Conversations: Dialogue in Motion

Contemporary art exhibition “CONVERSATIONS: Dialogue in Motion” will present a selection of work by 4 artists, Shirley-Ann Galbraith, Christine Parsons, Rupert Whale and Philip Williams.

The exhibition will explore dialogues, commonalities and differences between diverse pieces executed in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, ceramics, textiles, and sculptural work.

Shirley-Ann Galbraith

Shirley-Ann is a Kent based contemporary pluralistic artist using a wide variety of techniques and materials, though her main relationship is now with painting, drawing and asemic writing. She uses these materials to process, record and investigate storytelling, relationships, communication and the shifting boundaries between image, object and language. Ultimately, her work seeks not to illustrate relationships, but to stage them.

Her recent work focuses on semi-abstract paintings of vessel; vases, containers, domestic form, with the flora or fruit symbolising the holding of ‘temporary’.

Shirley-Ann has worked in several curatorial roles and for projects involving investigations into psychoanalysis and art. She graduated from Central Saint Martins, London in 2016 and her work was selected for the Clyde & Co Art Award, London. She has exhibited throughout the U.K.

Instagram: @shirleyanngalbraith

Christine Parsons

Christine has a multi-disciplinary practice including working with ceramics, textiles, photography and film.

Christine is showing work that explores the intimate relationship between body, identity, and transformation. The pieces examine how the body is shaped, constrained, and ultimately redefined through external influences.    Ceramic vessels are pushed into the sculptural realm, where they transcend their functional origins.   The act of manipulating and altering these forms echoes the ongoing negotiation between self and body, between the structures that define us and the fluidity of our identities.   Each piece becomes a vessel for questioning body image and the ways in which form can be both protective and vulnerable.

Chrstine also explores memory, language, and the rhythm of daily life through repetitive stitch and textile embroidery.  Each piece incorporates collected snatches of overheard conversations—fragments of the everyday—transformed into thread.  The act of stitching becomes both meditative and archival, preserving ephemeral words in a tactile, enduring form.

Instagram: @christinewparsons

Rupert Whale

Rupert Whale is a painter and printmaker living in London. He studied fine art at Exeter College of Art in the 1970s and, after a teaching career in schools, completed an MA at Central Saint Martins in 2017. He is currently studying for a practice-based prof/doc at the University of East London.

His work is held in private and public collections, including those of the University of the Arts London and Campari (Italy), and has been shown at Sichuan University (China) and in Berlin. He won the Art Gemini painting prize in 2021. He has been represented by Brook Street Gallery at the Affordable Art Fair and the Original Print Fair in London, and supports the Stone Space Gallery in East London.

Rupert’s painting has evolved over the years from figurative to abstract, and from oil to acrylic. Usually made in series, his paintings are layered, often featuring gestural brush marks, dragged paint counter to lines drawn in charcoal or marker, and flat areas of colour. They arise from thinking about how we perceive place and time, and the role chance plays in our lives.

Instagram:       @rupertwhale
Website:          www.rupertwhale.com

Philip Williams

Philip Williams is a painter, sculptor and printmaker working in London. Philip graduated from Central St. Martins art school, London in 2016.   He is the winner of the Hollyport Prize (for graduating artists) and has been shortlisted for the Clyde & Co award and Wells Art Contemporary Award. His work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in London, elsewhere in the UK and overseas. His work is held in collections in the UK, Europe, China and USA.

Philip will be exhibiting a selection of paintings, prints and objects.   Philip’s work interprets widely recognisable artistic imagery to present a refreshing, often child-like, take on these visual tropes.    Combining a variety of painting conventions and sculptural modelling techniques his works offer a lively re-imagining of familiar artistic traditions.   The paintings exhibited here reference the 17th Century Dutch still life and flower painting genre.   His 3D pieces are designed to inhabit the space between plaything and non- functional object.

Instagram: @philipmwilliams
Website: www.philipwilliamsart.com