“This is for Shardae-Rose. For our love. For our respective struggles. For the pain and the grief. In the name of melancholia. This is the first time I’ve painted with so much intent. And I have done so always thinking of you, Shardae-Rose.”

Cyril Ferrando was born in 1986 in Toulon, France.

Painting is his salve, his mode of soothing the sorrows of life whilst indulging in listening to bands like The Cure, Cocteau Twins, Emma Ruth Rundle and multiple other artists who are always carefully selected for the moment. “I stretch and prime all of my canvases using the finest materials, such as super-fine French linen… Often, Serge Gainsbourg plays in the background too, and all of this is part of how much I love painting. So much.”

As the Bruises Turn to Yellow is Cyril’s catharsis, featuring paintings evocative of his innermost self and darkest thoughts… Works appreciated most in the light. The title is taken from the lyrics of ‘Pierrot the Clown’ by Placebo. The paintings are all named after songs from The Cure.

A free exhibition, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist’s growth and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

See the feeling.

“I use the human form to examine…tensions between light and colour, culture and emotion.”

Chrissy Thirlaway is a fine and creative artist working out of Brixton, South London and Los Angeles, California. She began serious drawing, she would say, at the age of nine, during a period of several years living in Brazil and with no contact with other children.

“Like many people, I've felt a bit of an outsider since I was a child, born in one country, raised in another… Drawing was my companion and my teacher then, and still is now, allowing me to relate and respect the subject.” For Chrissy, drawing was and is a journey of exploration “of our interface with the world I find myself living in and its consequences. I am in awe of the beauty of what is. What comes from me are delicate, precise, emotional narratives about [people’s] common experiences and what it is to be human beings.”

The process of painting is an extended, layered process of her practice, often taking months to complete, while clarifying her insight(s) into the impulse(s) for a particular work. Sometimes, it is a window into the world she knows, and other times the canvas' edge is the world. Her subjects are naked and natural, stripped of all disguise, and in their nudity are both vulnerable and powerful.

Chrissy also works in three dimensions - including textile, copper and glass - and her work is held in private collections in the United Kingdom, the USA, Brazil, Indonesia, Qatar, Portugal, Germany and France. Intimate Stories is her latest solo show.

A free exhibition, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist’s growth and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

Peek inside.

“As a model, I am an artist.”

As a model, writer and filmmaker, storytelling is central to Roy Joseph Butler’s practice, one now shifting towards a critical exploration of his life journey and a heritage - personal and social - informing both his identity and his outlook as a body-positive Queer person. Consequently, he is compelled to introduce and engage ever-newer audiences with the life room, a place of compulsory collaboration between fine artist and life model and a formative creative centre in which his body and the history traced upon it are displayed, ready for critical artistic interpretation. In this space, he perpetually rediscovers himself.

Roy’s work is mainly concerned with expressions of belonging. From the Life Room, his debut exhibition, is a documentation in photographs of those spaces where he, as artists’ model, has been both inspiration and subject, encouraging viewers to consider how they see, how the subject who would otherwise inhabit the space may view them and how that, in turn, translates into a conversation of creative collaboration and acceptance. In that conversation, the creatives on both sides of the easel function as artists and necessary agents, and in the tacit dialogue between them, they find manners of expression and, it is hoped, real senses of place.

Roy is the founder of charity and social enterprise Packed Lunch Productions, whose mission is to advance visual storytelling through fine art, moving image and performance, subsequently improving the social capital of its partners and participants alike. All proceeds from From the Life Room will go to supporting the organisation’s public programming.

A free exhibition.

“These [works] are the things I have inside that I toss out because there are burdens with which you cannot live or drag along…” Belkis Ayón

Natalie Charles (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist from London whose work explores connections between people and the impact of our personal histories. She honours her sensitivity to materials and flexible approach as a ‘toolkit’, working across a range of media, including drawing, painting, printmaking and animation. The foundations of her practice are materiality, shadows and texture. She makes some of her materials, enabling her to connect with and understand their potential. Her work then draws the viewer in by highlighting the intimacy in quieter moments, often through cleverly cropped compositions and delicate attention to shadows. Scale and rigour are imperative to her process, as is maintaining a playful approach to texture, pushing the surface and medium to evoke an emotional response in the viewer.

