LITHA

Artist : Mat Chivers
Title : Where Do I End and You Begin (Swift)
Medium : pencil on paper
Dimensions : 56 x 76 cm


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“As a child I learnt somewhere that swifts sleep in the air. They lock their wings and spiral down, waking before they hit the ground. I’ve held a kind of near-mystical reverence for them ever since. I’ve day-dreamt for hours imagining their epic migration route from the summer skies of North-Western Europe to the plains of sub-Saharan Africa - my mind travelling with them. Because of their incredible speed and the fact that they rarely land, they’re quite hard to observe, so I’ve probably spent more time experiencing the associations than the birds themselves. This swift was found the other side of the Atlantic in the car park of a Metro supermarket in Montreal. It would have probably overwintered in Peru if it’s journey turned out differently. Holding its body in the palm of my hand I can sense its absolute stillness. A delicate memory of airborne freedom. A beautiful vessel.”

The work of British artist Mat Chivers looks at some of the fundamental phenomena that drive our thoughts and actions. He explores ideas relating to perception, evolutionary process, ecology and ethics by bringing traditional analogue approaches to making into counterpoint with state of the art digital technologies. Chivers has works in numerous private and public collections including Oxford University Mathematical Institute, UK and Fondazione Henraux, Italy. Solo exhibitions include ‘Migrations’ at Arsenal Art Contemporain Montréal, Canada and Musée d’art de Joliette, Canada; ‘Harmonic Distortion’ at PM/AM, London, UK, ‘Altered State’s at Hallmark House, Johannesburg, South Africa and ‘Syzygy’ at Anima Mundi. Group exhibitions include The New States of Being at Centre d’Exposition de l’Université de Montréal, Canada; A Place In Time at Nirox, Johannesburg, South Africa; Glasstress: White Light/White Heat at Pallazzo Cavalli Franchetti for the 55th Venice Biennale, Italy and The Knowledge at The Gervasuti Foundation for the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy.

Artist : Alban Roinard
Title : Rapture
Medium : (music by Jamie Mills), single channel video, duration 00:05:17

To watch the film : Click Here


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Alban Roinard was born in Paris and currently lives and works in St Ives, Cornwall. his practice draws specifically from close contact with landscape and community. He is a film maker and photographer and founded Eia Films and St Ives TV where he regularly documents the achievements and challenges of the town at a time of unprecedented change. He has twice been nominated for the Celtic Media Festival Awards and worked as cinematographer on the war documentaries ’The Americans in the Bulge’ and ‘Road to Victory’.

Artist : Luke Frost
Title : Yellow Volts
Medium : acrylic on canvas
Dimensions : 61 x 107 x 107cm


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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 : Tim Shaw
Title : The Bringers of Light (III)
Medium : bronze (edition of 8)
Dimensions : 13 x 35 x 10 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 : Sam Lock
Title : Green Stripe / Overhead
Medium : mixed media on panel
Dimensions : 25 x 20 cm each


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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 : Joy Wolfenden Brown
Title : Float
Medium : oil on paper
Dimensions : 18 x 45 cm


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Joy Wolfenden Brown’s intimate oil paintings feel hauntingly familiar possessing a raw, emotional, honesty. She captures fleeting fragments of memory, moments in time where the inherent vulnerability of the figures depicted, often in isolation, is palpable. These are lovingly yet spontaneously executed reflections on the human condition, which have an unnervingly, yet simultaneously comforting, unguarded quality. 

Joy Wolfenden Brown is a British artist born in Stamford, Lincolnshire. She currently lives in Bude, North Cornwall. She graduated from Leeds University then completed a post-graduate diploma in Art Therapy at Hertfordshire College of Art & Design which she worked as an for ten years before moving to Cornwall in 1999. Since then she has had numerous solo exhibitions and was the First Prize Winner in The National Open Art Competition, 2012. She was also awarded the Somerville Gallery painting prize in 2003 and first prize winner at the Sherborne Open in 2007 and the Revolver Pricze at The RWA in 2019. Works were acquired by the Anthony Pettullo Outsider Art Collection in Milwaukee with further works held in collections worldwide

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.

