Thresholds (The Unnamed)

Thresholds 

(The Unnamed)

“I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, 

nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, 

gone astray, I’m all these words, all these strangers, 

this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, 

no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, 

fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, 

those that merge, those that part, those that never 

meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m 

something quite different, a quite different thing, a 

wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry 

cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, 

and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast 

born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of 

caged beasts...” 

Samuel Beckett,‘The Unnamable’, 1953 

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Thresholds (The Unnamed) 

Stories. A meme just flashed, too brief a moment, 

no more than a few seconds, which said (and who 

knows if it is true): “In every breath you breathe 

in you inhale 10^19 atoms… Every breath contains 

atoms from every person that is alive now and has 

ever lived.” That feels like big news, flicking by in 

the blink of an eye. Put down the phone. Why would 

we ever feel so alone? 

Beneath the surface smile, beyond a heart engorged 

with love, ripened by social and familial contentment 

and professional achievement, lies an emptier and 

fearful void. Is the aim for it to become filled with 

a clarity of knowing or a deepening of mystery? 

There remains forever, doubt in truth and 

certainty in untruth. A perpetual pushing against 

a potentially desolate state of being in the waiting 

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of those whispers of magic that may reach us on 

the wind, lifting up for a moment on to the broad 

shoulders of forever. There is purpose in a searching 

for poetry in the contemplated understanding of 

this, among other dichotomous states of duality that 

we are perhaps not alone in finding ourselves 

locked in. 

The artworks selected for this presentation with 

a degree of spontaneous intuition have not been 

done so to offer any conceptual solutions. Instead 

because they ‘feel’ to me to occupy a hovering 

space of unknowing or perhaps even a quietly 

humming place of gestation and potential – a 

captured moment within the fog of existential 

liminality, providing a threshold, which I hope, 

through recognition or affirmation, might offer the 

potential to connect. 

Joseph Clarke, 2021 

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Amy Gillian Wilson (b. 1997) 

“I used to be a woman who knew how to 

make things out as I saw them, but I have 

since committed the pathetic error of 

thinking. Wanting to understand was one 

of the worst things to have happened to me. 

I care too much about the utter darkness, 

the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat 

back the lives that have been tossed forth 

from the womb to fail, to kiss and bestow 

them all a second chance. I’m sending my 

true love back to the bitch that bore you. 

She is the world-generating spirit who all 

creatures rise through: space, time, and 

causality – the shell of the cosmic egg. 

She is the enticement that budged the 

self-brooding absolute to the act of creation. 

All information inside her is systematized 

around an enigma invisible even in its most 

private nucleus. I’m handing you a world 

on fire. I’ve given up on figuring out how 

to figure things out. Every lure seems to be 

an expanding vortex. Fear comes from what 

surpasses me, and I fear myself becomes 

I’m always ready to suffer. To protect me 

who persecutes me, I’ll float in emptiness 

and become air, energetic air, or maybe I’ll 

be more like an instant of air. Yes, I want 

to be an instant. Rather than a soul in a 

body, I’ll be a body in a soul.” - Amy Gillian 

Wilson, 2021 

Amy Gillian Wilson was born in Boston, 

Massachusetts in 1997. Her interdisciplinary 

approach consists of sculpture, painting, 

installation, writing, video and performance. 

She earned her undergraduate degree 

from the School of the Art Institute of 

Chicago and is currently completing the 

Masters of Fine Arts program in Ceramics 

at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield 

Hills, Michigan. She has exhibited her 

artwork widely in the USA and beyond. 

‘Who Orders Me Around Is Only For Me To Know’ 

mixed media wall hanging, 160 x 150 cm 

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David Quinn (b. 1971) 

Working on several pieces at once, David 

Quinn’s studio is an intimate, white, 

rectangular space where small scale, interrelated 

yet instinctively painted works, hang 

in line or grid. Each piece a self contained 

unit, both unique and yet part of a greater 

whole, as if individual words as part of 

a sentence, notes in a tune or hours in a 

day. What at first glance appears simple, 

minimal and understated, reveals itself 

upon closer inspection to be multilayered 

and imbued with quiet complexity, where 

a unique history is accumulated, built 

like strata in sedimentary rock. A finished 

painting is the summary of the process of 

its creation: a concentrated form or essence, 

containing both purity and imperfection, 

each tablet a poetic palimpsest, considered 

by Quinn as a marker of time, spent 

in contemplation - akin perhaps to a 

physical embodiment of meditation or 

a prayer. 

David Quinn was born in Dublin, Ireland 

in 1971 and currently lives and works in 

Shillelagh, County Wicklow. His paintings 

have been exhibited internationally and 

can be found in collections worldwide. 

‘Lugnaquilla 1 & 2’ 

mixed media on panel, 21.5 x 13.5 cm 

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Judith Nangala Crispin (b. 1970) 

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. 

‘Some spirits remain in this world only a moment– just to feel breath on their lips, a mother’s 

warmth, to smell wildflowers in the grass- and then they go, slipping back into the before-country. 

Lucy, dropping her body in the field, lifts into a Braidwood night and is greeted by insects.’ 

lumachrome glass print, cliche-verre, chemigram, stillborn calf & bugs on fibre paper, with 

household chemicals, mineral salts & seed - exposed 48 hours in a geodesic dome, 140 x 100 cm 

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Richard Nott (b. 1963) 

Richard Nott’s paintings are unique. There 

are no oil or acrylic paints in his studio, he 

works with industrial materials, bitumen, 

emulsions and varnishes, building them 

up layer upon layer, often over intimately 

drawn or gouged grids, lines or marks, into 

a textural palimpsest, before courageously 

scraping or burning them back to reveal what 

lies underneath. Viewing Richard Nott’s 

artwork is witnessing a protracted collision 

of creative and destructive processes. An 

evolution of matter, exposed, concealed, 

exposed, concealed, continuously. His 

paintings become the consequence of 

protracted time spent where Nott’s history 

merges with the history of the elements 

used. He has little interest in illusionistic 

‘texture’, the work must be its own entity, 

have its own story and be its own statement. 

