Workplace is delighted to announce that Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster will present a two-person exhibition at Baltic in April 2025. 

Remember, Somewhere brings together a major body of works by painters Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster. This is the first institutional presentation of Hartlepool-born sisters’ paintings displayed together and invites an exploration of their unique approaches to painting, through the commonality of their source material.

Laura’s paintings are inspired by found photographs, slides, and cine films of strangers, sourced from online auction sites, flea markets, and junk shops. Through gestural, expressive paint application, she transforms these discarded memories into works that balance abstraction and figuration which elevate the mundane into fragmented, surreal and melancholic visions. Laura’s process-oriented practice creates an ongoing dialogue between painting and photography, emphasising the tension between the physical reality of paint and the images it brings to life.

In contrast, Rachel paints fragments of cinematic imagery, often cropped from stills of 1980s and 1990s films. Focusing on intimate details, such as the nape of a neck or an arm resting on a cardigan, she creates a heightened sense of intimacy through the interplay of light, fabric, skin, hair, and pattern. In her new series of large-scale works, Rachel expands this exploration, merging sensuousness with monumentality, rendering these fragments both descriptive and abstract, suspenseful, and open-ended. Her strategic use of ambiguity creates resonant pauses, allowing emotional undercurrents to surface and find resolution. Through this, she reveals the uncanny beauty and quiet spectacle that exists beyond the action.

Remember, Somewhere spotlights the distinct yet interconnected styles of both artists, encouraging a deeper reflection on the formal language of painting. The exhibition is an exploration of the everyday and the overlooked. It creates an uncanny sense of familiarity by evoking personal memory and collective consciousness, conjuring a moment suspended in time for all who visit.

A painting by Laura Lancaster of a figure stoof in a body of water next to a red canoe

Remember, Somewhere

Workplace is pleased to present Cold Enough For Snow, a group exhibition of six UK and international artists.

Cold Enough For Snow explores the spaces between personal and collective experiences, memory and perception. Presenting new work by Remi Ajani, Jesse Akele, Kristy M Chan, Nada Elkalaawy, Marta Ravasi and Boo Saville, the exhibition will investigate the shifting boundaries that define personal and collective narratives, history, and human experience.

Remi Ajani’s intimate paintings are site where collective and personal experiences collide. Her compositions are drawn from found imagery from her family archives which she utilises to explore a wide range of ideas from the tangible; body language and touch; to more abstract ideas such as the nature of observation and how memory is inextricably linked to complex emotional states. Spontaneous gestures sit alongside slower layered applications of paint which hold the works in a hushed tension, the images slowly revealing themselves whilst hovering on the cusp of collapse.

Similarly, Jesse Akele’s work explores the intersections of identity and lived experience, drawing on the energies of family, friends, and everyday encounters. Through fluid abstraction and fragmented figuration, she seeks a deeper understanding of self, others, and the spaces they inhabit. With a practice rooted in storytelling, Akele’s work reflects how individuals are shaped by their environments, often unconsciously. She is particularly drawn to the intangible imprints of place, memory, and relationship, using painting to give form to these invisible yet enduring connections. 

Kristy M Chan’s expansive, gestural canvases are richly layered meditations on the human experience. Through thick, vigorous brushstrokes and intersecting curves, her use of light and shadow maps her exploration of the complexities of "homeland" while navigating diverse cultural landscapes. Her lively use of oil paints — intuitively manipulated, layered, and rearticulated over months, recalls the spirit of Abstract Expressionism and the global diaspora experience.

Nada Elkalaawy’s paintings weave together images sourced from art historical objects, her own photographs, and those found online, Elkalaawy is concerned with histories and memory, particularly their implications on personal narratives. Her recent work focuses on closely cropped depictions of tableware including tureens and porcelain vessels often found in Middles Eastern homes. One element of these objects that Elkalaawy is intrigued by is their hollowness - a feature required in their production for firing in a kiln but also inherent in their form as items for display rather than utilised as traditional receptacles. By translating these domestic objects onto canvas, she reimagines their hollow forms as repositories for emotions, memories, and narratives. Pentimento are also visible in her works, in particular in An Arrangement which features traces of earlier images that act like ghosts or phantoms, imbuing the work with an eerie and ephemeral quality that lead to the work constantly negotiating between the past and present.

Marta Ravasi’s diminutive works continue a long tradition of art historical still lives. Rather than painted from life, Ravasi’s works are coalesced from a range of disparate imagery from her own photographs, to images discovered from scouring the internet. Printed out and stored in her studio the images take on a new life, acquiring marks, traces, and imperfections from their environment and the passage of time. These subtle material changes make their way into the weave of her canvases further complicating the reading and provenance of the imagery. Many of her subjects are explored in different ways over time with subtle changes in brushwork and colour, or slight shifts in perspective pushing the limits of the painting and allowing them to shift and evolve.

Boo Saville presents works from both sides of her multifaceted painting practice. Her abstract colour field work utilises multiple layers of oil paint to create an array of optical effects, with her contemplative and meditative painting process echoing the perceptual experience of the viewer. Recently the titles from this body of work are drawn exclusively from female names, Saville’s direct experience of the colours prompting experiences and relationships of friends and family. In contrast, Saville adopts a non-narrative approach to figurative painting, using found imagery as metaphor. Often rendered in a monochromatic palette and sourced from online materials, these works emerge as reflections on thoughts that surface during the abstract painting process. Her work investigates the phenomenology of memory and perception, questioning both our collective and personal histories.

A painting by Marta Ravasi of a bowl of peaches 

Cold Enough For Snow

Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present Pictures of You,  curated by Miles Thurlow, Co-founder of WORKPLACE.

The exhibition brings together 16 international and multigenerational artists, whose of images, objects and actions evoke specific, often fleeting, moments whilst simultaneously revealing incisive reflections on time, memory and social structures. 

’s large-scale installation Rage Fluids weaves through Pictures of You both physically and sonically, with huge sheets of curved metal and car wrap activated by the rumbling sound and vibrational energy of car stereo subwoofers. Similarly influenced by the industrial context of the North of England, 

 references his father’s work as a tailor and childhood memories of playing dress-up in Pop Pose, rupturing the fashion industry’s veneer of cool. 

 presents iconic modernist chairs – Gerrit Rietveld’s crate chair, Marcel Breuer’s Wassily B3 – overturned and covered in a marble ‘snow’, teasing out a web of issues around class, aspiration, manufacturing, and taste.