Artist : Rebecca Harper
Title : Camouflage at the Edge
Medium : acrylic on unprimed canvas
Dimensions : 80 x 80 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 : Stuart Pearson Wright
Title : Zakynthos
Medium : glazed vulcan stoneware on slate
Dimensions : 28 x 40 x 23 cm


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Stuart Pearson Wright drew from an early age and after considering becoming an actor, finally opted for art school. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. During his time at the Slade, Pearson Wright won a travel award from the National Portrait Gallery as part of its 1998 BP Portrait Awards. He drove around Britain in a van, producing sketches and paintings as he went. The resulting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was called From Eastbourne to Edinburgh: A Painter’s Odyssey. Godfrey Barker in the Evening Standard labelled the artist “A Hogarth for our Times” and Brian Sewell described the paintings as “images of such eccentricity and even madness that they fit perfectly the English tradition of the odd man out: the Blake, Spencer, Cecil Collins line, and the largest of them should at once have been bought by the Tate.” In 2000 Pearson Wright won the BP Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, London. The National Portrait Gallery subsequently acquired paintings of John Hurt, Adam Cooper and J.K. Rowling, plus a series of drawings which were displayed in 2006’s Most People are Other People. Stuart Pearson Wright lives and works in Suffolk, UK and is represented by Flowers.

Artist : Paul Benney
Title : The Magisterium
Medium : oil and resin on panel
Dimensions : 101 x 183 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 : Alastair & Fleur Mackie
Title : Complex System 27 & 28
Medium : cuttlebone (edition of 4 variee)
Dimensions : 44 x 49 cm each


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Alastair and Fleur Mackie’s sculptural practice is one of contrasts. It is as labour-intensive as it is formally effortless, as grounded in ideas of nature as it is in the intrinsically human struggle to define a role within the environment; it is as intellectually ambitious as it is aesthetically understated. Alastair grew up in an agricultural community in Cornwall, UK while Fleur’s childhood was split between Cameroon, France, and the UK. They met at art school in London in the late 90’s. Initially their creative practices were separate, but over time their work has evolved into a natural collaboration.  In 2011 they moved to live and work in Cornwall, the landscape of which has played a key role in the shaping of their vocabulary. Naturally occurring elements (native metals, wood, sea shells) are meticulously rearranged and transformed in a knowingly quixotic attempt to make sense of the primordial. Each work is something of an enigma, enriched by the loaded associations of its material and the story behind its making. Ally and Fleur operate by reduction; materials are pared down to their core. In their work, process dictates form, no matter how poetic or Romantic the piece’s origin. 

Alastair and Fleur Mackie have shown extensively in the UK and internationally, including exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery in London, the Venice Biennale and the Reykjavik Art Museum. They have worked on a number of public commissions and their work is held in collections including The Olbricht Collection in Berlin, the Salsali Private Museum in Dubai and the Wellcome Collection in London.

Artist : Sax Impey
Title : The Boatman
Medium : mixed media on paper on panel
Dimensions : 122 x 190 cm


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Sax Impey’s artworks are often large scale, immersive and elemental, incorporating intense detail and dexterity and an expressive, behavioural use of medium. Since 2005, Impey has produced works derived predominantly from experiences at sea. A qualified RYA Yachtmaster he has sailed many thousands of miles around the world. His journeys have had a profound impact and subsequent development as an artist. Reconnecting with nature through this powerful element has the almost inescapable effect of calling to question many of life’s existential questions. This epiphanic moment of realisation, of revelation, is at the core of Impey’s oeuvre. Reflecting on and capturing personal moments and making them universal, Impey’s work reaffirms the importance of introspection and confrontation, found specifically when surrounded by the natural world; “A mind can breathe, and observe, and reflect, away from the shrill desperation of a culture that, having forgotten that it is better to say nothing than something about nothing, invents ever new ways to fill every single space with less and less”. 

Impey was born in Penzance, Cornwall. He currently works from one of the prestigious Porthmeor Studios in St. Ives. From 2005, he has collaborated with the cross-cultural, environmental art group Red Earth. In 2007 Impey’s work was selected for the ‘Art Now Cornwall’ exhibition at Tate St Ives where he was placed on the cover of the associated publication. The same year he was heralded in The Times as one of the ‘New Faces of Cornish Art’. In 2010 he was featured in Owen Sheers’s BBC4 Documentary ‘Art of the Sea (In Pictures)’ alongside Anish Kapoor, J. M. W. Turner, Martin Parr and Maggi Hambling among others. His work was selected as a finalist the 2013 Threadneedle Prize and the year before was elected an Academician at the Royal West of England Academy. His paintings are in multiple collections including The Arts Council, Warwick University and the Connaught Hotel.