His objective is to create an organic object 

that evolves like a living thing with truth 

and imperfection. His process of working 

allows for a contemplation of a cycle of 

existence to become imbued in to the work. 

Not a beginning with an end but a journey 

where genesis leads to dissolution, and on 

once again to genesis. Something eternal 

akin to alchemy. 

Richard Nott is a British artist born in 1963, 

who lives and works in west Cornwall. Nott 

gained his Fine Art degree at Lancashire 

Polytechnic and his MA in fine art at 

Reading University. In 1985 he worked as 

an assistant to Andy Goldsworthy on sitespecific 

sculptures in the Lake District. He 

was gallery assistant at the Royal Academy 

from 1986-7 and at Oldham Art Gallery from 

1991-2. He won the South West Arts Visual 

Arts and Photography Award in 1994. He 

gained a residency at the 12th International 

Weeks of Painting in Slovenia. Exhibitions 

have been extensive and international 

notable included numerous solo exhibitions 

at Anima Mundi over a long and fruitful 

working relationship, ‘Art Now Cornwall’ at 

the Tate St Ives and Chashama, Avenue of 

the America’s, NYC. 

‘Scarified 1’ 

mixed media panel (bitumin, acrylic, varnish, paper), 102 x 102 cm 

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Claire Curneen (b. 1968) 

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. 

‘Anam Cara’ 

tin glazed terracotta, 89 cm (H) 

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Jamie Mills (b. 1983) 

Jamie Mills is a musician, sound and visual 

artist. His practice is underpinned by 

investigation surrounding the dissemination 

of gesture between materiality and 

environments – referencing both internal 

and external landscapes. These concerns 

are reinforced by an interdisciplinary 

approach to working and are made manifest 

through the renderings of sounds or 

materials often sourced or retrieved via 

immersion into nature or borderlands, 

and with particular reference to his aural 

works, articulated and manipulated through 

unorthodox instrumental preparations 

and the incorporation and processing of 

field recordings. The term ‘gestalt’ refers 

to a concept within psychotherapeutic 

fields, inferring that the nature of a 

whole is greater than the sum of its 

parts. Mills’ employment of the mediums 

of photography, sound and mark-making 

can be read in this sense whereby a reality 

is constructed not by the sole surface 

representation of any individual element 

alone, but instead there is a sense that 

the artists reality is presented through 

the relationships and the spaces between 

elements. In other terms, it is work that 

requires both on one hand a stepping 

away from, and on the other an immersion 

into, in order to extract an empathetic 

understanding of the essence of the 

work that presides from both a conscious 

and subconscious framework of mind. 

Universally inherent within his process of 

rendering, there is a conscious dialogue 

between, on one hand material intent (or 

‘essence’) and on the other, control (or the 

relinquishing of control), so as to make work 

that negotiates thresholds and occupies at 

times a liminal status. In this sense Mills’ 

“intuitively composed” sound works, and 

his images or assemblages become markers 

to a series of internal journeys or rituals 

informed by an often poetic dialogue 

between material, form and environment. 

‘The Velocity of Inertia’ 

single channel video & sound work 

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Mat Chivers (b. 1973) 

Referencing that all life on Earth, including 

our own is carbon-based, ‘Carbon Mirror’ is 

one of a series of paired drawings made 

using this primary element. The left hand 

has been used to make a drawing of the 

right hand and the right to draw the left. 

The eye observes, sending a signal to the 

brain and down through the body into 

the hand which makes marks on the paper 

in an attempt to describe what the eye 

sees - setting up a continual loop between 

the interior and the exterior. Physical 

engagement with material reality is an 

act of extended cognition - of thinking 

out into the world. The idea of extended 

cognition centres around the way thinking 

is something that happens in relationship 

with material reality - a network of 

processes that radiate back and forth from 

the wetware of the brain through the 

physiology of the sensorial body and into 

the world of animate and inanimate form in 

a complex web of reciprocity. The evolution 

of our hands has facilitated an evolution of 

our minds. The hand enables the mind to 

manifest on the three-dimensional plane 

and has led us to where we are now. 

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. 

‘Carbon Mirror’ 

carbon on paper, 75 x 55 cm each 

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Jim Carter (b. 1967) 

In these two territorial boundary markers, 

the right hand is closed and mute, suggesting 

secrecy, the unknown and arcane. The left 

hand is raised so as to challenge unjust and 

oppressive action, both forbidding trespass 

into hallowed terrain. 

“In the forest, as in the skull, there are levels 

of consciousness much less supervised by 

rational control, and from this legitimate 

dark, a cry will appear as more or less 

unimpeded emotion. In the Hebrew language 

it is known as the hôy, a term associated with 

lamentation for the dead, that yet lends itself 

to complex utterances. If I think of this work 

as an agent for the cause of the subjugated 

animal, then the hôy-word crystalises as a 

reflex sourced from anger, grief and pain. 

It is a cry that secures the boundary and 

resists the transgressor, or one which makes 

pronouncements that tend towards vengeance 

and punishment (though the root is always in 

grief and suffering). Of course, if we ally this 

sound to a gesture of the hand, then meanings 

become more numerous as well as emphatic. 