Drawing upon a rich archive of anonymous analogue photographs, 

 transforms deeply personal memories into shimmering, impressionistic images that transcend their source material and tap into a broader collective memory. 

’s small, intimate paintings explore the interpersonal dynamics of familial relationships and friendships, as well as her interiority and reflections on quotidian life. 

’s exuberant, expressive paintings capture heightened moments of anxiety and melodrama. Upturned legs in pond suggest a disastrous event, but light handling of paint and a pastel palette give the subject a lightness of touch and disarming gentleness.

’s tactile paintings give abstract forms to queer erotic encounters. Bodily fluids and bodily contact are insinuated through glittering, polychromatic surfaces, sprayed and hand-smeared paint, and distorted, suggestive forms. 

’s paintings were guided by a belief in the primacy of feeling. Taking on the guise of objective minimalism and the monochrome, he presented us with so much more: nature as something real, tangible, all around us, to be touched and felt. 

 captures her friend and collaborator, the Irish artist/filmmaker Vivienne Dick, in a moment of cosmic wonder on an isolated beach, then turns the lens outwards to a lavender-infused, psychedelic vision of the Donegal coast. 

’s paintings depict vernacular architecture, riverside views, post-industrial landscapes and moments of intimacy. His paintings of isolated buildings invited us to ruminate on distance and connection.

’s 1969 video piece Lemon gives a close study of a single citrus fruit, its devotional gaze drawing out the fruit’s bodily and sculptural qualities, and transforming a humble everyday object into something meditative and profound. 

’s small-scale, intimate portraits have the feel of a small shrine or devotional object. Closely cropped to frame their subjects’ faces, each work captures a vulnerability and sense of deep connection between artist and sitter. 

’s photographs deromanticise the popularly sentimental and yet their sensitivity to light, framing and texture give them a cinematic quality. Responding to the increasingly dematerialised nature of contemporary image making, Cunnane remains connected to the physicality of the production process, printing his photographs by hand in a darkroom.

’s luminous paintings give cinematic depictions of mostly female subjects, building colour and depth using meticulous Renaissance techniques. 

 painstakingly creates digital environments using 3D graphics software, which then become the source material for his otherworldly paintings. Referencing Northern European still life paintings and using traditional techniques, they nevertheless include the glitches, ruptures and defamiliarised atmosphere of their digital origins. 

 treats the eternally-intriguing subject of the human form is treated with delicacy and attentiveness. Using casein tempera, an ancient form of paint derived from milk, his paintings offer a deliberate ‘slowing down’ of image-making.

Installation view of 'Pictures Of You' - curated by Miles Thurlow, at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Pictures of You

Workplace is pleased to launch the latest instalment of Focus, a series of online exhibitions in the which the practice of artists at early stages of their career and new to the gallery programme are introduced through a body of work, curated specifically for each presentation.

For this Focus we introduce the work of Zoe Spowage a Leeds-based visual artist and Falmouth University graduate, working in large-scale painting and drawing with dye, acrylic, and pastel. Her bold, expressive works explore themes of femininity, threat, and humour, influenced by her background as a scenic artist 

WG: Alongside your practice you worked for many years as a scenic artist. How do you think this has influenced your own work?

ZS: Working as a scenic artist inspired me so much with the physicality of making, scale and materials but I think the deepest effect is thinking-on my audience, I want to be generous, to give something with drama and theatre. I see them as ‘along for the ride’ and as ‘up for a show’. I am performing for them. 

WG: Most of your paintings exclusively feature women in poses of strength, vulnerability and rest. Can you talk more about this?

ZS:In Hazelnut I’m raging, snarling like my Dad, this face is modelled on his. As a new parent, these states cycle through my day to day, and keep me moving, tripping and flying forwards. Lord give me strength, vulnerable like an overturned turtle, and I think it’s my turn to rest. 

WG: There’s often a wry humour present in your works. Is this an important element in their construction?

ZS: Humour is a natural lubricant, for your abrasive thoughts, to aid connection with other people. Highlighting the absurdity of a situation helps to tell the story of the thing. Once you know the story, you have perspective. It’s a process of simplification, or just a way to take pleasure.

WG: In this new body of work you’ve utilised a really vivid and saturated colour palette as well as incorporated very gestural marks with pastels that interrupt the confident and illustrative lines demarcating the figures. Can you talk more about this new direction in these paintings?

ZS: I see this work as part 2, the post-birth offering of a body of work. Part 1 (in Utero) being ‘Pet’ which was springy and sparse. Part 2 (in World) is electric and forgiving. 

WG: You tend to work on a large scale with the figures depicted appear in life-size or even larger. Do you want the paintings to feel monumental in how they command a space?

ZS: This is a neutral scale for me, it’s hard to say why. But I truly find it hard to shift smaller, or larger. Yes, I love how they command the space, it’s like drawing a room-full. 

WG: Are your compositions based on your specific imagery, memory or something else?

ZS: I draw indiscriminately, I can be very repetitive or dismissive but try to keep it as a pleasure-seeking activity. Shapes and colours can have little barbs that get snagged on me, until they germinate. 

A detail of a painting by Zoe Spowage of a naked woman holding two blue forms under her arms

Focus

Workplace is pleased to present A New Path, the first UK solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based painter Cathleen Clarke.

Exhibited through midsummer, the show brings together a new body of work that looks back to the Midwestern winters of Clarke’s childhood. Isolated figures surface from vast immersive landscapes of glowing, hallucinogenic colour, holding the viewer between observation and recollection.

Clarke’s paintings are shaped by a preoccupation with the fragmented nature of memory, in particular how certain fleeting moments can imprint themselves vividly in the mind, whilst others recede into obscurity. Her intuitive and spontaneous approach echoes this process, with forms concurrently emerging from and retreating into the pictorial plane with equal intensity. Her ethereal subjects appear faintly remembered, held together by the slippery materiality of the oil paint.