Natalie has of late been investigating her ancestry, personally and through her practice. The Things I Have Inside, a new body of work taking its name from a quote by Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón that deeply resonated with her early on in her journey into generational healing, is an articulation of the innate spiritual guidance that steers and protects her in life.

Natalie is currently on the Drawing Year 2023/4 at the Royal Drawing School having graduated with a BA Hons in Illustration from the University for the Creative Arts in 2013. She worked as an animator before pivoting to Operations and Communications management for arts charities. Natalie is a Trustee at Packed Lunch Productions and Content Manager for Middleground Magazine.

A free exhibition, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist’s growth and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

“I start a painting with my own vision of it, what it is and why it’s there but I leave it loose and open, so you can find your own world in it.”

Maria Rado is a fine artist based in London whose work explores minimalist abstract approaches that evoke a specific feeling or sense of place for the viewer. Her artistic interests extend to nature, especially the beauty of the underwater world, where the way light and colour behave continues to inspire an ongoing series of paintings. She also focuses on verdure - the richness of flora, its curves and the balanced innate in its proportions.

Maria was raised in Bulgaria and earned her Master’s of Fine Arts from the National Academy of Art Sofia in 1996. She subsequently worked in advertising and publishing for twenty-five years, holding positions in Europe, the Americas and Africa. During this time, she also illustrated more than fifteen books. In 2018, Maria relocated to the UK, where she has focused full-time on her painting practice, and her work can be found in private collections in the UK and Europe, the USA and Canada.

Equilibrium is a new series by the artist, using inspirations from nature to create a string of ten paintings of dancing colours and dynamic forms that balance and speak with one another.

A free exhibition, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist’s growth and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

“What do we make when we want to make something special? What does that say about us, and what we think is important? When we make, we manifest. A thing is in the house that wasn’t there before, and what on earth are you supposed to do with it? What is it to crown yourself, especially if you increasingly look like your mother, who recently died. Is the sparkle real, and does it even matter?”

Anna Marlen-Summers is a maker living in London. Having worked in arts education for over twenty years, she periodically oscillated between:

1 - feeling that all her own creative practice has been obliterated, and all the remains is the occasional craft outburst;

2 - deciding that the teaching itself is a creative practice (it’s just that she gave all her ideas to teenagers to do, badly);

3 - wondering if perhaps just making things is good for you, and so it should be done.

Having now moved away from the classroom and into adult arts education management, as well as completing an MA in Arts and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London, she now finds that in fact all three coexist in her practice, alongside an all-encompassing compulsion to collect and stockpile discount arts and crafts materials.

Manifest. Oh? is an exhibition of recent re-works created in response to the remnants of her previous exhibitions Trying (2022) and Trace (2021), a visit to Vienna (where she saw the relics of various saints in various churches and the bejewelled skeletons of Germany’s rural Catholic churches as photographed by Paul Koudounaris) and a vaguely remembered talk attended some time in 2010-ish. It is demonstrably NOT a manifesto.

A free exhibition, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist’s growth and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

“Creativity is part of what drives us as humans.” - Oana Gavrila, Exhibit12

The Exhibit12 collective is a product of the pandemic.

Initially an online exhibition event, run by a small group of South London creatives acting on a desire to get back to work during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown and enliven their creative juices, Exhibit12 began as a platform for showing and selling work in the digital space.

It has since expanded to a collective of 12+ creatives assisting each other in their artistic journeys, providing a welcoming and supportive environment for artistic connection and collaboration with other artists, and creating and nurturing conversations around art and creative practice.

Exhibit12 also exists to make the most of the power in numbers, coming together to take its work into communities and taking up opportunities that show our work to the wider art world.

Community is the collective’s latest offering, an exhibition of recent work that highlights the skills, stories and aesthetic of the individual artists while exemplifying the heart and soul of this ever-evolving group: community.

A free exhibition, with proceeds from all sales going to the artists and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

“In the last few years, I have discovered the beauty of the human body and have captured through the camera lens the naked body to showcase and admire its vulnerability.”

Roberto Boussin - a.k.a. CentoStellePhoto - is a London-based creative portrait and bodyscape photographer specialising in high-contrast imagery. His work explores intimacy, identity and sexuality through the gentle and caressing magic of light, enhancing the beauty and the perfection of the human subject.

Of Light and Men is the outcome of recent collaborations between the artist and a diversity of subjects, each in their own way finding the boundaries of their creative selves and pushing those limits, making way for plays of light and dark on flesh accentuating representations of male sexuality.