The right hand is here closed and mute, and 

into this we can read ideas of secrecy and the 

occluded animal. The power and dominion 

of its hermetic silence is not denied the 

other hand, it is just of a different order. 

The left has occasion for sound, whereas 

the right does not, if it ever needed it. 

What are we to make of these hands at the 

threshold that in form suggest the man 

but which are countered against him? Are 

they not a man’s instrument with which to 

conquer, emblematic of his sovereignty and 

kingship? But the sign is raised more so to 

challenge his unjust and oppressive action 

than to accent his differentiating image. It 

expresses, moreover, the spirit of the animal 

in opposition which, as far as this work is 

concerned, forbids trespass into hallowed 

terrain. The left hand, its fingers extended, 

denotes command and invocation; the right 

is equally raised in a prohibitive gesture, and 

one which comes with a hex of judgement and 

attendant calamity (I imagine the intruder 

who crosses this threshold into the grove of 

the satyr subject to all the repercussions of a 

curse).” Jim Carter 2021. 

Jim 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, Centre For Human 

Ecology. Carter’s work has appeared in 

The Dark Mountain, About Place Journal, 

Unpsychology and Earthlines magazine. 

‘There Are Tongues, They Will Be Ceased’ & ‘He Gathered The Wind in His Fist’ 

fox, cow and sheep bone, clay. fox fur, poplar leaf, hazel wood,170 cm (H) 

cow teeth, wood, clay. poplar leaf, soil, ash, 150 cm (H) 

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Massimo Angei (b. 1962) 

Massimo Angèi’s elemental, tempestuous 

yet ethereal oil paintings reflect varied 

emotional states whilst remaining open to 

physical and metaphysical interpretation. 

Tableaus and forms are suggested but 

never fully established, perhaps evoking 

landscape, weather patterns, natural 

systems, inner psychology or spiritual 

connectedness. Voluptuous cloud-like 

billows intersperse with delicate spiralling 

marks forming an ecstatic unity reminiscent 

of both renaissance grandeur and primitive 

automatic drawing. 

Massimo Angèi was born in La Spezia, Italy, 

he currently lives and works in Sarzana, 

near the borderline between Liguria 

and Tuscany. Following art school, he 

collaborated with various institutions and 

museums exhibiting early representational 

depictions of flora and fauna. After finishing 

his degree at the Fine Arts Academy in 

Carrara/Painting (Accademia di Belle 

Arti\Pittura), he participated in his first 

exhibitions, and the creation of the Idioma 

group along with Marco Casentini, Fabio 

Linari, Jacopo Bruno, Andrea Geremia. 

He then began to work as an independent 

freelance photographer working for photo 

agencies including Grazia Neri of Milan, 

and Bilderberg of Hamburg, publishing his 

images in both Italian and international 

magazines. A vivid dream in the spring of 

2006 made him realise that his destiny was 

as a painter, and he vowed to never again 

abandon it. 

‘Abissi di morbida luce (Abyss of Soft Light)’ 

oil on canvas, 70 x 140 cm 

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Tim Shaw (b. 1964) 

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. 

‘Hallucinatory Figure 1, 2 & 3’ 

bronze (edition of 8), 20 cm, 19 cm & 15 cm (H) 

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Gabrielle K Brown (b. 1994) 

Embodying a natural and intuitive, 

seemingly naive, yet extremely complex 

aesthetic, Gabrielle K Brown is a multifaceted, 

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. 

‘Eat The Soup Live The Dream Live Die Repeat’ 

acrylic, pencil crayon, wood, resin, fabric, horse hair, 185 x 160 cm 

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David Cooper (b. 1972) 

David Cooper’s work deals with disorder, 

taking fragments of found, disregarded 

objects and exploring them inside out, 

and outside in, through a series of 

unpremeditated and intuitive processes 

in three dimensional form. The works 

inquire into a humanity that feels, fears and 

confronts restriction and control; a state of 

being often conducive to an abominable 

sense of desolation and fettered anxiety. 

These unknown (and unknowable) aspects of 

the human condition, driven by momentary 

absences of restraint, structure and control 

are embodied. Broken happenings, motivated 

by instinct, assemblage techniques and 

random thoughts, naivety and energy are 

exploited to sculpt the identity of these 

unfathomable aspects of human experience. 

His intriguing and expressive portraits, are 

perhaps deliberately destined to remain 

curious and incomplete. 

David Cooper was born in Wakefield, West 

Yorkshire in 1972. He currently lives and 

works in Suffolk. Cooper studied Fashion 

at John Moores University followed by an 

MA in Fashion Design at Central Saint 

Martins where he went on to become lead 

designer and head of menswear at Alexander 

McQueen. More recently Cooper attended 

Fine Art summer school at the Slade School 

of Fine Art in 2008. Works have been 

exhibited extensively in the UK including 

The Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2014 and most 

recently as part of Anima Mundi’s ‘Protected 

by Alarms’ & Ode to a Nightingale’. 

‘Mutta Dictator’ 

jesmonite, 40 x 22 x 19 cm 

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Andrew Litten (b. 1970) 

Andrew Litten’s dynamic and gestural 

figurative paintings 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 largescale 

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. 