In these quiet crepuscular scenes the everyday sits alongside the surreal; A lone figure shovelling snow or the fleeting impression of a snow angel are counterpointed with a face mysteriously hovering in the flickering green glow of the aurora borealis. Presenting these vignettes together casts the ordinary in an otherworldly light.

Clarke’s work is presented alongside a newly commissioned text by New York based writer Alja Zoe Freier.

Workplace is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn based artist Cathleen Clarke.

A New Path

Workplace is pleased to launch the latest instalment of Focus, a series of online exhibitions presenting new work curated specifically for each presentation.

For this Focus we present the work of Joseph Jones (b.1985, London, UK), a Sussex, based artist who completed his MA at the Royal College of Art in 2010. Jones produces detailed paintings of cats and flowers that explore sensitive notions of care, compassion and nurture. 

On the occasion of the exhibition Harriet Lloyd-Smith, journalist, artist and managing editor of Plaster sits down with Joseph Jones to discuss his new body of work. Their wide ranging conversation touches upon ideas of value, indexicality,  animal portraiture. 

 When we met, we bonded quickly over the fact that we both paint cats. You don’t actually meet many people in the art world who do—and certainly not as captivatingly as you do. I think we all remember our first. Tell me about the first cat you painted.

 That’s a good question. The first cat I painted was our family cat, Pebbles. I was probably five or six years old. As I got older, I became more interested in pictures of cats I found in books at school—all kinds of cats: tigers, lions, leopards.

There’s a very long history of domestic animal portraiture. Some examples are beautiful, while others—particularly from the medieval period—border on satire. I think there needs to be some level of obsession to immortalise anything in paint. Why cats for you? Is it their form, their demeanour, their symbolism?

I suppose it’s primarily their form and demeanour. But also the strange blend of familiarity and unfamiliarity. You never really know what cats are thinking—they don’t give much away.

My real fascination lies in how we connect with cats emotionally and culturally, especially in an era where we can choose to be constantly surrounded by them, both in reality and virtually.

I’m sent lots of images of cats and flowers—by friends and by people I’ve never met.

Many of the images might be seen as overly sentimental or a bit kitsch, but they can also be seen as traces of care and attention. These are the kinds of images people take and share every day, and that says something deeply human. I’ve built up a massive archive—probably 40 or 50 thousand images I’ve collected over the years from all sorts of places: social media, newspapers, books, forums… I’m constantly digging through it. It’s a bit chaotic, but I like that.

Are they specific subjects or are they a composite of sources? 

It’s usually a mix. I rarely paint from a single photo. Instead, I build composite images—taking elements from different sources and piecing them together. So while the subjects are real, the final paintings exist in this slightly in-between space.

In recent exhibitions at Workplace in London and Ehrlich Steinberg in L.A., I’ve aimed for the paintings to feel familiar but not specific—something like a dream or a memory. I’m interested in the tension between reality and imagination, between the personal and the universal.

Images of both flowers and cats are entrenched in the history of painting and are also omnipresent online. How do you handle this tension between old and new, and manage to capture something extraordinary amid the overwhelming ubiquity of these subjects?

I’ve been lecturing in art history and philosophy for the past 15 years, with a particular interest in images. That way of thinking naturally influences how I approach painting. One concept I return to often is indexicality—the idea that an image can both reveal and obscure what it represents. So, even though these are paintings of cats or flowers, they’re also meditations on looking—on caring about something enough to try to preserve it in an image.

You work on a small scale, but the detail in your paintings is meticulous. There’s a weight to their forms and a majesty in the use of light that feels beyond photorealism—more like spiritual realism, if that can apply to felines. How long does each painting take? Are there specific techniques you use to achieve this effect?

Yes, I tend to work small and very precisely. I think that scale encourages people to slow down and really look. I spend a lot of time getting the composition and scale right—it’s probably what takes me the longest. Sometimes I’ll include something subtle that throws off the eye slightly or adds another layer of meaning or illusion.

It’s hard to say exactly how long each painting takes—probably about a week, allowing for drying time between layers. I paint on thick linen, which I prime with clear acrylic so the weave stays visible. That texture is important—it prevents the image from becoming too slick or photographic. I also sand the surface in stages, which gives the work a kind of print-like quality. There’s always a push and pull between the detail in the painting and the flatness of the surface.

Your other muses are flowers. Like the cats, you paint them in isolation, allowing us to spend time with each one. Tell me why you keep returning to flowers.

Yes, I’ve always painted flowers—probably even more than cats. Like cats, I think there’s a kind of quiet compassion or care in images of flowers. They can also act as a way of thinking about how we live in the natural world now—how we stop time. In a way, images of cats and flowers reflect our relationship to the world around us.

So while the flower paintings might appear soft or delicate, they’re also asking questions about how we see, and what we value.

Focus: Joseph Jones runs through London Gallery Weekend

A detail of a painting by Joseph Jones of a white cat

 a solo exhibition of new paintings by London based artist Ki Yoong.

This new body of work by Yoong becomes an act of devotion, a slow attentive process that both honours and abstracts the subject. Yoong’s paintings are marked by a quiet tenderness, underscored by his distinctive used of tightly cropped compositions. This approach becomes a deeply personal gesture which acts to focus the gaze whilst suggesting intimacy and connection. The removal of visual information also opens space for projection, inviting the viewer to bring their own associations and memories into the process of looking.

What I want to explore isn’t necessarily the individual at all, but a shape, a feeling — something familiar that reaches beyond identity. We’re wired to recognise faces, even where there are none: in clouds, in rocks, in buildings. And that instinct works in reverse too. When I look at a portrait, I find myself noticing what else it brings to mind — a line, a curve, a shadow that feels like something I’ve seen or felt before. A jaw might echo the bend of a river. A cheekbone might mirror the slope of a hill.

It’s these small echoes that I find compelling. They remind me that portraiture, for all its ties to likeness and identity, is also deeply abstract — made of shapes, rhythms, and forms that resonate beyond the human face. I’m thinking of faces not only as representations of people, but as visual structures that prompt recognition in the broadest sense. We project meaning onto them, and they return that gesture by pulling memories out of us — memories that may have nothing to do with people, but everything to do with how we’ve moved through the world.