Artist : Sax Impey
Title : The Boatman Calls
Medium : mixed media on paper on panel
Dimensions : 122 x 190 cm


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Sax Impey’s artworks are often large scale, immersive and elemental, incorporating intense detail and dexterity and an expressive, behavioural use of medium. Since 2005, Impey has produced works derived predominantly from experiences at sea. A qualified RYA Yachtmaster he has sailed many thousands of miles around the world. His journeys have had a profound impact and subsequent development as an artist. Reconnecting with nature through this powerful element has the almost inescapable effect of calling to question many of life’s existential questions. This epiphanic moment of realisation, of revelation, is at the core of Impey’s oeuvre. Reflecting on and capturing personal moments and making them universal, Impey’s work reaffirms the importance of introspection and confrontation, found specifically when surrounded by the natural world; “A mind can breathe, and observe, and reflect, away from the shrill desperation of a culture that, having forgotten that it is better to say nothing than something about nothing, invents ever new ways to fill every single space with less and less”. 

Impey was born in Penzance, Cornwall. He currently works from one of the prestigious Porthmeor Studios in St. Ives. From 2005, he has collaborated with the cross-cultural, environmental art group Red Earth. In 2007 Impey’s work was selected for the ‘Art Now Cornwall’ exhibition at Tate St Ives where he was placed on the cover of the associated publication. The same year he was heralded in The Times as one of the ‘New Faces of Cornish Art’. In 2010 he was featured in Owen Sheers’s BBC4 Documentary ‘Art of the Sea (In Pictures)’ alongside Anish Kapoor, J. M. W. Turner, Martin Parr and Maggi Hambling among others. His work was selected as a finalist the 2013 Threadneedle Prize and the year before was elected an Academician at the Royal West of England Academy. His paintings are in multiple collections including The Arts Council, Warwick University and the Connaught Hotel.

Artist : Arthur Lanyon
Title : Jackfruit Falling
Medium : oil stick, acrylic, watercolour, collage on panel
Dimensions : 30 x 41 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 Brinker 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 : Andrew Hardwick
Title : Orange Sunset
Medium : mixed media on panels
Dimensions : 128 x 284 cm


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Andrew Hardwick’s often large scale, sedimentary paintings display his captivation with ever decreasing wilderness zones; both natural and man-made. Playing with and subverting traditional notions of romantic landscape painting and the sublime. The paintings often depict edge-land zones around big industrial conurbations or ports, such as large-scale car storage compounds, redundant factories and polluted waste lands. Other works draw inspiration from the more typically idyllic locations such as Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. However, these landscapes are also filled with reminders of human interference. Roads criss-cross the moor in deeply scratched lines, a narrow road is etched into an otherwise massive moorland triptych, likewise a real car radiator sits in the surface of another painting as if decaying and buried by the earth. His medium of working is also atypical, paintings are heavily layered with different types of paint (often sourced from recycling centres), plaster, plastics, soils, pigments, roofing felt, hay and other unconventional materials. To this rich surface relevant artefacts are often added, creating reminders, triggering memories or reflecting fears intrinsic to a particular landscape. The concept of layering in the landscape arrived partly a result of the artist’s childhood, during which his family’s farm was first sliced in half by the M5 motorway and then again by the Royal Portbury Dock. The land once filled with sheep has become a pure edge-land wilderness with detritus of continuous development now occupying and obliterating the land. Hardwick’s entire oeuvre makes reference to concepts of change, memory, history, emotion and transience. Ever redolent is the notion that we are but another layer in time.

Andrew Hardwick is a British artist born in Bristol, England in 1961 where he still resides. He achieved an MA in Fine Art at the University of Wales. He is an elected Academician at the Royal West of England Academy. He has featured in four solo exhibitions at Anima Mundi. Works have been exhibited extensively including numerous public shows and have been collected worldwide.

Artist : Carlos Zapata 
Title : Mixed Race (Latin America)
Medium : polychrome wood
Dimensions : height 45 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 : David Kim Whittaker
Title : The Nonbinary II (The Oolala)
Medium : oil and acrylic on primed panel
Dimensions : 92 x 92 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 : Kate Clark
Title : The Sweet Spot
Medium : pronghorn hide and horns, foam, clay, thread, pins, rubber eyes
Dimensions : 137 x 134 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 : Henry Hussey 
Title : The Past
Medium : altar cloth, digitally printed linen, hessian & hand woven fabric, dyed linen & yarn, embroidery
Dimensions : 240 x 270 cm


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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 : Katie Sims
Title : I Know I Exist Somewhere, in Silence (1)
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 : Katie Sims
Title : I Know I Exist Somewhere, in Silence (2)
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 : Jackson Whitefield
Title : Imprint I
Medium : etching on paper with silver gelatin prints in a five part polished aluminium frame
Dimensions : 87 x 87 cm


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Mild steel forms were buried, embedded or secured to the earth at various pertinent sites and left to be imprinted by the elements. After a three month period the steel shapes were photographed, removed and then etched to paper. These forms are presented alongside photographic images of the sites where each form was left to weather.