‘Liminal Stage’ 


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William Arnold (b. 1983) 

Living Places: ‘The pleasures of life do not 

fill time but leave it empty. The human mind 

however, feels detestation and discomfort 

in the presence of empty time. Present time 

can admittedly seem to us to be full, but in 

our own memory it nevertheless appears to 

empty, for when time is full of diversions 

and the like, it only feels full when it is 

contemporaneous - in the memory it is 

empty. If one has not done anything in 

one’s life but simply waste one’s time, and 

then looks back at one’s life, one will be 

unable to understand how it could come to 

an end so swiftly.’ - Emmanual Kant 

Through use of an adapted paper negative 

process, ‘Living Places’ takes a wry look at 

the present era of ubiquitous surveillance 

and social networking by literally recording 

everything that has happened within the 

participant’s living space for periods of 

a week or more in a single photographic 

frame. Subjects were sought and chosen 

through an open-call online, collaborating 

in the installation of the camera in their 

chosen personal space, which was then left, 

shutter open over an extended timeframe. 

The resulting images give cause to 

reflect on the need to record our lives in 

comprehensive detail and the corresponding 

trend of making this record of banal, yet 

often highly personal information available 

for wider consumption. These photographs 

seek, in abstracted form to document and 

to an extent subvert this confessional 

trend, in which the public and private 

are increasingly entangled; the intimate 

commonplace. 

William Arnold is an experimental, 

conceptual and documentary photographer, 

interested in the layers of human and 

natural history that comprise the making 

of the landscape, and the role played 

by the photograph in documenting time 

and change—the subjective and objective 

politics of places and their histories. His 

first monograph Suburban Herbarium was 

published by Uniformbooks (2020) with his 

work showcased in various publications 

and periodicals including: The Guardian, 

New Scientist, De Standaard, Source and 

Resurgence & Ecologist Magazine. He lives 

and works in West Cornwall, UK 

‘Luke’s Home Office, December 18th to January 3rd (Continuous exposure from paper negative)’ 

archival inkjet print on hahnemuhle photorag 308gsm, 43 x 56 cm 

31

‘William’s Room, February 17th to 24th (Continuous exposure from paper negative)’ 


32

‘Silje’s Bedroom, June 6th to 21st (Continuous exposure from paper negative)’ 


33

Joy Wolfenden Brown (b. 1961) 

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. 

‘Evanescent Light’ 

oil on paper, 62 x 51 cm 

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Laura Ford (b. 1961) 

Laura Ford’s sculptures are faithful 

representations of fantasy, often with 

bittersweet and menacing qualities mixed 

with tenderness, providing us with acutely 

graphic renditions of human emotion, 

mental and physical. She utilises an acute 

observation of the human condition to 

engage with personal narrative and wider 

social and political issues. Her imagery 

is all about remembering and giving that 

memory clarity. 

Born in Cardiff and currently living near 

Chichester, UK, Ford studied at Bath 

Academy of Art from 1978-82 and at 

Chelsea School of Art from 1982-83. She 

was included in the British Art Show 5, 

2000 and represented Wales in the 51st 

Venice Biennale in 2005. She has had 

numerous solo and group shows around the 

world including 2012 ‘Days of Judgment’, 

Kulturzentrum Englische Kirche , Galerie 

Scheffel, Bad Homburg and at The New Art 

Centre, Roche Court, 2011 Frederik Meijer 

Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, 

USA, 2007, ‘Rag and Bone’, Turner 

Contemporary, Margate, 2006 ‘Armour 

Boys’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 

2005, Venice Biennale for Wales, 2004, 

‘Wreckers’, Beaconsfield, 2004 ‘Into 

My World: Recent British Sculpture’, 

Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art 

in Connecticut, USA, London, 2003, 

‘Headthinkers’, Houldsworth Gallery, 

Cork Street, 2002, ‘The Great Indoors’, 

Salamanca Centre of Contemporary Art, 

Spain, 1998, Camden Arts Centre, London. 

Her work is represented in many public 

collections including; Tate, The Victoria 

and Albert Museum, Government Art 

Collection, Potteries Museum, National 

Museums and Gallery of Wales; Museum 

of Modern Art, University of Iowa; Arts 

Council of Great Britain; Contemporary 

Art Society; Unilever plc; Penguin Books; 

Oldham Art Gallery, The New Art Gallery 

Walsall, The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, The 

Meijier Gardens, Grand Rapids USA and 

The Gateway Foundation, St. Louis, as well 

as numerous private collections. 

‘Pale Fat Ghosts’ 

jesmonite, steel, fabric, mixed media, 120 (H) x 60 (W) x 30 (D) cm 

37

David Kim Whittaker (b. 1964) 

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 he still resides. 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. 

‘Lockdown Portrait : The Lamb’ 

oil on acrylic on panel, 76 x 76 cm 

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Roger Thorp (b. 1955) 

Roger Thorp’s interest in the poetic 

use of word and image, to evoke a deep 

emotional response, are key to his creative 

process. His artworks are unapologetically 

infused with a nostalgic romanticism, 

transmitting an enormous sensitivity 

towards the earth, humanity and a universal 

inter-connectedness between matter and 

all living things. Primarily consisting of 

video work and multi-media installation, 

his work is informed by a deeply-felt 

belief that as a society, and as individuals, 

we need to come home, to remember a 

less rapacious and frenetic way of living, 

more connected on an emotional level 

to each other, and to the rest of the 

natural world. If his work offers up an 

urgent protest, it remains an optimistic and 

tender one. 

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. 

‘Tide of Love’ 

single channel video 

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Arthur Lanyon (b. 1985) 

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. His latest 

exhibition ‘Arcade Laundry’ opened 

in 2020. 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. 

‘Gordian Ghost’ 

mixed media on canvas, 160 x 120 cm 

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Evelyn Williams (1929-2012) 

Evelyn Williams was born in 1929 and died 

in 2012. Her tender, intimate and emotional 

paintings are concerned with the subtleties 

and complexities of relationships and the 

human predicament. Dealing with the 

intimate connection and profound solitude 

of existence, taking the viewer on a profound 

journey from womb to tomb. 