Rendered with meticulous detail, Yoong’s diminutive paintings are constructed from many translucent layers of oil paint, each applied with a tiny brush in a process akin to drawing. Rather than bold, expressive brushstrokes, Yoong favours subtle accumulation, fine gestures that coalesce into images that are concurrently precise and ephemeral.

, Yoong offers a deep investigation into identity, memory and perception. Through a rigorous and delicate process, he invites the viewer to contemplate the elusive, poetic spaces between seeing, remembering, and feeling.

A painting by Ki Yoong of two near identical images of of the same female face, one colour less saturated. 

As We Are

 a solo exhibition of new works by London based artist Eve Ackroyd. 

Ackroyd’s new series of intimate portraits capture a year in the life of a family. Exploring the tensions and quiet strangeness of adolescence alongside the challenges of parenthood, the works offer a tender glimpse into the shifting dynamics of familial relationships, making visible the subtle transformations that occur as individuals and relationships grow, adjust and take on new forms.

Through her distinctive visual language, Ackroyd explores the intricate emotional terrain of the familial unit, a subject both intimately familiar and endlessly nuanced. A sense of cool indifference pervades these paintings, yet beneath the surface underlying tensions hint at forces outside of the frame: echoes of lockdown, global crises, and the pressures on healthcare and educational institutions. These external realities subtly infuse even the most private moments of daily life.

Rendered in luminous, soft-edged fields of colour, Ackroyd’s figures emerge in poses that are simultaneously contemplative, beguiling, and imbued with a sense of ennui. There is an uncanny, magnetic stillness to the works, where each gesture and glance is charged with latent emotion. Her subjects are at once anonymous and deeply personal, composites drawn from her own experience, memory, and research that reflect the delicate interplay between the personal and the world at large.

A painting by Eve Ackroyd of naked couple facing each other in a white bed

Upon A Tide

Workplace is pleased to launch the latest instalment of 

, a series of online exhibitions in the which the practice of artists at early stages of their career and new to the gallery programme are introduced through a body of work, curated specifically for each presentation.

 we introduce the work of Amy Winstanley (b.1983, Dumfries, UK), a Glasgow based artist who completed her BA (Hons) in Sculpture from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2005 and her MA from the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam in 2019.

Your practice is made up of a ‘constellation of activity’ which includes reading, drawing, moving, and listening to music or podcasts. Is the sense of energy and flux in your paintings a reflection of this dynamic approach? 

 Yes, it feels natural to me to include reading, writing, and listening into my studio practice as it is a way to deepen my sense of the world. The act of painting, for me, provides fertile ground for critical thinking in tandem with exploring mood, observations, memories and feelings through the blending of intentional and intuitive mark-making. Whilst my attention gets pulled in different directions, all these activities are valuable to the paintings and this fluid approach to working, I hope, results in the paintings themselves reflecting, in some way, the energy and flux found within life itself.

A constant in your practice is an investigation into our entanglement and intertwined relationship with the landscape and natural world. How has your upbringing in rural Scotland informed this?

 My upbringing was one where I had the privilege of freedom to explore the ‘natural world’ around me and gain a strong sense of place within a community of people and the more-than-human world. This interest with entanglement has stemmed from there and has grown as my experience of life with love, loss and grief has shaped me. For many years I have lived in cities where a contrast to how I grew up, and a different exposure to life, has piqued an interest in looking critically at our current systems and way of life. The more I investigate this in my studio practice the more this gains traction for me and articulates something I have always known – our deep connection with the web-of-life. Painting, for me, is a means to go some way towards expressing this connection.

 The titles of your works touch upon a diverse set of references ranging from intimate personal moments to feminist literature and even faintly surreal or humorous words and phrases. Can you talk about your process to titling works? 

I find the act of painting is conducive to forming thought so when I am working, words and phrases often pop into my head. I liken this process to writing a story; the basic plot is there but as you write the story emerges into existence and so do words as I’m painting. I note these down. Sometimes it is something said in a podcast that resonates with me, or a sentence I’ve read that seems to crackle with meaning. At times phrases or words seem to stick to a particular piece as I’m working on it. Other times if a painting is 

 as I like to call them, but with no title, I will go back over my notes and assign one from them. I also like to play with words, like putting a well-known phrase the wrong way round, like “shadow of my former self” becomes “Former Self Shadow”. Or “what in the world are you waiting for” becomes “Waiting for the What in the World”. I do this to be playful as I see painting as a form of play, of serious play. I am aware that I am dealing with large philosophical issues in my mind as I’m working, in tandem with mundane thoughts of domestic life, for example, and this mix is very much a part of going through life. I want my titles to have that mix too; to have that complexity, ambiguity – that seriousness blended with humour.

 Your works employ a vivid and rich colour palette applied with a variety of painterly approaches from dry brushing to building up section in thin glazes. Does working on many paintings at the same time help to create a sense of cohesion between the works?

I work on many at the same time as it fits with the ‘constellation of activity’ mentioned earlier, so does using a variety of painterly techniques which I really enjoy doing. I like the openness of possibility this way of working affords me. I move between works in an intuitive way; I’ll work on the wall, the floor, the desk – moving between different sizes of canvas, placing the paintings next to each other to see what conversations happen. There is a tension with this, as I want cohesion but I also don’t want the paintings to all do the same thing, to say the same thing. This is a challenge I find endlessly engaging. 

At the moment I am mainly working on my solo show for the Margot Samel gallery in New York later on in the year. 

Workplace is pleased to present James Cabaniuk’s first solo exhibition with the gallery 

The exhibition features a new series of paintings that reflect the nuanced, complex, and often paradoxical experiences of queer identity, intimacy, and the subversive joy that comes with embracing personal and communal chaos.

Cabaniuk’s new body of work is a deep investigation into queer communications hidden in plain sight messaging. Drawing from a history of veiled signalling, from violets to the hanky code, Cabaniuk’s work reflects a unique way of communicating through metaphor, gesture, and abstraction. 

