title : AC
Medium : oil on canvas
Dimensions : 200 x 200 cm


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Andy Harper’s intricate oil paintings deal with the fruits of labour in the shadow of uncertainty. On one side they are concerned with the immediate process of painting, the mechanical, almost automated act of laying down mark after mark on a wet surface. On the other hand, they are subject to long-term strategy, each mark developed over time and embedded into a composition that provides an architectural structure for the work. While this framework may be logically ordered, the marks themselves are organic entities, forming a broad visual library that has taken on a life its own, growing through repetition and recombination in each new work. The paintings act like a Petri-dish for the culturing of this visual language, and a greenhouse for its cultivation. The forms may seem organic, but upon closer inspection they are not specific to anything the natural world has to offer. Rather they appear as a synthetic form of nature, generated from compulsive repetition and subjective reinterpretation, a world that has somehow evolved beyond the point of progeny to become its own independent alien entity.

Andy Harper lives in St Just, the most westerly town in Cornwall and works from a studio at the renowned Porthmeor Studios in St Ives. He studied his BA in Fine Art: Painting & Printmaking at Brighton Polytechnic and then MA Fine Art: Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. In 1996, with some peers from the RCA, Harper co-founded NotCut which ran a studio and photographic darkroom in London and curated ‘Lightness & Weight’ in Birmingham. During this time he also studied part time at Middlesex University for an MA in Visual Culture and had his first solo exhibition in London in 1998. After attending the Braziers International Artist Workshop in 2000, Harper became a member of the organising committee until 2008. Harper has taught in many institutions nationally and internationally, and had teaching posts at Central St. Martins, The City Lit and is currently a Senior Lecturer on the MFA Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. Harper has exhibited widely in Europe, North America and 
South Korea.

Artist : Carlos Zapata
Title : Life & Death
Medium : polychrome wood
Dimensions : height 60 cm


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Carlos Zapata predominately makes idiosyncratic carved and painted wooden sculpture alongside mixed media installation. His work deals with many challenging and potent humanist themes including poverty, conflict, religion and race, yet perhaps paradoxically, the overriding characteristics of the work are of emotive empathy and compassion. Zapata’s work belongs to and takes inspiration from folk and tribal artforms from all over the world but specifically from South America, from its indigenous populace and the trade routes and traditions that have fed it over the centuries. Many of his sculptures have evolved from personal experience of living in a foreign land and from his home country where civil issues continue to trouble its people. 

Carlos Zapata is a Colombian artist who currently lives and works near Falmouth in Cornwall, UK. He has exhibited extensively internationally with works held in numerous private and museum collections around the world.

Artist : Sarah Gillespie
Title : Nottingham Catchfly & Whitespot Moth
Medium : mezzotint engraving. two plate diptych (ed 30)
Dimensions : plate size 30 x 23 cm each


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“It is my hope, through a process of long-looking and close attention, focusing on quieter moments of beauty and oft hidden lives, to reveal something of the natural world’s remaining loveliness and, in so doing, to see what answering grace that might awaken in ourselves.”

Sarah Gillespie is an expert in the intricate and painstaking method of mezzotint, also known as ‘the English Method’, a form of engraving using a copper plate. She sees it as a labour of love, a method of quiet application, creating an image which emerges from darkness to light. Her work is about staying still and paying attention to the natural world that we inhabit. She is not concerned with self expression, stating that “we are at our most creatively powerful when we can overcome or more precisely forget ourselves, staying open and attentive to the way things are.” 

Sarah Gillespie was born in Winchester and currently lives and works in Devon. She studied ‘16th & 17th century methods and materials’ at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris and then read Fine Art at Pembroke College, Oxford (BFA Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art). Upon leaving She was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation International Award for figurative art. In 2016 she was elected a member of the Royal West of England Academy. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in numerous private and public collections including: the V&A Museum; Victoria Gallery in Bath; the Government Offices for the South West; the Royal West of England Academy; Sharpham Trust; Chatsworth House; Castle Howard; Damien Hirst; Museum of Fine Arts in Yekaterinburg, Russia; The Xuihui Museum of fine Art in Shanghai and Calvin University in Michigan.