Williams trained at St Martin’s School of Art 

from the age of 15 and then the Royal College of 

Art working alongside the older, largely male 

students, many of them soldiers returning 

from service in the Second World War. 

Despite failing health she continued 

painting right up to her death at the age 

of 83. Williams proved difficult for some 

to categorise during her life time, but is 

regarded, along with friends such as Paula 

Rego, as having forged a path for female 

artists. She later founded a trust in her 

name which has done modest but important 

work to support artists, particularly women, 

and the practice of drawing. As Huon 

Mallalieu stated “Her work deserves to be as 

well-known as those of her fellow 1961 John 

Moores prize-winners, Blake, Blow, Hockney, 

Kitaj, Kossoff, McWilliam and Uglow.” 

‘Mother Singing I & 2’ 

oil on canvas, 36 x 46 cm each 

45

Carlos Zapata (b. 1963) 

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. 

‘Cede‘ 

polychromed carved wood, 37 (H) x 50 (L) x 31 (W) cm 

546

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Rebecca Harper (b. 1989) 

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. 

‘The Watch Tower’ 

acrylic on canvas, 180 x 150 cm 

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Andy Harper (b. 1971) 

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 longterm 

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. 

‘Want Mistaken For Need’ 

oil on linen, 30 x 25 cm 

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Shiri Mordechay (b. 1974) 

Shiri Mordechay’s extraordinary painted 

works have a cinematic quality, where 

expansive imagery seemingly passes 

through time and space, like fleeting scenes 

in a film or interconnected snippets of 

dream. Both 2D and 3D painted installation 

works are made piece by piece, where a 

narrative unfolds, like a trail of instinct. 

Imagery seems to arrive with fluidity, 

through the artist as conduit, moving 

within an unguarded realm, seemingly free 

of structured morality or logical confine, 

conjuring what Julia Kristeva calls an 

“oceanic feeling”. Mordechay’s form of 

ambiguous realism is revealed through an 

intuitive rendering of unmediated internal 

psychology or event, which through her 

translation offers up a wider metaphysical 

and perhaps spiritual context. She attains 

a preservation of the enigma of the 

unconscious, where constructed ego is 

eroded or absorbed into something more 

widely connected, not necessarily at one 

with beauty, yet seductive none the less, 

like a forbidden fruit promising to lure us 

towards darkness or light. As expressed by 

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mordechay paints an 

inner and outer world where nature is “red 

in tooth and claw”. Acclaimed American art 

critic Jerry Saltz wrote “Shiri Mordechay 

gives us a topsy-turvy world of mundane 

and mad images... It’s Charles Adams meets 

Edgar Allen Poe meets Animal Planet. 

Mordechay never allows us to look at any 

one thing; chaos and tumult reign.” 

Mordechay was born in Israel and raised 

in Nigeria. She received her BFA from 

the San Francisco Art Institute and an 

MFA from School of Visual Arts in New 

York, where she now lives and works. 

In 2013, he was named as one of “25 

Artists to Watch & Collect” by Artvoices 

Magazine. Solo exhibitions have occurred 

in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York 

and Italy. 

‘Untitled 1 & 2’ 

watercolour on paper, 25 x 20 cm each 

53

Barbara Neil (b. 1953) 

“I never paint with narrative in mind 

(although that may not be obvious). 

Developments in the painting occur along 

the way, through working, when it works, 

which it doesn’t always. Often I paint out 

and overpaint time and time again. I see 

the bottom of this painting as a defiance of 

death and when looked at from that position 

or perspective, I see the life - our human 

lives - taking place above the ground. There 

is the overground and the underground 

struggle in this one. Well, you’ve probably 

guessed I dislike interpreting my work… 

I mean, if words were going to be enough 

why would I paint it at all? My work is an 

attempt to snag the worm in me (thank you 

Herman Hesse), to delight my eyes and 

befuddle my brain. Clarity is a fearsome 

thing, hard to find, but worth seeking I 

think.” Barbara Neil, 2021. 

Barbara Neill was born in Sydney, Australia 

in 1953 and has spent most of her adult life 

living and working in relative obscurity in 

Barcelona, Spain. She describes herself as 

an art school dropout, university dropout 

and self taught. Anima Mundi are delighted 

to present her work in this exhibition. 

‘Cold‘ 


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Simon Hitchens (b. 1967) 

Simon Hitchens’ work explores the 

interconnectedness between the human 

and the non-human, as a means to 

learning about Mankind’s relationship with 

impermanence. The material backbone of 

his work is rock in its raw and natural 

state. This is not carved and polished 

but plucked from the rock face or quarry 

floor. He remains acutely aware of the 

historical significance that stone has as the 

prime material to make sculpture, and as 

a sculptor is challenged to make art that 

contributes to this debate. As a climber 

he maintains an intimate relationship with 

rock, and is acutely aware that geologically 

it is the very material that supports us upon 

the planet. In the age of the Anthropogenic 

it seems pertinent to question how we 

comprehend the geological and human 

worlds as united, interconnected even. 

Hitchens believes there is increasingly 

a disconnect between these two worlds. 

which is harmful not only to the planet but 

also our psyche. Consequently, rock is the 

conceptual focus of his work and typically 

the material backbone within it. His work 

questions differences between animate and 

inanimate, more specifically rock and flesh, 

mountain and body; exploring themes of 

transience and transcendence. He makes 

post-human hybrid forms that negotiate a 

numinous space somewhere between rock 

and flesh: a line of inquiry into the nature 

of being. 

