THE ARTISTS
JACK WHEELER
Jack Wheeler, Litus, 2022. Limewood and urushi lacquer, 23 x 60 x 68cm.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Jack Wheeler is a woodworker based in the rural landscape of North Norfolk, who creates sculptural forms inspired by the natural and artificial materials found along its coastline. Guided by each object's speculative pasts and the responses they inspire, Wheeler seeks an elusive harmony between materials, narratives, processes, and forms.
The selected wooden sculpture, Litus (2022), is crafted from the remnants of a large, storm-fallen lime tree. Inspired by shingle spits — shifting landmasses made and unmade daily by the tide — Wheeler replicates the associated durational processes of erosion, abrasion and accretion, transforming discarded materials into dynamic forms. Sculpted, smoothed, and lacquered, Litus expresses both the polished surface of a pebble and the latent promise held within a seed, serving as an emblem of resilience and metamorphosis amidst processes of loss and change.
Jack Wheeler, Trace, 2025. Limewood and oak, 55 x 70 x 37cm.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Made from the same wind-blown lime tree as Litus (2022) and inspired by the remnants of ancient forests revealed by surge storms along the North Norfolk coast, Wheeler’s new work Trace (2025) sits propped as if exposed by a receding tide. The bleached, skeletal form is oddly familiar, yet its origins remain unknown. Traps, nets, basketry, bone, weaving, the contours of a map, coral, and bleached driftwood are all conjured by its form: it could be something functional, man-made, or part of something primordial, alien, and forgotten - a vestige of deep time.
SIMON CARTER
Simon Carter, Path, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, framed 89 x 104cm.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Simon Carter, a painter based in Frinton-on-Sea, North East Essex, has spent sixty years observing the coastline’s transformation. His work is deeply rooted in this landscape, capturing its changeability through acts of repetition and return. Translated onto canvas, an unpredictable quality remains, caught and sustained by the ‘gnomic marks’ of his brushwork.
In Path (2019), Carter portrays Skipper’s Island as the sea encroaches at high tide. Despite the scene’s vulnerability, the boundary between water and land meanders organically. Through this depiction, Carter explores the elements as one mechanism, characterised by reciprocal processes. The painting’s title refers to the human-made walkways that intersect the island, which Carter reinterprets as organic forms, akin to the wandering lines of a willow tree. In this painting, human interventions shape and integrate with its environment, becoming essential components of its evolving compositions.
RAPHAELLA PESTER
RAPHAELLA PESTER Dust, 2023. Aquatint etching printed with brick dust on paper, framed 38 x 52cm.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Raphaella Pester is a multi-media artist raised on the border between Suffolk and Essex. Spurred by a connection to land and home, Pester questions how we can comprehend the incomprehensible through forms, materials and symbols: how we can come to understand something or someplace that becomes unknowable.
Captivated by water’s ability to simultaneously affect and be affected by its environment, Dust (2023) explores waveforms as both imprints and memories. Utilising finely ground brick fragments as pigment, Pester creates prints wherein the granular ink disrupts the pristine lines of the etching plate. Through this process, both print and plate are left permanently altered, symbolising the increasingly blurred divide between cause and effect; perpetrator and victim, in moments of environmental disaster.
RAPHAELLA PESTER Eternal Line, 2023. Hand quilted cotton, glazed ceramic, brass hooks, wadding and thread, 127 x 137cm.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Raphaella Pester’s second work, Eternal Line (2023), is a hand-sewn quilt featuring a central ceramic amulet. Drawing inspiration from Hilma af Klint’s transformation of intangible concepts into symbols, Pester employs elemental symbology to evoke nature’s intricate conditions and embroiders the golden spiral to visualise the fabric of deep time. The amulet, crafted from clay — a material formed through millennia of compression and transformation — serves as a tactile embodiment of geological processes. Encased within the soft, degradable fabric of the quilt, this ceramic piece highlights the contrast between ephemerality and endurance, decay and new life: central tenets of the natural world.