Artist : James Seow
Title : Garden Path
Medium : print on acrylic with led-backlit lighbox
Dimensions : 420 x 190 cm


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James Seow was born in Malaysia and has resided in the UK since moving there in the late 90s. He received an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art in 2014, where he developed work across a range of media and techniques, including print, photography, sculpture and installation. He explores connections between traditional Eastern art and the contemporary, using digital techniques and modern visual language to interrogate these connections. The relationship between nature and urban life is a key focus in Seow’s practice. His work is informed by his early life experience, witnessing the huge transformation of Malaysia through its massive deforestation and urban planning policies of the 90s. Seow plays with how ideals of universal equality and harmony can be communicated, often drawing on the imagery of parks and gardens, illustrating the dichotomy between constructed environments and the ephemerality of the natural world. Working with the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the rational and the instinctive, he encourages a critical rethinking of contemporary reality.

James Seow’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in various private collections including Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, Royal College of Art, Brookfield Asset Management Inc. and St James, Berkeley Group, UK.

Artist : GL Brierley
Title : Untitled
Medium : oil on panel
Dimensions : 90 x 80 cm


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In GL Brierley’s pictorial stages, we often witness simultaneously seductive and grotesque themes tilting over and collapsing into a sort of pantomime-like comedy. In addition to their representational quality, paint remains paint as material oscillating between a form of abstraction and figuration. Brierley symbolically plays with the term ‘base-matter’ as a word rooted in the term ‘mater’, which also means ‘mother’ in Latin and Greek, gracefully fusing two concepts: object and desire. Her exquisite oil paintings feature individual subjects, often appearing engaged in dialogue, positioned alongside fragments that perhaps resemble still life. The paint appears corporeal, organic and almost living, congealing as a result of technical alchemy, casting ambiguous folds in a unique materiality which simultaneously demonstrates a virtuosic use of light and shade. All pictorial elements are given the same ornamental treatment, which means that the viewer’s gaze freely roams across the entire image: filigree inlays in sharp angular shapes are applied, simulating a floor covering that may appear abruptly foreshortened. Broad brushstrokes rich in contrast generate a figurative element, perhaps punctuated with parasitic colour sequences that freely resembles an imaginary covering or garment. In sharp contrast, thick applications of colour dot the surface here and there in an almost violent act of embellishment. Brierley’s paintings serve as a stage for diverse forms of reconciliation and transformation between the male and female, mind and material, body and object.

GL Brierley is a British artist based in London. GL Brierley. She completed her Masters in visual arts at the College of Art in London and graduated with an M.F.A. from Goldsmith College, London. Her works have been presented in numerous exhibition internationally. And are placed in renowned cas numerous private collections.

Artist : Kate Clark
Title : Charmed
Medium : mixed media wall mounted sculpture
Dimensions : 150 x 100 x 40 cm


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Kate Clark’s sculptures invite the viewer to experience an instinctive and primal reaction, that encourages further examination of our own humanity. Stitched over a hand-sculpted human face, the material quality of her ethically sourced animal hide brings an authenticity to the final sculpture, through what the artist describes as a unique energy and presence. We identify with animals through both our connection with and separation from them. Recognising these contradictions, Clark’s fusion of human and animal suggests that our human condition is fully realised only when we acknowledge and reconcile our current state and our natural instincts, acknowledging the animalistic inheritance within the human condition. She achieves this through emphasis on the characteristics that differentiate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, and, importantly, the ones that unite us. 

Kate Clark lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Cornell University for her BFA and Cranbrook Academy of Art for her MFA and has been awarded fellowships from the Jentel Artists Residency in Wyoming, The Fine Arts Work Center Residency in Provincetown, MA, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program in New York. Clark was nominated for a USA Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award. She was awarded a grant from The Virginia Groot Foundation in 2013 and a New York Foundation For the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship Award in 2014. Clark has exhibited in solo museum exhibitions at the Mobile Museum of Art, The Newcomb Art Museum and the Hilliard Museum and in group museum exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Islip Art Museum, and The Bellevue Arts Museum, MOFA: Florida State University, Cranbrook Art Museum, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, The Winnepeg Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum, the Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre, Paris, The Art Gallery at Cleveland State University, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Biggs Museum of American Art, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her work is collected internationally and is in public collections such as the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, the 21c Collection, the David Roberts Art Foundation and the C-Collection in Switzerland. Clark’s sculptures have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Magazine, Art21:Blog, The Village Voice, PAPERmag, The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, NYArts, Huffington Post, Hi Fructose, the BBC World News Brazil, Hey! Magazine, Time Out, ID Paris, Cool Hunting, Wallpaper, Creators Project/VICE, Sculpture Review and many other publications. In addition she was filmed by National Geographic in her studio over a 2 month period for a short documentary about her work.

