TheBritishConnection

The TheBritishConnection exhibition brings together seven artists who share experiences and friendships formed in the renowned London art schools of the 1980s and 90s. These prestigious institutions include Chelsea, Central and St Martins School, the Royal College, and the Slade School of Art.

This exhibition reunites us for the first time as a group since graduation. The works on display—all newly created—reflect the different themes, media, and aesthetic sensibilities that each of us has individually developed in the years since. Acrylic, oil, and watercolor paintings, prints, drawings, and plaster sculptures have all been crafted with the understanding and skill that have evolved over time. Our contrasting subjects—landscape, portraiture, interiors, and animals—mirror both our diverse life experiences and our dedication to making art a central part of our lives.

This exhibition therefore presents the works of seven distinctly individual artists, offering a cross-section of contemporary British art. But perhaps it also illuminates our shared roots. And as our works are once again brought together, new meanings and connections will continue to emerge.

Victoria Arney

I work with landscapes and what they reveal to the modern viewer. Using traditional techniques—Japanese woodblock printing, etching, and drawing—I carefully and slowly explore photographed subjects, archived images, and disasters to reflect on our fragile relationship with the landscape.

In NO MAN’S LAND, I wanted to create something that literally floats (as the paper is so light that it moves) and is architectural in nature. While making this piece, I had in mind Hokusai’s references to the sea and tsunamis. The underlying idea behind this work is that the oceans resist the digitization of landscapes and history, and the intrusive presence it brings.

Aly Helyer

My work explores the idea of portraiture, both in historical and contemporary contexts. In some way, I hope to create singular images that merge past, present, and future into one. I strive to develop universal archetypes—primal images built upon ancestral and shared cultural experiences.

The hierarchical tension between figure and ground has opened new challenges for me, engaging with issues of context, illusion, perspective, and flatness. The painting process itself initiates deeper investigations, creating a platform for exploring the act of painting itself—the pursuit of bringing an artwork to life, surpassing the limitations of representation, and generating a reality beyond illusion. My work is shaped by both conscious and unconscious decisions, as well as the unpredictable moments that arise during the act of painting.

Automatism has become a catalyst for the initial creation of images—something beyond mere human depiction.

Liz Hough

These paintings were inspired by the following passage:
“I lift up my eyes to the mountains…” – Psalm 121:1

Lisa Ivory

“We are the Tame Man because we are not the Wild Man. We know what we trust because we know what we fear. We feel included by virtue of what is not included…it illuminates the Me in Us…the circus of the hidden parts of being human…”
—Robert McLiam Wilson, Wild at Heart

Jo Lawrance

My drawings are born from my love of drawing itself. I wanted to create a forest of trees that have become fragile and ephemeral due to their scale and level of detail.

Lee Maelzer

*”An artist based in London, known for giving discarded objects and abandoned places a poetic purpose on canvas. Maelzer has an enduring fascination with how material things and physical spaces hold connections to our shared experiences and symbolic rituals that bind us together.

She encourages the viewer to linger in the cinematic twilight, contemplating the peculiar visual language of stillness—one that can infuse everyday scenes with melancholy or extract eeriness from the most mundane of subjects. The eye needs time to decipher the pathological precision of hyper-focused details, or the subtly seductive phases of material dissolution.”*
—Rebecca Geldard

Caroline Ward-Raatikainen

My work explores journeys through landscapes and the role of creative imagination within them. For me, art is not a substitute for nature but a way to awaken a forgotten need for connection with it. By immersing ourselves in nature, observing it deeply and attentively, these connections take on real meaning.

Personal, poetic, profound, scientific, and political—today’s living nature is all of these things… as long as we open the door from within.

As the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir so succinctly wrote:
“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

Translated with ChatGPT