, resonates with this duality, speaking both to the sudden surge of emotion that can overwhelm, as well as the cultural pressure to suppress or judge these responses as ‘unbecoming’. Through a carefully orchestrated visual language, Cabaniuk interrogates how the queer body, often caught in tumultuous spirals of identity and expression, has been forced to reconcile with societal expectations. Their paintings confront the messy beauty of being overwhelmed, by desire, loss, and joy, and the liberating chaos that allows one to emerge stronger and more self-aware.

The works presented are both deeply personal responses as well as part of a larger commentary on queer temporalities and the absence of these histories in traditional spaces of culture. The paintings offer a topographical view of Cabaniuk’s experience, simultaneously micro and macro in scope, where the details of personal anecdotes blur into the larger, shared narrative of queer communities.

With thick gestural surfaces that often employ glitter, confetti and soil, the works speak to the queer opacity of experience, where meaning is buried in the layers of colour, shape, and form. The paintings exist in a liminal space between abstraction and figuration, a zone where meaning is not fixed, but constantly shifting and evolving. The works are a celebration of the resilience that comes from chaos, and the moments of kinship that form between individuals in unexpected spaces.

A thick impasto gestural painting by James Cabaniuk 

I Don't Know What's Come Over Me

For this instalment we introduce the work of Ki Yoong (b.1985, Bradford, UK), a London based artist who completed is BA in Fine Art from The University of Leeds in 2010 and his MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2013.

Yoong will be presenting a solo exhibition at Workplace | London in May 2025.

The people featured in your works are drawn from a diverse range of sources including people you know, anonymous images on the internet, as well as famous figures such as Marilyn Monroe. What’s the selection process and what draws you to paint?

Deciding who to paint feels a bit like walking down a street—sometimes a friend is beside you, and beyond that, there are faces that catch your eye: strangers, people you recognise, endless adverts, faces from pop culture. It’s an accumulation of gazes, some intimate, some anonymous. It’s this reflex of catching your eye that is my filtering process, looking around and seeing who I find interesting, we do it all the time when we sit on a park bench to people watch. Recently, I’ve been drawn more to the people close to me. Painting them becomes an act of devotion. As the world becomes more and more disheartening I’m looking close around me to the people who give me joy.

Your works often utilises surprising and varied choices regarding framing, previously you’ve included copper, clay, wood, metal and even water. Can you talk about how these framing decisions tie into the ideas you’re exploring in your work?

When I'm in a gallery or museum, my experience of viewing artwork involves the piece as a whole, including the frame or objects that holds the painting —enamelled lockets for miniatures, woodwormed cases of altar pieces, rock crystal reliquaries, these ‘frames’ transform. They can make something feel precious, or intimate, or the works become objects to handle. When working I use materials to engage the viewer, a reflective material such as copper or steel brings the viewer into the artwork quite literally like a mirror, and the work becomes a series of gazes, between viewer, painting and the viewer’s reflection. These metals also take on a patina over time, when handled our fingerprints leave their marks, the metal oxidises, and the work itself undergoes a slow evolution - The frames and their materiality bridge the gap between the artwork and its place in the world.

You almost exclusively employ tight cropping in your works, along with the spare backgrounds there seems to be strong a tension in the suggestion of what’s outside the pictorial frame. Can you elaborate on this?

The tight cropping is designed to focus the gaze. By cropping, information is removed, leaving space for the viewer’s own experience to be brought into the process of looking. What do we tell ourselves about the person in the painting, what does that tell us about ourselves - seeing is a personal act and what we perceive is shaped by our own experiences. The crop suggests intimacy, these four paintings are people I care about, so the cropping also becomes a personal act, almost like holding a face in your hands, or seeing someone’s face close to yours

Isolating the subject from its original context shifts how it’s understood, and the suggestion of what’s outside the frame introduces possibility. Portraits are often devices to aid the process of constructing that individual’s identity, acting as a confirmation to that person, through costume, setting, poses. I’m distilling to just the face, to the idea of the self, who are we when we strip it back.

What does a typical day in the studio look like for you?

I try to paint every day, if I can. A typical day in the studio for me is pretty simple—just me and my dog Oats. I sit at the table painting while he naps nearby, taking breaks for walks and a bite to eat. I usually have music or a podcast playing to keep me company. Some days, I get lost in the work and happily stay late into the night. This winter has been tough, with the light being so poor there are mornings when I come in and find I need to repaint areas I worked on the evening before, as the colours never quite match under daylight. Very happy spring is almost with us!

Can you talk about how art history and poetry inform your practice.

 Holbein was a first love of mine, I was pretty obsessive about Tudor paintings when I was in primary school, I’m not sure what it was that captivated me at the time but I was always copying his paintings. The quiet stillness of his sitters has become ingrained in me and comes through my practice, as well as how these paintings live with us today and our experience of them, a memory of a person existing outside of time, we look at them in silence and we are met with silence.

From the Fayum portraits to the works of Nicholas Hilliard, I’ve a love of portraits, and by painting faces I feel connected to a long tradition of depicting people, mostly whom are forgotten. In this sense, the subject of a portrait becomes the absence of a person. We look at them from a world in which they have vanished. It is this that we encounter, a fragmentation between the who and the what, a knife has been drawn across the threads that connect us to who they were and to us they become untethered, like a ghost.

Poet Don Paterson wrote ‘Almost everything will survive you, to the room you, you’re already a ghost’. I explore this thought in my practice, painting it’s a way to briefly hold on to something or someone - it’s lifetime transitions, moving from life towards death and then back again, an object that oscillates between memory and forgetting, the situation of its creation and our present moment.

Is drawing an important part of your process or do you work directly in paint?

Drawing is at the very beginning of my process. I start by sketching out the composition in pencil, laying the groundwork for the painting. After that, I work with very thin layers of oil paint. I see this process as akin to drawing—it’s a series of tiny, fine gestures that accumulate to create the image as a whole. Instead of using large, bold brushstrokes, I layer the paint delicately with a tiny brush, much like the nuanced shading of a pencil. 