Artist : Luke Hannam
Title : If Truth Be Told
Medium : oil on canvas
Dimensions : 250 x 160 cm


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Luke Hannam describes his work as the result of an ‘ordered chaos’ where poetic paintings are made ‘in the eye of the storm’, where creativity spins wildly, through bursts of impulse around a silent meditative deep well of meaning. Ideas emerge out of an energetic dedication to drawing and a relentless desire to explore images and motifs. His work is instantly recognisable through his strong punch of colour and definite use of line which weaves its way sensuously across the surface, denoting both the delicacy and strength of the form and spirit of the subject. Hannam’s paintings expressively offer a singular view on how what he sees, how he thinks and pivotally how he feels about the human condition and what lies beyond our materiality. His work could be seen to continue the Romantic tradition, embracing reality and mysticism with the wonder of experience.

Luke Hannam was born in 1966 and currently lives in East Sussex, UK. He studied Fine Art in the 1980s and whilst others of his generation faithfully chanted the conceptual mantra of the time, Hannam focussed on perfecting his expressive drawing skills seeking inspiration from the earlier masters. Works have been exhibited and collected internationally, including the collections of Stefan Simchowitz and David Kowitz.

Artist : Arthur Lanyon
Title : Turner Tina
Medium : oil stick, acrylic, watercolour, charcoal, collage on panel
Dimensions : 50 x 60 cm


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Arthur Lanyon paintings combine intuitive figurative motifs with an emotive, gestural, abstracted language. His energetic works are sited on a physical and metaphysical cross roads, like a belay between numerous visual and emotional pinnacles. They offer a progressive link between the outside world, the inner architecture of the brain, altered states of consciousness, memory and the unencumbered essence of child’s drawing. 

Arthur Lanyon is a British artist born in Leicester, England in 1985. He lives and works from a studio near Penzance, Cornwall. Born in to an artistic family, his father was the painter Matthew Lanyon and his grandfather the celebrated, influential and world renowned modernist painter Peter Lanyon. He won the Hans Brinke Painting Award in Amsterdam in 2007 and gained a first class degree in Fine Art from Cardiff University in 2008. Upon graduating he was featured in Saatchi’s ‘New Sensations’ exhibition. In 2014, his work was in the long-list for the Aesthetica Art Prize and was included in the award’s published anthology. His debut Anima Mundi solo exhibition ‘Return to Whale’ opened in 2016, which was followed by ‘White Chalk Lines in 2018, ‘Arcade Laundry’ in 2020 and ‘Coda for an Obol’ in 2022. Works have been exhibited extensively, notably including Untitled Art Fair in Miami; Zona Maco, Mexico City; the Saatchi Gallery London; The House of St Barnabas, London; CGK, Copenhagen; Tat Art, Barcelona and Herrick Gallery, Mayfair. Arthur Lanyon paintings are held in private collections worldwide. 

Artist : Arthur Lanyon
Title : Aswan
Medium : oil, oil stick, acrylic, charcoal, collage on linen
Dimensions : 100 x 90 cm


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Arthur Lanyon paintings combine intuitive figurative motifs with an emotive, gestural, abstracted language. His energetic works are sited on a physical and metaphysical cross roads, like a belay between numerous visual and emotional pinnacles. They offer a progressive link between the outside world, the inner architecture of the brain, altered states of consciousness, memory and the unencumbered essence of child’s drawing. 

Arthur Lanyon is a British artist born in Leicester, England in 1985. He lives and works from a studio near Penzance, Cornwall. Born in to an artistic family, his father was the painter Matthew Lanyon and his grandfather the celebrated, influential and world renowned modernist painter Peter Lanyon. He won the Hans Brinke Painting Award in Amsterdam in 2007 and gained a first class degree in Fine Art from Cardiff University in 2008. Upon graduating he was featured in Saatchi’s ‘New Sensations’ exhibition. In 2014, his work was in the long-list for the Aesthetica Art Prize and was included in the award’s published anthology. His debut Anima Mundi solo exhibition ‘Return to Whale’ opened in 2016, which was followed by ‘White Chalk Lines in 2018, ‘Arcade Laundry’ in 2020 and ‘Coda for an Obol’ in 2022. Works have been exhibited extensively, notably including Untitled Art Fair in Miami; Zona Maco, Mexico City; the Saatchi Gallery London; The House of St Barnabas, London; CGK, Copenhagen; Tat Art, Barcelona and Herrick Gallery, Mayfair. Arthur Lanyon paintings are held in private collections worldwide. 

