Held in view

Ruby Archer and Ben Liney

23 June - 3 July

Please join us for the opening celebration, Thursday 25th June 6-8pm

Held in View brings together the practices of Ruby Archer and Ben Liney through a shared commitment to slowness, attentiveness, and sustained looking. Across domestic interiors and fragments of the natural world, both artists use painting to hold quiet, easily overlooked moments - foregrounding forms of observation that resist speed, distraction, and immediacy.

Notably, both practices remain absent of the body. Instead, traces of human presence emerge indirectly through objects, cultivated spaces, framing, and attention itself. This absence produces a heightened awareness of time and duration: foliage continuing to grow, light shifting across interiors, objects outlasting the lives that arranged them.

Drawing from photographic ways of seeing, Archer’s cropped domestic scenes and Liney’s paintings of foliage and landscape fragments invite a patient mode of attention. Together, the works move between inside and outside, intimacy and isolation, asking how painting can register time, atmosphere, and the accumulation of looking itself.