A painting by Ki Yoong of a woman's face enclosed in a stainless steel box

, a group exhibition including new works by Celia Hempton, Laura Lancaster, Lucy Stein and Phoebe Unwin.

 investigates how memory, imagery, and the body are mediated and redefined within the fragmented and often alienated nature of contemporary life. Each of the artists engage in a delicate process of capturing and reconstructing the familiar, using paint as a vehicle for translating found imagery and personal recollections into new visual languages that explore the tension between figuration and abstraction.

The exhibition shares its title with the seminal poem by Margaret Atwood, a complex exploration of the Greek myth of Persephone. The ‘double’ in the title refers to the dual nature of Persephone, both as a young, innocent maiden in spring and as ruler of the dark underworld. Atwood’s writing combines elements of mythology with modern sensibilities, and is an intricate mediation on women’s identity, power, agency, and the complexities of their roles within personal and societal contexts.

Celia Hempton’s paintings, performances and installations investigate the blurred lines of comfort and consent; desire and subjugation; visibility and opacity, seeking to deconstruct the ways in which we engage with humans in a rapidly evolving age of hyper-mediation. Formally, Hempton’s paintings, which range in scale from intimate to life-size, acknowledge the tropes of history painting and the often subjugated female body. Painted in thick expressionistic brushstrokes, 

 is a work from Hempton’s ongoing series 

 which depicts strangers she met while browsing online webcams on the website chatrandom.com. Here, Hempton presents the cropped torso of a figure in blues, purples and pinks, evoking the cool glow of a laptop. Acting as a painterly documentation of a specific encounter, the painting is deeply intimate yet the tight cropping, anonymised background, and expressionistic rendering of the face highlight the physical and emotional remove of this experience.

Laura Lancaster’s work centres around the figure, often abstracting its presence, which is intensified by the manipulation of paint, creating ambiguous and surreal imagery. The inspiration for Lancaster's paintings is found photographs, cine films and slides of strangers. Lancaster's process-orientated practice forms an ongoing dialogue between the languages of painting and photography, focusing on the tension between the visceral qualities of the paint and the image it depicts. 

 by Lancaster features an isolated female figure in a small rowing boat gliding across a partially shaded, tranquil body of water. Utilising her signature approach of wide brushstrokes and an engergetic handling of paint, the figure becomes almost indistinguishable from the lush foliage and surroundings gently reflected in the surface of the water. The quiet intimacy and dreamlike quality of the scene is undercut by a sense of voyeurism, as though the viewer is witnessing a private moment. Lancaster’s approach draws us into a liminal space where the familiar slips into the realm of the uncanny – a woman adrift in space.

 by Lucy Stein portrays a figure simultaneously appearing and disappearing into a rich and intense red background. The swirling and raw gestural marks, create a sense of chaos and movement that sit in stark contrast to the doubled stoic skeletal forms that are framed in the centre of the canvas. The faint trace of a dress can be discerned around the spectral forms and a large arrow becomes almost an extension of one of the figure’s arm, conveying an impression that they are caught between states of being. The echoed presence of the figure intensifies the ambiguity, adding to the notion of transformation. The imagery and narratives presented here are drawn from Stein's study of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, esoteric histories, and personal experience. Continuing to embody the concept of the unstable narrator, Stein creates her own mythology where different painterly styles coexist. She shifts selves, becoming ever more expressive, allowing herself to perform different roles.

, both of which continue her distinctive exploration of how to capture and reconstruct the familiar. Both paintings are made without any source material other than her memory of fleeting moments or objects from daily life. In these works she generates dense and saturated layers of oil paint that gradually evolve into other-worldly renditions of faintly recognisable forms. Her loose brushwork and soft colour palette produce a meditative quality that evoke feelings of quietude and reflection. Amidst an ever-accelerating circulation of imagery in contemporary culture, these paintings carve out an uncanny yet intimately seductive space.

A painting by Celia Hempton of a figure's torso painted in thick brushstrokes of blue, pink, purple, and white

Double Persephone

Workplace is pleased to present Cold Feed, a group exhibition featuring new work by artists Andrew Bryant, Alice Channer, Callum Innes, Damien Meade, Robin Megannity, Jack Otway, Hannah Perry and Hayley Tompkins.

Cold Feed explores the complex relationship between form and perception, examining how surface, texture, and materiality shapes our understanding of the world. The exhibition will bring together a group of artists that investigate how appearances can both reveal and obscure deeper truths, realities and possibilities.

Gathering resources from print, the internet, and his own photography, Andrew Bryant creates meticulous paintings of isolated objects, which are purposefully lacking or incomplete. The works are informed by a deep interest in critical theory, queer theory, and psychoanalysis, as well as an ongoing engagement with art and image-making. Bryant’s recent body of work is an exploration into a critical engagement with AI, which has generated hybridised imagery drawn from his own photographs and found images. Simultaneously beguiling and banal, the objects are rendered with a forensic painterly process that acts to simultaneously reveal and conceal realities.

Dry Cask (Peacock) (2023), by Alice Channer is a floor-based sculpture comprising of three mirror-polished stainless steel vessels. Each cylinder contains volumes of undulating accordion-pleated crepe satin silk resembling ripples in a puddle or the gentle whorls of a fingerprint. Punctuating the fabric are vapour-blasted and chrome-plated aluminium sandcasts of ammonites whose own grooved natural forms echo the soft surface they are nestled into. The cylindrical forms are informed by sliced open dry-cask flasks, designed to store nuclear waste, whose pristine industrial surface belies the hazardous material housed within. In contrast, the frosted gold paper surface of Channer’s Sharks (2025) series presents a pleated relief supporting chromed thorns, some which are menacingly rendered in blood red enamel - simultaneously seductive and violent. 

Callum Innes is known for luminous abstractions that push at the fundamentals of painting: pigment, surface and space. Composed of opaque sections juxtaposed with thin, translucent washes –  remnants of a process of removal - that appear almost permeable, his paintings invoke a dynamic conversation between presence and absence. Through this unique, spare vocabulary, Innes elicits vast, ambiguous and sublime painterly territories.

Damien Meade produces alluring and visually disorientating paintings through a multi-layered process of clay modelling, photography, and editing before transforming them in exacting detail into oil paintings. Shifting between purely formal clay abstractions to feminine busts whose heads eerily float above their bodies, there is a strong interest in the animate and inanimate that runs throughout his work. The tension between surface and illusion, object and desire, and abstraction and figuration are sensitively explored in paintings that sit at the intersection of the quotidian and the uncanny. 