Jackson Whitefield is a British artist born in St. Ives, Cornwall in 1991. Whitefield works with a diverse range of media including photography, film, drawing, book making and site-specific earthworks. Themes which run through his work include geology, anthropology, process and language. While his choice of media and interests are diverse, his inspiration is rooted firmly in his immediate surroundings. Always allowing his environment to lead his immediate enquiry his approach to making the work is more about reacting and engaging with the subject rather than seeking out ideas that were already formed in the mind.

Artist : Luke Hannam
Title : An Abuse of Power
Medium : oil on canvas with painted frame
Dimensions : 152 x 122 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 : Luke Routledge
Title : Flower Sprite
Medium : mixed media sculpture,
Dimensions : 120 x 60 x 60 cm


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Luke Routledge creates a phantasmagoric caste of grotesques constructed a re-assembled from an ever growing body of figures. Routledge’s sculptural output is focused on the description of an alternate society of nonsensical, protohumans, anthropomorphic beings and the speculative fictional multiverse that they call home. This multiverse is used as a framework within which to explore and unite diverse research topics, creating a living, collage territory. The hypothetical beings that these sculptures represent are positioned as a band of travellers exploring and striving to understand the cosmos they inhabit. They are building their cultures and communities as Routledge, through research, stitches new information into the fabric of their reality. As his research expands to include new topics, the beings transition from place to place - with each presentation they are simultaneously charting the boundaries of their existence. Central to both the material nature of his sculptures and the narrative setting is the idea of assemblage. His sculptures are constructed in a modular method that allows them to be dismantled and reassembled in new configurations, resulting in new narrative threads emerging across the installations and feeding the stories that he creates.  The sculptures, their tools, possessions and elements of their landscape are predominantly made from an air dry clay material that he has been developing for a number of years. This material can be manipulated to achieve a diverse range of finishes and is used alongside other clays, silicones and CAD components. He combines these elements with altered electronics, treating them as found objects; utilising them to create a semblance of the technology and architecture of this other space, brought to life by animatronic elements.

Artist : Michael McGrath
Title : Future Planning for Pollinators
Medium : soft pastel, coloured pencil and acrylic on paper
Dimensions : 50 x 65 cm


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Michael McGrath’s paintings are inspired by an interest in the history of place and his natural environment but also embodies a curiosity in the cults of mysticism, mythology and religion. An interest in the esoteric is balanced and presented alongside the more prosaic aspects of daily life with a playful sense of naivety. His painted faces often depict deities or the deceased, where ghosts and skulls naturally symbolise death and afterlife, but are rendered with a fair measure of acceptance and hope. McGrath imagines that “if there were gods, ghosts or magic, they would exist within nature and in the landscape; not just as beings in the sky, but also in the ground, in the trees, in the flowers and in the animals.”

Michael McGrath is an American artist and painter who lives and works in Rhinebeck, in New York’s Hudson Valley. He graduated from Ithaca College in 2000 with a B.F.A. in Fine Art and has most recently shown work in Rhinebeck, New York, Germany, Belgium, and in Beijing, China.

Artist : Michael McGrath
Title : Garden Plans for Attracting Dragons
Medium : soft pastel, coloured pencil and acrylic on paper
Dimensions : 50 x 65 cm


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Michael McGrath’s paintings are inspired by an interest in the history of place and his natural environment but also embodies a curiosity in the cults of mysticism, mythology and religion. An interest in the esoteric is balanced and presented alongside the more prosaic aspects of daily life with a playful sense of naivety. His painted faces often depict deities or the deceased, where ghosts and skulls naturally symbolise death and afterlife, but are rendered with a fair measure of acceptance and hope. McGrath imagines that “if there were gods, ghosts or magic, they would exist within nature and in the landscape; not just as beings in the sky, but also in the ground, in the trees, in the flowers and in the animals.”

Michael McGrath is an American artist and painter who lives and works in Rhinebeck, in New York’s Hudson Valley. He graduated from Ithaca College in 2000 with a B.F.A. in Fine Art and has most recently shown work in Rhinebeck, New York, Germany, Belgium, and in Beijing, China.

Artist : Peter Burns
Title : Red Sun
Medium : oil on linen
Dimensions : 26 x 36 cm


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Peter Burns lives and works in County Mayo, Ireland. His enchanting impasto oil paintings unguardedly address the plight of the lost soul, the lone wayfarer and the anti-hero. Expressing the solitary struggle to comprehend the universe that looms over us and the magnitude of the world we inhabit, overpowers us and seals our fate to be ever a stranger in an ever stranger land. Burns’ work has been exhibited extensively internationally and collected worldwide, and has featured in Wall Street International Magazine, The Sunday Times and ArtForum. He was also  a recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and was awarded a BA in Sculpture and MFA in Painting from The National College of Art & Design, Dublin.

