An Exhibition by Split Collective

29th May to 16th August, 2026

Guernsey, Channel Islands

Venues

The Rectory at St Peter’s Church                  30th May to 16th August, 2026

St Pierre du Bois

Guernsey 

and 

The Gate House Gallery                                29th to 31st May and 6th to 7th June, 2026  

The Grange 

St Peter Port  

Guernsey 

Foreword: St Peter’s Church

Dear Friends,

It is a great pleasure to be able to host the Split Collective’s Response 2026 Exhibition under the able curation of Fiona Richmond. Every day and in so many ways we are all presented with a myriad of sensory invitations that enrich our lives. It is perhaps the gift and skill of the artist that seeks to capture and express a response to these stimuli.

In today’s world, the artist also plays a vital role as a listener, a questioner, and a connector. Through their work, artists help us pause and notice what might otherwise be overlooked – shared emotions, everyday beauty, or uncomfortable truths. They respond to a fast-moving, complex world with curiosity and care, offering new ways to see, feel, and understand our experience of it. More than providing answers, artists open spaces for reflection and conversation, inviting us to imagine new possibilities and to see ourselves, and each other, with fresh attention.

My huge thanks are expressed to all the artists involved who have given careful thought and creative energy to producing something truly special and memorable. Thank you for taking the time to experience and enjoy this exhibition.

We also invite you to take a walk around the garden and the meadow surrounding the Rectory. The gardens have been here for 150 years, and the meadow, which is glebe land, for many centuries. It is very much a work in progress but it, too, is a place that is full of sensory invitations that can feed the soul.

Every blessing.

Rev’d Adrian Datta

Rector, St Pierre du Bois and Forest

Foreword: Gate House Gallery

It is a privilege to welcome the Split Collective who are all alumni of the Turps & MASS Art School to our gallery. The commitment of Turps & MASS to artist-led professional discourse and peer-led mentoring aligns with our own aims, ethos and focus on enriching visual arts education in Guernsey. This exhibition, that brings the vanguard of contemporary art practice from the national and international stage directly to our shores, will provide a catalyst for discussion, an exchange of ideas and the possibility of new friendships and future collaboration.

Hosting artists of this calibre is vital for the continued growth of our cultural landscape. By bridging the gap between the UK and the Channel Islands, and other countries, we provide our community with direct access to the evolving dialogues of the modern art world. For our local artists and students, this showcase serves as both a mirror and a window, offering fresh perspectives, technical inspiration, and a sense of connection to a broader creative network.  Exhibitions like this do more than just hang art on walls; they spark conversation, challenge our perceptions, and enrich the cultural fabric of our island. We hope this collection inspires you as much as it strengthens our commitment to bringing high quality contemporary art to the heart of our community.

Adam Stephens

Director, Gate House Gallery

Curatorial Statement

This publication accompanies Response, an exhibition showcasing the contemporary artworks of 44 painters and sculptors who are members of the Split Collective. The work included was shown at the Gate House Gallery and the Rectory at St Peter’s Church in Guernsey from May to August 2026. 

Bringing the work of my fellow artists of Split Collective to my home island has been a real pleasure. We are a very diverse group in terms of age, background, nationality and the type of work we make, so the brief for the exhibition needed to be broad. We settled on the term ‘Response.’ 

Across painting, drawing, sculpture and mixed media, the works presented here rarely offer fixed narratives or narrow perspectives. Instead, they operate as responses – to place, memory, environment, politics and bodily experiences, as well as to the mentorship programme that we initially met through.

Themes of identity, belonging and displacement surface across the exhibition, shaped by migration, cultural inheritance, gendered experience and personal history. The body, particularly the female body, appears as both site and symbol, carrying narratives of care, scrutiny, resilience, grief and desire. There are moments of wit and humour, anger and darkness. Landscape appears repeatedly, not as a descriptive genre, but as a psychological, emotional and metaphorical field – one marked by time, human impact, memory and history.

Central to the exhibition is an engagement with in-between states: between abstraction and representation, presence and absence, chance and control. Materiality and the act of making: layering, erasure, revision, intuition, become the means through which understanding emerges, rather than being something predetermined. Materials carry memory; surfaces accumulate traces; paintings evolve through uncertainty. In this way, the works resist narrow readings or closure.

The exhibition invites viewers not to seek definitive answers, but to dwell within uncertainty. In doing so, Response proposes art as a space where experience can be felt, held and discussed.

I would like to thank most sincerely the artists represented here who responded with great enthusiasm towards the idea of showing their work in Guernsey. I am hugely grateful to Adrian and Myfanwy Datta of the Rectory, St Peter’s Church for their partnership, support

and funding of transportation of works, and use of their home; and Adam Stephens of the Gate House Gallery for generously allowing us to use the gallery. Special thanks to Michael Paramore for sorting out the complex logistics of getting the work to the Island, and to the many other members of the collective who have helped out in so many different ways.

Fiona Richmond

Curator

Introduction

“An artwork is not complete until it is received by others. Art lives in our response. The spectator, the listener, is as important as the doer.”

Helen Martineau, Prodigal Daughters

Response is the first exhibition of Split Collective’s 2026 season. Opening in Guernsey on 29th May, it will then travel to London mid-August.