Simon Hitchens graduated in Fine Art 

from the University of the West of England 

in 1990 and his work has been exhibited 

around the world since then. He frequently 

exhibits in solo and group exhibitions, 

undertaking private commissions and 

numerous largescale public commissions. 

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society 

of Sculptors in 1998, is an RWA Academician 

and is the fourth generation of artists in 

his family. 

‘More Than Human’ 

rock, wax, resin, , 25 (H) x 34 (W) x 38 (D) cm 

57

Gabriel Tendai Choto (b. 1995) 

Gabriel Tendai Choto’s artwork combines 

the twin disciplines of printmaking and 

painting. Through his singular technique 

Choto seeks new pathways into the painted 

image by taking cues from the surface quality 

produced by the printmaking process. His 

evolving, experimental practice involves 

layering painted areas of naturalism over 

the delicate compositional architecture 

of etching, resulting in paintings where 

physical presence and absence imply a 

metaphoric liminal state. Sensitive and 

intimate, these images include close family 

members, depicting quiet moments of 

contemplation or affectionate domestic 

scenes taken from old photographs, 

increasingly progressing in to self portraits 

where through constructed situations the 

artist examines his own identity. Choto’s 

intimate paintings draw on themes of 

home, pride, identity diaspora, change 

and personal as well as cultural fragility. 

Choto was born in 1995 in Harare, Zimbabwe. 

He was raised in Bradford, Yorkshire and 

currently lives and works in London. After 

completing his Diploma in Art and Design 

at Leeds Arts University in 2012, Choto 

gained a BAFA in Drawing from Camberwell 

College of Art (UAL), London, in 2014 

and more recently has completed an MFA 

at Central St Martins, London. Selected 

group exhibitions include FBA Futures, 

Mall Galleries, London, UK (2018); Flock, 

GX Gallery, London, UK (2017); Blxckout 

Revolution: The Exhibition, 198 Gallery, 

London, UK (2017); BAME, Hotel Elephant 

Gallery, London, UK (2016); and Long Live 

the New Flesh, Tower Gallery, London, UK 

(2015). In 2018, Choto was selected for the 

Clyde & Co Art Award. Choto’s debut solo 

exhibition at Anima Mundi featured in 2021 

and most recently he has been personally 

invited by Yinka Shonibare to submit for 

the 2021 RA Summer Exhibition. 

‘Desolate’ 

oil on paper, 73 x 48 cm 

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Kate Clark (b. 1972) 

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. 

‘Twins’ 

pronghorn & blesbok antelope, foam, clay, thread, pins, rubber eyes, 

91 (H) x 66 (W) x 30 (D) cm 

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John Robinson (b. 1981) 

John Robinson’s technical prowess could be 

seen to be shared with the great pantheon 

of masters of the 17th and 18th centuries 

including artists such as Diego Velazquez 

and Francisco Goya with a developing 

unguarded focus on self portraiture adopted 

by the likes of Rembrandt Van Rijn or more 

recently Frida Kahlo. However Robinson’s 

figurative works offer a contemporary 

subversion of the rich tradition of self 

portraiture. Somber protagonists dominate 

the canvas, usually presented in theatrical 

situations which barely mask a more 

prosaic ‘kitchen sink’ vulnerability. They 

are often simultaneously absurdly comic 

and psychologically revealing. Robinson’s 

process often involves private performance, 

where his actions are then exquisitely 

rendered, in oil on canvas. For Robinson 

these paintings embrace personal concern, 

disclosure and catharsis, for the voyeur 

the experience appears both elaborately 

grandiose and awkwardly revealing. 

Robinson was born in Worcester, UK where 

he still resides. He studied Fine Art at 

Falmouth College of Arts, spending most 

of the time whilst there skipping tutorials 

to travel to Plymouth to be taught by the 

notorious and idiosyncratic painter Robert 

Lenkiewicz. Robinson was awarded the 

Richard Ford Scholarship by the Royal 

Academy of Arts and spent a summer as 

artist in residence at the Prado Museum 

Madrid absorbing the works of Velazquez 

and Goya. He stayed in Madrid for a 

further decade broken by a year at Central 

Saint Martins on a Masters degree in fine 

art. He later developed his duel use of 

‘the painting’ as revelation and disguise; 

‘self portrait as (other…)’. Robinson has 

exhibited internationally. He has won 

the Peter Spicer Award for Excellence 

in Creative Arts (First Place), Richard 

Ford Award for Painting, Royal Academy, 

London (First Place), South Square Trust 

Scholarship for MA study at Byam Shaw 

school of Art, Central Saint Martins, 

London, Alfa Romeo Award Art (‘Best of 

show nominee’) Madrid, Spain, Premio 

de Pintura Focus-Abengoa, Seville, Spain 

(Winner) and the Hauser and Wirth Prize, 

Hauser and Wirth Somerset UK, (First 

Prize). Works are held in notable collections 

including University of the Arts London 

permanent collection, London, UK, Nicolas 

& Maxinne Leslau collection, London, 

UK, Focus-Abengoa Foundation, Seville, 

Spain, Coldwell Banker, Madrid, Spain, 

Falmouth College of Arts Library, Falmouth 

UK, Museo del Ferrocarril, Madrid, Spain, 

Stedlijk Museum Amsterdam Netherlands, 

Wellcome Collection London UK, British 

Council Collection UK. 

‘I’m Doing Much Better Now’ 


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Henry Hussey (b. 1990) 

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 quasimythological 

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. 

‘Vessel (Anima Animus)’ 

terracotta & endgobe, 22 (H) x 20 (W) x 11 (D) cm 

65

Phoebe Cummings (b. 1981) 

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. Cummings 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. 