OLIVER VENTRESS
OLIVER VENTRESS De Motu, 2020. One channel video, CRT.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Oliver Ventress, a video and installation artist from Norfolk, now based in Lincolnshire, explores concepts of existence and experience through landscapes, often from a non-human vantage. Considering stories as tools to comprehend the unknown, Ventress utilises British mythologies to explore the contentious relationship between humans and the natural world.
The selected video De Motu (2020) documents a journey through the Peak District to the mystical site of Mermaids Pool, where a water nymph is believed to reside with the power to grant humans either immortality or death. The juddering waves capture the artist’s slow movements, as he treks through sub-zero temperatures towards the pool. Ventress’ poetic text captions the video, questioning what it is to walk the line between myth and reality as water overtakes the land. For ‘Which of the two is more Real: the invisible motion in the pursuit itself, or the undiscovered, unseen creatures below the surface?’
ALISON COOKE
ALISON COOKE Bridge Under Troubled Waters, 2020. Glacial clay and sediment core, 48 x 22cm.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Alison Cooke, a ceramicist based in London, uses clay sourced from geologically significant sites to visualise the dynamic memories of the earth, embedded within each sedimentary layer. Embracing the unpredictable nature of the firing process, Cooke allows the materials to ‘fire in what way they may’, emphasising the agency of the land.
Created in the wake of Brexit, Bridge Under Troubled Waters (2020) employs glacial clay sourced from Cromer and the Netherlands to reimagine the physical and cultural connection once facilitated by the expanse of Doggerland and to symbolise its subsequent dissolution. The resulting ceramic sculpture depicts a footprint, followed by tablets of fired sediment core: read in sequence the work reflects processes of flooding, and their effect on our ancestors and subsequently, ourselves. Through this exploration, Cooke articulates the geographic and cultural dissolution between Britain and Europe, accelerated by moments of flooding and solidified by contemporary political decisions.
SASHA SÁTCHI
SASHA SÁTCHI Breathe, 2024. C-type print, framed, 31 x 38 cm.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Sasha Sátchi, a still-life artist and photographer working between locations in Eastern Europe, produces works that capture the subtle relationship between ‘nature and the human in the present, their destructive unity, and the beauty and fragility of their union.’ Fascinated by the hyperreality of still life and the transience evoked by the vanitas subcategory, Sátchi creates hybrid objects using natural and man-made elements that are at once dynamic and morbid.
In Breathe (2024), the stem and leaves of a plant are submerged within a water-filled carton, while its roots are left to languish, parched in the air. Foregrounding the pervasive presence of plastic waste in aquatic environments and humanity’s impact on rising sea levels, the composition illustrates our tendency to disrupt and invert the natural systems we rely upon to survive. Like traditional vanitas, the work’s subtle beauty contrasts with its unsettling message, underscoring the paradox of humanity’s simultaneous appreciation and destruction of nature.
SOPHIE MEI BIRKIN
SOPHIE MEI BIRKIN Vestige, 2025. Mixed media, 65 x 95cm.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Sophie Mei Birkin is a multi-media artist based in London, whose practice revolves around the afterlives of different materials — from organic, inorganic, to artificial — and the semiotic slippages caused by their muddled interactions. Viewing sculptures as containers for dynamic and evolving ecologies and as instigators of psychophysical response, Birkin’s work examines the implications of materiality on cultural, environmental, and personal narratives.
Vestige (2025), a new hanging sculpture, builds on Birkin’s longstanding interest in bodies of water as sites of protean transformation, wherein human artefacts and natural forces collide to form hybrid materialities. Studio-grown biomatter is documented, printed and immersed in saline solution. This process harnesses salt crystallisation to physicalise the passage of time and its effects on submerged matter, positioning it as both a process of preservation and metamorphosis. Suspended and encrusted, Vestige invites contemplation on the accumulation and interaction of materials in marine environments, and the shifting thresholds between fixity and flux.
ADAM HEDLEY
ADAM HEDLEY Riddles in the Ruins, 2023. Oil, sand and gesso on canvas, 50 x 60cm.
Ash and Bone, 2023. Oil, sand and gesso on canvas, 81 x 101cm.