Born in Italy, Roberto attended the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts and has gone on to exhibit in the US and Europe. Of Light and Men is his latest solo show.

A free exhibition of original work, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

“Movement is the manifestation of life. Moving is an all-natural process, such as blood circulating in our veins, such as the rotations of the earth, microcosmos = macrocosmos… Stagnation and standstill are death. In shamanism, death is believed to be a transformation into another stage, a further level of existence and consciousness. It is the condensation of the physical body into light, referring to a luminous being.”

Lizita is an artist and designer from Meissen, Germany. Coming from a family of artists, she has always loved drawing, developing her own drawing style in her early years. She studied fashion design at the Bielefield University of Applied Sciences, Germany, during which time her artworks were featured in several publications, including Tush Magazine and Modeillustration. She has since worked with top designers Alexander McQueen and Matthew Williamson.

Her fine art practice specialises in the creation of figurative illustrations and portraits, which she aims to develop into moving-image and video art. With a focus on the human face, it is her passion to capture emotiveness, creating a crossover of the archaic and the contemporary. Combining art with fashion, Lizita’s works are developed in several stages, a journey starting from a pencil sketch and leading into the realm of digital storytelling. The synergy of manual and digital drawing techniques creates a multi-layered communication within and between her pieces which bears witness to a high-emotional expressiveness.

The Radical Gender, an exhibition of new work, explores the concepts of movement and human transformation while questioning the social structures within which they are considered. For Lizita, both movement and stagnation are transformative, exemplified by the dynamic stillness of her vibrant, mixed-media work.

A free exhibition, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

“Our most fundamental form of expression is through our bodies. Instinctively, we use our physicality to communicate and connect with others. By observing, reading, interpreting and responding, we forge a shared human experience.”

Leo Crane is a painter and animator from London. Having studied with Maggi Hambling CBE, he has developed a particular love for the painterly qualities of charcoal. He draws from life using fast fluid strokes to capture the relationship between the subject and the space around them. Life in Charcoal, his most recent collection, exemplifies this, conveying self-expression through gesture and movement, with particular reference to the nude.

Since 2018, he has been developing his charcoal practice into animations, including L’amour rebelle, the first opera on the blockchain (Electrifying Opera, 2021), as well as The Foundling (Animate Projects, 2018), both of which have been recognised at festivals around the world. He is currently working on The Masterpiece of Tamagata, a hand-painted feature animation.

As a portrait artist, Leo is featured in the book Portraits for NHS Heroes (Bloomsbury / Google Arts & Culture) and has appeared on national TV in Brazil (Artists to Watch, Canal Curta!) and the UK (Sky Portrait Artist of the Year).

Leo is co-Founder of the London-based studio Figuration and teaches at Sotheby's Institute of Art, V&A Academy, British Library and the Heatherley School of Art. He holds an MA (Distinction) in Animation from Bournemouth University and is the co-author of Contemporary Figures in Watercolour (Batsford Books, 2021).

A free exhibition of original work, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

“Keith Ashley’s response to his subject is keen-eyed and his commanding draughtsmanship deeply felt. Throughout this richly wide range of mood, each image, by its power and intensity, reveals the Crow - dramatic and forever mysterious.“ Maggi Hambling CBE

Keith Ashley uses monotype as a way of examining the enduring fascination and symbolism of the crow, depicting it in a starkly ominous landscape which allows the artist to experiment with mark making, creating prints rich in depth and complexity. The unpredictable nature of the medium - each image is unique, with dramatic variations in texture and tone - captures the raw emotion and intensity of the moment in time.

With its black plummage and intelligent demeanour, the crow has long been associated with death, magic and trickery. To some, the crow is seen as representative of bad fortune, to others emissaries of change and transformation, occupying an elusive space on the edges of the physical world.

Crows are also often portrayed as omens or harbingers, and this series, made just prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, seems to prefigure the isolation and anxiety of the past few years. Each print invites the viewer to contemplate themes of mortality and loneliness in the haunting presence of these solitary birds, explore the unknown and find comfort in darkness.

Keith lives and works in London. He is a graduate of the Norwich School of Art and Chelsea School of Art and has exhibited widely across the capital. The Messenger is his latest solo show.

A free exhibition of original work, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.