Artist : Rebecca Harper 
Title : Trying to Travel The Spaces Between Us
Medium : acrylic on unprimed canvas
Dimensions : 190 x 180 cm


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Much of Rebecca Harper’s work has revealed itself through a diasporic consciousness which can often involve a multiplicity of belonging and a sense of difference, often one of ‘otherness’ and displacement. The identity of the displaced positioning is a paradox between location and dislocation, out of place everywhere and not completely anywhere. Generally, the work frames expressions of ‘being’ and manifests itself within an unfolding, wondering, allegoric commentary on the locations that she inhabits and those which inhabit her.

Recent work explores a cast of reoccurring characters that rotate around the outskirts of the house that she grew up in, where she also found herself locked down during Covid. This work is a part of a body of work that acknowledges the human and worldly capacity to live at the edge of the precipice. The characters are never seen as portraits as such, more like actors that play a role, filling in for particular people, as they fill a stage. As Rebecca says of the figure who resembles herself; “It feels like perhaps this woman, has almost become a guiding spirit of myself, one of vulnerability and strength in the dealings of uncertainty, instability loss, and grief. She shows up reliably again and again during terrible turbulence.” 

Harper was born in London in 1989, where she continues to live and work. She studied at UWE Bristol then The Royal Drawing School and Turps Art School (Postgraduate’s). Rebecca was Artist in Residence at The Santozium Museum, Santorini, in summer 2019, and Artist in Residence for the Ryder Project Space at A.P.T Studios, Deptford in 2018-19 before becoming a studio and committee Member in 2019.  She was winner of the ACS Studio Prize in 2018. Chameleon, her debut solo show at Anima Mundi met with great acclaim including a review in the FT by Jackie Wullshlager. Most recently Rebecca was selected for The John Moore’s Painting Prize 2021, and previously selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2018 at South London Gallery, Other curated shows include Huxley Parlour, Public Gallery, The Royal Academy Summer Show, Christies London and NYC, Flowers Gallery’, Paul Stolper Gallery, Turps Art Gallery and Arusha Gallery. Her work is on long term display in the Albright Collection at Maddox Street Club in London curated by Beth Greenacre and at the Santozeum Museum in Santorini. Harper is represented in many public and private collections internationally including the Ullens and the Royal Collections.

Artist : Gabrielle K Brown
Title : Sweet Milk
Medium : left : front / right : back, decorated wood carving with horse hair
Dimensions : 61 x 22 cm


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Embodying a natural and intuitive, seemingly naive, yet extremely complex aesthetic, Gabrielle K Brown is a multi-faceted, multi-media artist who eagerly and energetically seeks new ways to tell stories through her artworks. Her pieces retain an object, often shrine-like quality, utilising materials including wood, various paints, resin, fabrics and even hair - nothing is beyond limits. The works dissect the relationship we have with ourselves, our companions, our society and our past with an awe and celebration of nature and the divine, shedding light on how we grow and how we suffer as human beings. Confrontational imagery is often contrasted with uplifting symbolism, actions and words - emphasising the extremes of the human condition and experience, and yearning within the energetic and fraught times that we live in. 

Born in 1994 on the east coast of Canada in New Brunswick, Brown grew up along the riverside and mountains which is where she connected to art and began painting and sculpting. She has spent much of her life traveling the world and moving throughout Canada which has always reflected in her work, but has recently moved back home to St John, the oldest city in Canada.Work has been exhibited at Art Basel Miami, as well as Montreal and New York and LA in the United States.