‘Triumph of the Immaterial’ 

single channel video 

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Roy Eastland (b. 1964) 

“‘Displaced Portrait (Woman from Brünn, 

1942)’ is one of an ongoing series of 

silverpoint drawings based on portrait 

photographs taken mostly in the 1930s and 

1940s, which have found their way into 

my hands via a second-hand shop in my 

home town of Margate. My drawings are 

a kind of meditation on these displaced 

traces of lived moments. This particular 

drawing is of a woman who, judging from 

the hand-writing on the back of the source 

photograph, was a German-speaker living 

in Brünn (now Brno) in 1942 in what is 

now the Czech Republic. At the end of the 

war the ethnically German population was 

expelled. The piece has been repeatedly 

drawn onto with points of silver wire, 

drawn into with needles, and scratchedaway 

with scalpel blades and sandpaper. 

The image goes through a continual process 

of repeated loss and re-finding. With each 

re-working, certain details change; but 

always the repeated point of reference is 

the original photographic image. Whatever 

it is that I’m trying to see seems always to 

be elusive. Each re-working points to the 

same thing but each re-working is also a 

different drawing adding something new. 

I draw in the hope of catching sight of 

something which I could not have foreseen 

but which feels somehow true. These 

drawings are worked on over the course of 

many months and often years. Some never 

reach an end-point. Hand-made drawings 

remind us that there is always another way 

of seeing and that there is always another 

way to mark those moments of recognition. 

I wonder who it is that I have drawn here.” - 

Roy Eastland 2021 

Roy Eastland lives and works in Thanet, 

Kent. He graduated from Edinburgh College 

of Art in 1996. Works have been exhibited 

in numerous solo and group exhibition 

including the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing 

Prize, The Jerwood Drawing Prize (on 

three occasions), The ING Discerning Eye 

Drawing Bursary, The Zoo Art Fair, Miami 

Art Fair, The London Art Fair, The BP 

Portrait Award, The British Art Fair, The 

Hunting Art Prizes, Margate Rocks, the 

Turner Contemporary Open, among others. 

‘Displaced Portrait (Woman from Brünn, 1942)’ 

silverpoint drawing on gesso on board, 21 x 15 cm 

69

Youki Hirakawa (b. 1983) 

‘Untitled (Teardrops)’ is a video by Youki 

Hirakawa documenting a fallen tear drop 

on an iPhone. As time passes it shows 

the different phases of shape of tear as it 

dries. Through his still and installationbased 

video artwork, Hirakawa explores 

a mysterious and immeasurable sense of 

time, loss and longing. His monochromatic 

imagery is imbued with a melancholic 

quality, reconnecting a fragile past with 

a vivid present casting questions over 

the future. He creates a form of videopoetry 

which summons the voice of the 

lost. Hirakawa constructs his artworks as 

if to reveal hidden memories or narratives 

contained within the subject, resuscitating 

sensibilities that may have since been 

obscured, primarily through progressive 

human activity. 

Hirakawa is a Japanese contemporary artist 

born in Nagoya, Japan in 1983. He currently 

lives and works in Toyota, Japan, following 

a long residency in Berlin, Germany. 

He was invited to show at the ‘48th 

International Film Festival Rotterdam’ and 

‘65th International Short Film Festival 

Oberhausen’ in 2019 and has held solo 

exhibitions internationally, including Ando 

Gallery, Tokyo, Double Square Gallery, 

Taipei, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 

Kunstkraftwerk, Leipzig, Minokamo City 

Museum, Japan. Hirakawa has also been 

invited to exhibit in international art festivals 

including Digital Art Festival Taipei 2017, 

International Contemporary Art Festival 

Kaunas in 2016, Sapporo International Art 

Festival 2014 and Aichi Triennale 2013. His 

inaugural solo exhibition ‘Secret Fire’ at 

Anima Mundi was held in 2016 and his follow 

up ‘A River Under Water’ in 2018. In 2017 he 

was finalist of Sovereign Asian Art Prize. 

Works are held in numerous public and 

private collections. 

‘Untitled (Tears)’ 

single channel video (12 min, 30 sec / 4K / silent) 

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Sax Impey (b. 1969) 

Sax Impey’s paintings and drawings 

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 nautical miles around the world. These 

extensive trips 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 some 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 is a British artist 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 the creation of 

site-specific installations including a multi 

media performance at Trafalgar Square, 

London and Birling Gap in Sussex. 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, the Connaught Hotel 

and the collections of Roman Abramovich 

and Lady Victoria Getty alongside other 

private collections worldwide. 

‘Squall Study 1’ 

mixed media on paper, 30 x 60 cm 

73

‘Squall Study 1’ 

mixed media on paper, 30 x 60 cm 

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Andrew Hardwick (b. 1961) 

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. 

‘Estuary, Dark Sea and Iceberg’ 

mixed media on panel, 90 x 155 cm 

77

Peter Randall-Page (b .1954) 

During the past 25 years Peter Randall- 

Page has gained an international reputation 

through his monumental sculpture, drawings 

and prints which deal with the fundamental 

nature of existence. His practice remains 

informed and inspired by the study of natural 

phenomena and its subjective impact on 

our emotions. In recent years his work has 

become increasingly concerned with the 

underlying principles determining growth and 

the forms it produces. In his words “geometry 

is the theme on which nature plays her 

infinite variations, fundamental mathematical 

principle become a kind of pattern book from 

which nature constructs the most complex 

and sophisticated structures. 