Robin Megannity’s new body of work explores how seemingly disparate references, spanning the mundane and the historical, can coexist within a single, multifaceted plane. Whilst engaging directly with the tradition of historical still life, and nodding towards the lineage of the ‘master copy’, the paintings true focus lies in the act of compression and transformation – how the cultural and historical are remoulded into a deeply personal and contemporary encounter. The grisaille palette further distances the paintings from their sources, stripping away their status as replicas and transforming them into something more ambiguous – part historical echo, part present-day reflection. Visible traces of Megannity’s interruptions, hesitation and digressions on the canvas’ surface speak to the speed of thought and the fragmented way we process meaning.

Jack Otway’s kaleidoscopic paintings collide together two distinct layers of expressive gestural underpaintings with transparent hard-edged geometric patterns, which when combined create a range of hypnotic and hallucinatory optical effects. Carefully balancing order and instinct his paintings follow their own internal logic. For his new body of work, Otway arranges, coils and drapes remnants of his own paintings into new compositions, photographes them and then translates these hybridized forms into paintings with a paired back monochrome palette. The resulting works explore Otway’s interest in decaying forms and abstractly invoke a sense of collapse and renewal, questioning both time’s inevitable erosion and humanitys propensity for destruction.  

Hannah Perry develops a sprawling network of references, drawing inspiration from personal experience, the testimony of others and the accelerated nature of our hypertechnological times. Her works are about the materials she uses to explore the complexities of our inner worlds, as well as of everyday physical and mental endurance. In a recent series of works, she has produced large scale sculpture, dynamic audio-visual installation utilising sound, technology, dance, spoken word, printmaking and video, to engage with issues relating to our individual and collective welfare. Perry’s practice explores erotic discourse, motherhood, mental health, youth, social class, and taste, alongside gendered coded materials.

In her paintings and sculpture, Hayley Tompkins seeks to explore and expand paint and its application as a transformative tool. Often modest in scale, Tompkins’ energetic works are born from an experimental approach rooted in the navigation between intent and spontaneity. Soaked in paint, the works’ surfaces remain unpredictable as they accrue swaths of fluorescent color, and layers of brushstrokes that develop from both free-form association, and distilled yet calculated intervention. 

A detail of a sculpture by Alice Channer of pleated satin silk with cast silver ammonites sat on top

Cold Feed

, a group exhibition including new works by Eve Ackroyd, Tomas Harker, Xingxin Hu, Sooim Jeong, Joseph Jones, Maria Meyer and Sarah Poots.

 focuses on the often overlooked aspects of daily life — the banal, the mundane, and the seemingly insignificant moments that weave through our everyday existence. The group exhibition explores the quiet, fleeting interactions we experience, such as painting one’s nails or exchanging a glance with a stranger. These ephemeral moments, though brief, are rich with potential implication, suggesting that within the commonplace lies a world of untold stories and a multitude of possibilities. 

Eve Ackroyd’s paintings depict everyday activities of women, situated in domestic settings both real and imagined. Drawing from a wide range of sources including film, literature, and her own personal histories, Ackroyd constructs intimate scenarios that evince both a quiet stillness as well as a palpable tension. Her work often captures moments of solitude, reflection, and quiet interaction, placing her figures in both mundane and dreamlike environments. 

Tomas Harker’s work explores the search for meaning in an era defined by mediated experiences resulting in a fragmented and confusing reality. His paintings reflect the disorientation and complexity of contemporary life, where clear narratives are obscured and truth often feels elusive. Through ambiguity and the colliding together of disparate imagery, Harker’s paintings encourage a deeper, engagement with the world’s complexities.

Xingxin Hu's paintings explore themes of female identity, the paradoxes of self-perception and societal expectation, and the restless nature of human desire. Hu views her works as a collection of self-portraits, shaped by her personal experiences and rooted in the everyday - through the lenses of film, literature, and introspection. Pairing a luminous yet subdued colour palette with tightly cropped, filmic framing, her paintings evoke fleeting intimacies and the tangible tension of private moments.

Joseph Jones produces detailed paintings of cats and flowers that explore sensitive notions of care, compassion and nurture. The singularity of his paintings invite us to break away from frantic image consumption and instead ask us for a slower reading, challenging conventional perceptions, and prompting internal reflection.

Maria Meyer’s small-scale paintings explore the shifting meanings of objects and images as they move through different social contexts. Drawing from overlooked, everyday imagery from snapshots of strangers to second-hand items for sale, she deconstructs and decontextualises these found visuals to create new narratives. Meyer’s work invites viewers to reconsider how we assign value to images and objects, highlighting how small changes in context or composition can completely alter their meaning.

Sooim Jeong’s work draws from a wide spectrum of experiences, from the profound weight of tragic loss to mundane and seemingly trivial interactions with strangers. With a restrained and sensitive colour palette and minimal calligraphic brushstrokes, she constructs playful compositions. Bringing together disparate fragments of scattered past and more recent memories, Jeong recomposes these into images which each hold distinct and singular meanings.

Having learned traditional Korean calligraphy, she reimagines fragments of past and recent memories, transforming them into playful yet emotional compositions. She frequently incorporates familiar objects, like shirts, mittens, and vases, which take on new significance as personal symbols. Her paintings are further enriched with whimsical motifs of foliage, fruit, and smoke, reflecting both her introspection and the influence of her surroundings near Greenwich Park.

Sarah Poots' paintings focus on the intimate and personal, using everyday objects including drapery and candles as both symbols and fragments. These motifs, often cut out or arranged in layered compositions, invite contemplation on memory and touch. Central to her work is the tactile connection to the material world, with hand-tied mementos signalling the act of memorialising the ordinary. By pairing or grouping works, Poots creates a dialogue between them, offering a quiet, introspective space for the viewer to slow down and reflect on the subtle beauty in the everyday.