Artist : Alice Ellis Bray
Title : Burn Me
Medium : oil and copper on board
Dimensions : 64 x 38 cm


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Alice Ellis-Bray is an artist from Lamorna in Cornwall. She works with self made costume, painting, performance and script to explore the infinite possibilities of identity and experience. Through learning the properties of nature and the nature of people, Bray seeks to portray an interconnectedness she feels with all things. Painting has assisted her as a tool to transmute stubborn emotions laying dormant within, painting the strength she seeks in the eyes of her paintings, helping her to find a way through life with painting as her remedy. With her oeuvre she has created something of a temple to mythical women, using arch-shaped boards tinged with gold in an allusion to religious iconography, which frame ‘selfie’, ‘alter -ego’, subjects that are either direct references to well-known figures, looser notions of the primitive.

Alice Ellis-Bray has exhibited her work widely, most recently at Tate St Ives. She has also taught at a number of art galleries and schools including Newlyn Art Gallery, Tate St Ives and CAST in Helston, Cornwall. She was selected as an ‘Artist to Watch’ by Elephant Magazine in August 2022.

Alice Ellis-Bray has exhibited her work widely, most recently at Tate St Ives. She has also taught at a number of art galleries and schools including Newlyn Art Gallery, Tate St Ives and CAST in Helston, Cornwall. She was selected as an ‘Artist to Watch’ by Elephant Magazine in August 2022.

Artist : Katie Sims
Title : Solvere
Medium : oil on panel
Dimensions : 30 x 24 cm


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Painting, for Katie Sims, is the closest thing to an act of communion. Her work reinforces the complexities of engagement, of seeing beyond first appearances and in questioning the origins and absolutes presented. Constraints are an integral part of her process, from a conceptual, painterly and physical stance. These limitations help her pare back to the essential, towards a directness of emotional statement and to silence; the silence the process facilitates and the silence the work is trying to get at. It is a simplifying, but not in the sense as to reduce complexity for it is layered with complexity and thus demands more from the viewer. Maintaining a balance around the transition point requires great focus akin to any devotional practice. The repetition and movement between prior intention and intention-in-action supports the virtues of listening and humility as she ‘assists’ something into being. Her work is a process that leads to a resolve. She places herself in an in-between space, between two opposing poles, challenging what resolve is through the middle ground until these two states are in a complete tension. Each resolution is different; chromatically, compositionally, through colour or light, yet each involves a circular dialogue of adding and removing. Thus her resolve sustains an instability of form, which manifests as hesitant and uncertain of itself. Sims sees this liminal space as the place where distinctions dissolve and the best opportunity for renewal is found. It is a fluid, malleable situation that enables new customs and identities to be unconcealed. 

Katie Sims was born in Shropshire, England in 1988 and currently lives and works on the small island of Gozo, Malta. Her paintings have been exhibited internationally and can be found in collections worldwide.

Artist : Paul Benney
Title : Mishkan
Medium : oil on canvas
Dimensions : 56 x 66 cm


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Paul Benney was born in London and currently lives and works in Suffolk. He rose to international prominence as a member of the Soho and East Village Neo-Expressionist group, whilst living and working in New York City in the 1980s where he worked and exhibited alongside peers Marylyn Minter, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarovicz among the many other others who made up the exploding NY art scene. Despite living and working in this extraordinary creative environment Benney’s painting maintained a uniquely English sensibility. 

Collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Gallery of Australia and  The National Portrait Gallery in London, The Royal Collection and The Eli Broad Foundation own works. He has exhibited in eight BP Portrait Award Exhibitions and twice won the BP Visitors’ Choice Award. Benney’s portrait subjects have included HM Queen Elizabeth II, Sir Mick Jagger, John Paul Getty III, 7th Marquess of Bath, The State Portrait for Israel, Lord Rothschild, as well as Ben Barnes for the portrait in the feature film ‘A Portrait of Dorian Grey’. Benney was invited to be resident artist at Somerset House in 2010. During his five year residency he held the exhibition ‘Night Paintings’ in 2012 and drew over 15,000 visitors. In 2017 his epic painting and holosonic sound installation ‘Speaking in Tongues’ was a prominent feature of the Venice Biennale. 