Peter Randall-Page is a British artist born 

in Essex, England in 1954. He currently lives 

and works in Devon. Randall-Page studied 

sculpture at Bath Academy of Art from 1973- 

1977. In 1999, he was awarded an Honorary 

Doctorate of Arts from the University of 

Plymouth, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters 

from York St John University in 2009 and an 

Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Exeter 

University in 2010; from 2002 to 2005 he was 

an Associate Research Fellow at Dartington 

College of Arts. In 2015 he was made a Royal 

Academician. Recent commissions include 

‘Give and Take’ in Newcastle which won the 

2006 Marsh Award for Public Sculpture, 

‘Mind’s Eye’ a large ceramic wall mounted 

piece for the Department of Psychology at 

Cardiff University (2006) and a commemorative 

sculpture for a Mohegan Chief at Southwark 

Cathedral (2006). Recent projects include 

‘Green Fuse’ for the Jerwood Sculpture Park, 

Ragley Hall and a major one person exhibition 

in and around the Underground Gallery at the 

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, June 2009 - April 

2010. In 2015 he unveiled ‘The One and The 

Many’ at Fitzroy place London, An 25 tonne 

boulder inscribes with origin stories from 

around the world in native dialect. Over the 

years he has undertaken numerous large scale 

commissions and exhibited widely across 

the globe. His work is held in numerous 

public and private collections throughout 

the world including Japan, South Korea, 

Australia, USA, Turkey, Eire, Germany and 

the Netherlands. A selection of his public 

sculptures can be found in many urban and 

rural locations throughout the UK including 

London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, 

Oxford and Cambridge and his work is in 

the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery 

and the British Museum amongst others. As a 

member of the design team for the Education 

Resource Centre (The Core) at the Eden 

Project in Cornwall, Peter influenced the 

overall design of the building incorporating 

an enormous granite sculpture, ‘Seed’, at 

its heart. 

‘Stone Maquette’ 

carved pebble, 15.5 (H) x 41 (W) x 19 (D) cm 

78

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Paul Benney (b. 1959) 

The semiotics of public and religious signage : 

“My specific interest in religious painting 

from the renaissance up until the withering 

of church patronage is concomitant with my 

interest in the symbolism of our age. The 

dominant symbology of this past was firmly 

set within the Church’s iconography. The 

stories told to us from that time through their 

imagery were presented with an aim to guide 

us towards a universally desired and morally 

respectable life. The dominant symbology 

of our age (if you consider the acreage of 

signage in our modern landscape) is quite 

literally overwhelming, but mostly overlooked 

in its ubiquity. With the decline in acceptance 

of convincing moral and ethical guidance 

from religious bodies we have allowed other 

authorities to fill the vacuum. The current 

proliferation of symbolic signage would not, I 

suggest, be understood by an ancestor as the 

iconography of socially benign guidance but 

evidence of a universal adherence to a cult 

centred on the car, transport and health and 

safety in the urban environment that has been 

foisted upon us by a omnipotent force that 

sees itself as responsible for our apparent well 

being, in much the same way that the clergy felt 

responsible for us in the days of the church’s 

hegemony. I aim to show the underlying 

connections and intentions between these 

different forms of iconography and hope to 

open up some discussion about how we allow 

ourselves to be manipulated and ‘guided’ 

by the powers that be.” - Paul Benney, 2021 

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. 

‘Pieta’ 


81

Jonathan Michael Ray (b. 1984) 

Jonathan Michael Ray’s ‘mono no aware’ 

artworks examine the multilayered 

histories, fictions and beliefs assigned 

to artefacts, materials and the places he 

encounters. A practice comprising of 

stained glass, photography, sculpture, 

print, drawing, video and installation, 

much of his work is deeply connected to 

his surroundings. He regularly uses found 

objects and images imbued with their 

own histories, as well as material direct 

from the landscape, appropriating their 

symbolism while creating a new context 

and meaning. By layering and combining 

material, he is interested in looking beyond 

the surface of a purely physical existence 

and breaking down the institutions by 

which we are taught to see and experience 

the world. His work alludes to the sublime 

power that inanimate material and objects 

can contain when we give them space, time 

and authority to do so. 

Jonathan Michael Ray was born in High 

Wycombe, UK and has been based in 

West Cornwall since 2018. He studied at 

Nottingham Trent in 2007 and at Slade 

School of Fine Art in 2016. Earlier this year 

Ray was selected to take part in Masterclass 

at Zabludowicz Collection, London, he 

and Verity Birt organised “Gathering” a 

group exhibition at Grays Wharf, Penryn, 

and has been shortlisted for the National 

Sculpture Prize which is currently on show 

at Broomhill Estate in Devon. His work will 

be subject of a two person presentation 

with Willeminha Barnes Graham at Tate St 

Ives in 2022. 

‘Holy Reunion’ 

reclaimed antique stained glass, lead, oak and steel, 116 x 71 cm 

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Simon Averill (b. 1961) 

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. 

‘Entanglements’ 

acrylic on panel, 40 x 80 cm 

85

Luke Hannam (b. 1966) 

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. 

‘The End’ 

acrylic on unprimed canvas, 330 x 230 cm 

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“Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. 

For to go on means going from here, means finding me, 

losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger 

first, then little by little the same as always, in another 

place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I 

shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, 

thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite 

of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just 

enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, 

the same which seems made for me and does not want 

me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your 

choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never 

know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant 

skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for 

tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, 

my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old 

stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.” 

Samuel Beckett,‘The Unnamable’, 1953 

89

Published by Anima Mundi to coincide with ‘Thresholds (The Unnamed)’ 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or 

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Anima Mundi . Street-an-Pol . St. Ives . Cornwall . +44 (0)1736 793121 . mail@animamundigallery.com . www.animamundigallery.com

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Thresholds (The Unnamed)

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