A painting by Xingxin Hu of a closeup of glossly beige nails

Ordinary Things

RIA has commissioned the first performance work by British artist Simeon Barclay which will be presented in partnership with the ICA, London in January. 

 will see Barclay perform himself for the first time alongside musicians within a work he has conceived to address British identity, particularly in relation to masculinity and class. The commission is part of our Practising Performance programme.

 combines a monologue written and performed by Barclay with live percussion by James Larter and horn by Isaac Shieh specially developed for the performance. With this new performance Barclay questions a mythic idea of Britain through a personal lens. It introduces Barclay’s own history growing up in Huddersfield with parents originally from the Caribbean and reflects on the industrial landscape of northern England in the 1980s and 90s. Collaborating with musicians James Larter and Isaac Shieh, he brings together spoken word, rhythm and melody. The Ruin draws on a wide range of references from early modern music to landscape, urban design and fashion.

Simeon Barclay is known for his sculptural and installation practice which is rooted in material histories. He uses pop cultural references to explore personal and cultural memory and to navigate imposed and self-created identities. Interested in self-image, particularly in relation to socioeconomic status, race and 'Britishness', 

 investigates masculinity in a dynamic live ensemble piece.

A black and white portrait of Simeon Barclay sat on a chair with his legs crossed and holding a mask over half his face

RIA Presents: Simeon Barclay, The Ruin

Workplace is pleased to announce b chehayeb’s first UK solo exhibition tomboy heaven.

The exhibition will feature new paintings by chehayeb, which explore the complexities of memory, identity and cultural hybridity.

chehayeb’s gestural and vibrant semi-abstract paintings attempt to reconstruct fallible memories and sensory experiences of adolescence. Born in Dallas and raised in ‘Frontier’ towns such as Abilene in the West Texan orbit of Fort Worth, chehayeb’s formative years were spent negotiating her resistance to powerful archetypes within Mexican and American culture and religion. Softball, writing, and eventually Art provided routes of escape from a seemingly inevitable conformity to heavily gendered societal norms.

Enveloped in her experience of growing up in West Texas in the early 90’s, the paintings are marked by blocks of vibrant colour - dirt red and loamy ochres mix with deep blues of Texan skies, which gather haphazardly to form vast dreamlike tableaus upon which stories and histories play out.

I paint to understand how I got here, how I learned language, and ultimately study what is permanent, and what is temporary in regards to memory.

Populated by a cast of part formed objects, stars, cowboy hats, trophies, snakes, underwear and cigarettes become protagonists that parade through the unstable territory of memory, a visual lexicon of motifs, pointing towards a fluid selfhood emerging from a place between cultures and language.

A detail of a blue abstract gestural painting by b chehayeb

tomboy heaven

, a solo exhibition including new paintings by British artist Paul Barlow.

Paul Barlow’s paintings are built from an intensely obsessive process of accrual and removal. Beginning with an unprimed stretched canvas positioned flat on the floor, Barlow floods the canvas with highly diluted acrylic paint. Then, hung vertically upon the wall Barlow applies a higher concentrate of acrylic - allowing the pigment to bleed into the water soaked canvas. This process is repeated over and over, often interrupted by a complete rewashing of the canvas.

Binary rhythms of paint and water, of addition and washing away, laying horizontally and hanging vertically, are set up. Minute adjustments and the surface tension of liquids affect the image that appears and recedes from view - the process oscillating indefinitely until a work is accrued.  

The works installed in Workplace | Newcastle are placed with attention given to the space between the works. Three new larger works are tall and thin, and obliquely echo the proportions of a human - subtly registering their physicality as such to the viewer. These are punctured by two smaller square-format works. Together they become an intervention into the architecture of the gallery, the spatial tension evinced within and between each work becomes palpable – operating together as if an orchestral score articulated by silent objects. 

’ evokes the paradoxical and indeterminate nature of Barlow’s practice. Assertive in their presence as both image and objects, there is a sense that they have just materialised - as if out of thin air - and may yet disappear again at any moment. Firmly rooted in the sublime, Barlow’s use of paint seeping into water and his intentional warp and weft between positive application and negative removal relates his work, by association, to ink paintings of East Asian tradition and their philosophical and contemplative underpinnings. Barlow’s work is however more closely aligned to a contemporary understanding of the sublime - that of deep mathematics, of fractal curves, particle physics, and wave forms and noise, ebbing and flowing, rinsing and repeating infinitely.  

Open by appointment. Please email info@workplace.art to arrange a visit.

Thin air

Workplace is pleased to announce the first UK solo exhibition by Wang Pei.

’ is a technique which cinema has long employed to reveal more than the human eye might normally see – a device to build empathy between the viewer and the protagonist in the service of a constructed narrative. In the work of Pei Wang, tightly cropped faces are rendered on canvas with meticulous and unwavering detail. 

Light glistens on the moist surface of an eye, translucent layers of saturated colour forms skin as minute crevices and folds undulating in and out of focus. Brooding dramatic tension is heightened by the murky chiaroscuro of a darkened background.

In his seminal 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ Walter Benjamin argues that the ‘aura’ - the presence and authenticity of a work of art - is rooted in its singularity and uniqueness within a specific context, whereas mechanically reproduced artforms such as photography and film shift away from the singular aura of the art object towards a democratisation and politicisation. In our age of digital dissemination, Pei Wang’s canvases are a battleground, a site of both homage and challenge, where the aura is not lost but transformed.

Depictions of the face and body align with our innate human reflex and desires that are exploited by digital platforms to feed our perpetual engagement. Wang’s use of casein tempera—an ancient form of paint derived from milk and laden with historical and biological connotations—stands as defiant affirmation of the tactile and the temporal. Surface texture, the play of light and shadow, the subtle gradations of colour—all are given prominence, demanding from the viewer a meditative attention that opposes the scrolling speeds of digital consumption.

The algorithm—a god of our own unwitting creation—demands of images a certain legibility and speed of consumption. Wang’s work resists this with a stoic ferocity. Here, the close-up does not merely serve the algorithm's insatiable hunger for clarity and immediacy. Instead, it becomes a tool of resistance, a method of slowing the eye, of demanding contemplation and, ultimately, of commanding a more profound engagement. This is painting as an act of defiance, a slow rebellion against the tyranny of the instantaneous.

WORKPLACE – Contemporary Art Gallery