Little Known, 2024. Oil, sand and gesso on canvas, 34 x 50cm.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Adam Hedley, a painter based in Bristol, creates compositions which ‘operate in the space between nature, figuration and abstraction’. Central to Hedley’s recent work is the use of ambiguous forms to synthesise colour, texture, and shape, creating a fusion of lived experiences, observed landscapes, memories and associations.
In the painting Riddles in the Ruins (2023), Hedley employs layers of sand, gesso, and oil paint to express how time, nature, and human presence accrete and shape landscapes. Taking its title from an article on an ancient civilisation, cut out from a 1980’s National Geographic magazine, the painting emerges from moments of disintegration and archaeological digging to present reconfigurations of psycho-geographical space. The energetic convergence of colours and forms suggests that the ruins themselves pulsate with active and evolving possibilities; that they are not merely remnants of the past but also speculative forms that look toward the future.
A key motif in Hedley’s recent work is the use of empty yet generative spaces within each composition. This is most apparent in his largest exhibited painting, Ash and Bone (2023), where the void offers a glimpse of something barely there, half-emerging or dissolving. Unlike Riddles in the Ruins, which contemplates landscapes in upheaval, Ash and Bone shifts inward, exploring more personal, corporeal realms. By employing a similar visual language to represent both, Hedley places the body and the land in parallel states of decay and renewal, championing processes of mutual transformation.
The smallest painting exhibited, Little Known (2024), takes its title from descriptions of archaeological artefacts that linger in states of indeterminate identification and meaning. Such objects, whether rare, timeworn, or unlike anything previously discovered, occupy an enigmatic space within the historical record. They hover in the mists of the deep past, at once unresolved and unfolding: partial, fragmentary, and endlessly open to interpretation.
SCOTT HUNTER
Trace Elements, 2024:
Intertidal Deposition, 2024. Bladderwrack Seaweed (Intertidal Zone), lab filter paper, sodium hydroxide, silver nitrate.
Backshore Sediments, 2024. Soil (Bank of Spoil Tip, Back Shore), lab filter paper, sodium hydroxide, silver nitrate.
Hinterland Accumulation, 2024. Soil (Top of Spoil Tip, Hinterland), lab filter paper, sodium hydroxide, silver nitrate.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Scott Hunter is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kinghorn, Scotland. Taking a phenomenological approach, Hunter employs scientific methods, ecological research, and experimental photography to create representations of the land that challenge the hierarchical perspectives often present in traditional landscape photography.
The expansive photographic series Am I the Wasteland? (2020-2025) emerges from sustained attention to the former Michael Colliery site in Fife, a landscape where residues of human industry converge with evolving ecological processes. Transitioning from dry to aqueous land, the sequenced images explore the deep-time entanglements of geology, climate, and human agency woven into the site’s ongoing transformations, charting the liminal space between contamination and resurgence.
Utilising the scientific technique of chromatograms, Trace Elements (2024) — a new work commissioned for the exhibition — visualises the material interactions between human activity and natural processes at the former colliery site. Sourced from the intertidal, backshore, and hinterland, each chromatogram captures the chemical, physical, and biological processes unfolding in these areas. Yet, viewed as art objects, the chromatograms transcend their scientific origins, acting as portals to intangible realms. Combining scientific inquiry with artistic framing, they offer a deeper understanding of the site’s ecological legacies, extending beyond human scales.
OLIVIA LOUVEL
OLIVIA LOUVEL doggerLANDscape, 2023. Single channel video, stereo sound, 8’30.
Photographed by Isabella Scott.
Olivia Louvel is a French-born British composer and artist living and working in the coastal town of Worthing. Interested in the sculptural qualities of sound, Louvel harnesses the voice as a pliable and resonant medium capable of traversing cultural boundaries and temporal realms.
The artist’s film, doggerLANDscape (2023), captures Louvel’s movements across the Lincolnshire coast; a fragment of ancient land revealed at low tide. The visual narrative commences with Louvel, a shadowy figure, blurred across the shoreline. A male voice narrates Doggerland’s past, soon submerged beneath a sediment of female voices, as they utter primordial relations to the earth. The video lingers on vestiges of time-worn trees, honouring their ghostly presence in the landscape. As the water waxes and wanes and Louvel with it, the boundary between past and future, permanence and impermanence dissipates.