Artist : Sam Lock
Title : Yellow Falls
Medium : mixed media on canvas
Dimensions : 100 x 100 cm


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Sam Lock’s considered and expressive, often large scale, abstract paintings embrace the principle that change is a process not an event. A meditation on the continual flow and movement both around us and within us inspires each gesture. They are not made with a system or fixed process but through an energy that embraces both change and chance, in a manner that is both organic and unscripted, following its own path until there is a balance between presence and absence. There are silences and hiding places that are both poetic and activating, and a physicality and immediacy, where his aim to ‘submit’ himself to the canvas, eliminates extraneous thought in order to guarantee a purity of response. A response arising through concentration and intuition where thought and action, go hand-in-hand. This is what Lock refers to as the ‘poetry of moments’, of the spiritual nature of now becoming then, and how what started as waves of actions, becomes a forest of memory. Lock is interested in marks, resulting in paintings, that communicate both instantly and slowly - to slow down perception, and to create forms that don’t reveal themselves fully, all at once, through a filling up and emptying of space and surface; traces and echoes exist in a palimpsest, a build-up of painted marks, layers and statements that conceal and reveal, where time becomes held in a concrete way and the painting achieves a physical weight and substance. These layers allow you to swim in and out of the painting, they lead back in time, retaining a mystery and dynamism of the moment rather than a recollection of a misty lost past.

Sam Lock was born in London and now lives and works near Brighton with his studio in a converted industrial unit further up the coast.  Lock studied at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University, graduating in 1997 with MA’s in both Fine Art and Art History. During his training, he won a scholarship to travel to Rome, and explore the relationship between history, archaeology and the processes of painting, a preoccupation which still forms the conceptual basis that underpins his practice.  

Artist : Kristoffer Axen
Title : Ritual (1 & 2)
Medium : oil on canvas
Dimensions : 40 x 30 cm each (diptych)


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Kristoffer Axén’s atmospheric paintings are often auto-biographical as a means of tapping into the wider human condition. Works revolve around themes including the utopia of childhood, the temporary, dreamlike, quality of reality and the unconscious search for something oblique or unspecified. A sense of nostalgia is often tinged with an overarching feeling of the melancholy of transience. Inspired by cinematic imagery, anonymous photographs from the internet and childhood snapshots, Axén’s paintings and drawings are often bordering the dreamstate and the inner world. While contemporary and historic references include Michael Borremans, Mamma Andersson, Vilhelm Hammershoi and Richard Diebenkorn, his use of textured mechanical pencil for the drawings and the juxtaposed realism with the simplified blocks in his paintings are uniquely his own.

Kristoffer Axén was born in Stockholm, Sweden where his still resides. He is a selfself-taught painter, who studied fine-art photography at the International Center of Photography in New York between 2008-2009, a city in which he lived and worked until 2013. Axén’s works have been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions in New York, Copenhagen, Stockholm and in numerous group shows around the world, notably at Liljevalchs Spring Show in Stockholm, Sweden, Aperture Gallery in New York, USA and at Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. Axén’s works are included in many private and public collections including as the ICP collection, Michaelis School of Fine Arts and MONA and he has been published in articles from magazines including Zoom Magazine, The New York Times and Vogue Italia.

Artist : Simon Averill
Title : Entanglements
Medium : acrylic on panel
Dimensions : 40 x 40 cm each


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Albert Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ theory referred to the subject of ‘quantum entanglement’. This principle has inspired this ongoing series of paired paintings by Simon Averill. Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon which occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state of the other(s), even when the particles are separated by a large distance—instead, a quantum state must be described for the system as a whole. Physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad coined the term ‘intra-action’ to describe the concept of ‘entanglement’, (not only of fundamental particles but of all material, matter, of nature and of meaning). There is a distinction to be made between intra-action and interaction; when bodies interact they retain a degree of independence, each entity existed before the encounter. When intra-action occurs individuals materialise and agency emerges from within the relationship not outside of it. These works further enhance Averill’s reputation for attempting to record elusive, transitory yet fundamental phenomena. Produced through a multi layered, process of glazing where methodical and repetitive series’ of motifs, are used to describe intangible potentials.

Simon Averill is a British artist born in Brighton, England in 1961. He currently lives and works near Marazion in West Cornwall. Averill studied Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic and graduated with Honours. In 1986 he established a Printmaking Workshop near Penzance, Cornwall, which he ran until 1990. He has been a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists since the late 1980s. Averill has exhibited widely with exhibitions in the UK, Europe and USA including the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Show, The Discerning Eye exhibition at the Mall Galleries, Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, Sherborne House, Plymouth Museum, Plymouth Arts Centre, Truro Museum, Falmouth Art Gallery, Newlyn Art Gallery and the Festival Hall in Chicago, USA. He has had 12  exhibitions and won the Wells Art Contempory painting prize in 2020.