Artist : Jim Carter
Title : For the Old Fires Still Burn and the Night is Blooming
Medium : wood, earth
Dimensions : 83 x 39 x 15 cm


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Often uneasy or tragic, irrational or other, Jim Carter’s work is linked to a real world of suffering and transcendence: making sculpture from organic materials as a means of advocacy, atonement or commemoration; shifting to story and the written word as a way to enter emotional and numinous spaces of memory and dream. What appears on the surface to be a wilful disturbance of the remains of organic life in order to fulfil a creative compulsion is intended to be part of a transforming and re-sanctifying process. Taken materials are reconfigured into new forms to express complex feelings of grief and loss, love and devotion, fertility and renewal. Fundamental in this work is a conviction in an irrepressible spirit for regeneration in the world, an imperishable flame that rises most clearly in landscape and the magic and otherness of animals.

Carter was born in Worcestershire in 1967. He received an MA with distinction in Art and Environment from Falmouth University and an MSc Award in Ecopsychology from the Centre For Human Ecology, Edinburgh. His work has appeared in Dark Mountain, Unpsychology and Earthlines magazine.

Artist : Judith Nangala Crispin
Title : Jonah Sings Canticles to the Rising Sun
Medium : mixed media
Dimensions : 120 x 90 cm 


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Full medium: lumachrome glass print, cliche-verse, chemigram. roadkill pardalote with gold chloride and selenium, acid washed and subjected to electric current. exposed 26 hours on fibre paper in an abandoned car.  re-printed as a single image, detailed with gold and silver leaf

Judith Nangala Crispin is an Australian visual artist, poet and musician, and a descendant of Bpangerang people of North East Victoria. Her skin name, Nangala, was given to her by the Warlpiri people of the remote Tanami Desert in northern Australia, a place she has lived for a few months each year for over a decade. Her work includes themes of displacement and identity loss, a reflection on her ancestry, but it is primarily centred on the concept of connection with the land. This work forms a part of Crispin’s ongoing series depicting the transcendent ascending forms of recently deceased fauna. Crispin’s camera-less method of photography incorporates a range of processes. Her own developed alternative process of ‘lumachrome glass printing’, combines elements of lumen printing, cliché verre, chemical alchemy and drawing. She works within a mobile geodesic dome which functions as a giant lens where light streams penetrate its plastic walls. The mobility of her studio allows her to go to the site of her subject, prior to respectful burial. The muse, is raised onto a plastic box, rested on special photographic paper for up to 50 hours as the passage of sun and moonlight exposes its posthumous portrait. Each work is viewed as a collaboration with nature, where honouring the subject is a key objective. In each work the animals are diaphanous where light has literally passed through their bodies. They appear drawn in a primitive motion by a slipstream of spirit, levitating in a space of brooding luminosity that appears sentient and wholly focused on the task of enfolding each creature back into its care. The result offers a profound sense of what lies beyond.

Nangala Crispin has published a collection of poetry, The Myrrh-Bearers (Sydney: Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), and a book of images and poems made while living with the Warlpiri, The Lumen Seed (New York: Daylight Books, 2017). She is a member of Oculi collective, one of the chapter leads of Women Photograph (Sydney), and was the 2021 Artist in residence with Music Viva. She is also the Poetry Editor for The Canberra Times. She has also directed and worked on two major social justice research projects – The Julfa Project, which preserved photographic records of a destroyed Armenian cemetery and digitally reconstructed the site from new and existing images; and Kurdiji 1.0, an Aboriginal suicide prevention app, which strengthens resilience in young indigenous people by reconnecting them with community and culture. Nangala Crispin work has been exhibited internationally.

Artist : Roger Thorp
Title : A Beautiful Morning
Medium : single channel video (duration 03:00)

To watch the film : Click Here


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Roger Thorp is a British artist born in Derbyshire. He currently lives and works in Cornwall. He previously worked as a producer on music videos before directing / producing programmes for NGO’s such as WWF, ILO, Greenpeace and the Red Cross, working in Australia, Mongolia and the USA. He has also made two feature films. Other work by Thorp as a writer / director has been screened in Rome, Barcelona, Berlin, Oslo, Copenhagen, Istanbul, USA, Cornwall and London. In 2015 he founded ‘The Olive Network’ a sophisticated web platform built to foster tolerance and understanding throughout diverse global communities by focusing on the positive long-term contributions of charity, the arts and humanities. Thorp’s artwork has been exhibited extensively.