Please Join us for the opening celebration Thursday 7th August 6-8pm

Through a series of kaleidoscopic figurative paintings and intimate flesh studies, Familiar Weight explores the body as a site for human experience. The exhibition includes a range of subjects in various environments, highlighting the complex and often contradictory sensations that come with existing in a body.

Subjects range from self-portraits to depictions of a partner, friends, and strangers. Some relationships are familiar and tender, others distant or unknown. Yet through the act of painting, a thread of familiarity begins to emerge. Regardless of relational context, each figure invites a recognition of presence and shared humanity. Through the push and pull of figuration and abstraction, the body inhabits a space that is both intimate and collective, subjective and universal.

A series of 40 small flesh studies accompanies the larger works, offering a quiet counterpoint. References for this series were collected through an open submission platform, inviting fleeting and often anonymous encounters with participants. This process engages the reciprocal aspect of perception- of looking, and offering oneself to be seen. The portraits are closely cropped, inviting tactile associations like the softness of a belly, the gentle slope of a shoulder or the warmth of skin. Together, they form a larger tapestry of flesh, a collective portrait shaped by sensuality and mutual vulnerability.

Throughout the body of work, tensions and contradictions are held deliberately. The painting approach is both tender and analytical. Figures may be objects of reverence or bearers of deeper anxieties. Some resist the viewer's gaze, while others surrender to it. Familiar Weight embraces this complexity while evoking the quiet, abiding comfort found in recognising another being.