A response is a reply, an answer, a reaction. It implies correspondence, connection, conversation. The nature of a response, be it an affirmation, a question, a defence, rebuttal, or refusal, always carries a seed, a possibility of growth and expansion. A response can be the building block of a meaningful relationship, an opportunity for enlightenment or just the chance to engage in playful banter.

To respond is inherent in the Turps and MASS Correspondence Courses, which link artists and mentors across a wide geographical area and from which the Split Collective emerged in 2025. In a deeper way, to respond is woven into every artist’s practice. Artworks are formed by multiple responses – to materials, to experiences, to peers, to the audience and to the wider community.

Where previous Split Collective shows focused on the response between artist and mentor, now released from the structure of the course, the work presented in Response expands to explore that space in which myriad connections create the possibilities for better worlds. We invite you to join the conversation.

Split Collective

About Split Collective

Split Collective is a group of around 70 painters and sculptors from the UK, Channel Islands, Ireland, Europe, Australia and the USA. The collective was formed during the highly regarded Turps & MASS Correspondence Courses of 2024/2025. This is a mentorship program created by artists for artists to offer a rich source of learning and connection, invariably attracting serious artists with a variety of art practices.  

“As an art school we continue to challenge the one size fits all, inch-deep mile-wide approach to art education that has developed over recent years, largely for the benefit of the institution, which has blunted the art school experience for both mentors and participants alike. I’ve come to see the Turps & MASS correspondence courses as one of the most powerful tools we have in the armoury. It transforms the participants’ practice, and in a lot of cases it transforms their lives. We now see an embarrassment of riches when walking into the biggest competitions, the biggest collections, finding tonnes of artists who’ve been through the correspondence courses.”

Marcus Harvey

Co-Founder & Director, Turps & MASS

The Split Collective was formed during the 2024/2025 correspondence courses. The program has connected artists from different parts of the world willing to engage more deeply with their own practice while connecting with other artists. The Split Collective, drawn from the correspondence program, also welcomes Turps & MASS onsite members.

The name Split derives from Turps Banana (the founding art school), alluding to Banana Split, which can refer to a number of concepts, but primarily from the coming together of artists split across a wide geographical area.

“Our mission is to build an international community of artists that generates opportunities, supports one another, and encourages artists to recognize their value both in the arts and the wider community. We aim to become a thriving, empowered global network of artists who create independently in their studios while remaining connected. Our values are rooted in inclusion of Turps artists, the sharing of knowledge, and collective growth to create meaningful opportunities. We are committed to collaboration, diversity, and equality.”

George Badescu (England)

        Distance is a Kind of Touch, 2025

        Oil and acrylic paint on linen, 95 x 95 cm

I am a Romanian-British artist living and working in London. Born in Transylvania under Ceausescu’s regime, I grew up inside a strange duality: a magical childhood set against political turmoil, followed by the shock and trauma of the 1989 revolution. Those early contrasts of beauty and violence, belonging and estrangement shaped how I understand identity, home, and the human condition. Leaving Romania for the UK became a self-imposed exile that opened a lasting question of who I am and where I belong.

My work explores cycles of exile and return, and the transformation that unfolds in between. Displacement, separation, disconnection are not only physical facts, but emotional and existential conditions. Return is never a simple homecoming. It is a process of becoming. Painting is how I process and unearth, how I reimagine. It is a search for a way back, not only to what was, but to what could be.

Vivienne Baker (England) 

        Orpheus 2, 2025

        Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm

        Reflect 2 (Ruskin Mill Ponds), 2025

        Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm        

The sensory experience of being in the landscape is often the starting point for my paintings. I am interested in nature’s complex structures and the psychological space of bodies of water, in what is hidden and what lies below and on the surface. My paintings emerge through a slow process of layering and exploration. Themes concern the ephemeral in nature, the intangibility of reflected light and the entanglement of forms. The paintings exist in the space between figurative representation and a process-driven, experimental abstraction.

Hayley Banks (Scotland)

        Dumfries Before They Left, 2025        

        Mixed media, 25 x 30 cm        

        Where Things Are in My Garden, 2025

        Mixed media, 51 x 61 cm

My considerations when creating are philosophical and enquiring. I am acutely aware of the importance of materials when I draw and paint, understanding that the medium is the only way my response will be conjured into existence. My current practice involves paying attention to where things are, rather than what they are, and this practice of drawing the ‘where’ rather than the ‘what’ helps me to understand a subject as part of a whole, rather than as something that exists in isolation.

I work quickly and with energy, trusting that my strong drawing practice will give me the grounding I need to build the picture and take it to the point where it is conveying the ‘something’ that drew me to the subject in the first place. Authenticity and intuition are of paramount importance to me and I take care that my painting and drawing are because of a thing rather than of a thing.

Jarrod Becker (USA)

        Sinistral Shell, 2025

        Oil, acrylic, encaustic, charcoal on burlap, 61 x 61 cm

I love the theatricality of painting as both a physical action and an emotional reenactment of reality. I view the canvas as a space for dramatic representation – a site where true thoughts and internal experiences are translated into visual story and form. Rather than focusing on direct representation or mimetic transcription, I create a pictorial equivalent from my internal landscapes, using personal experience in my natural world as the primary symbol for the human existential condition I express in my work.

I am drawn to the ‘perfectness’ found within imperfection. My process embraces the messiness and wildness of creation, utilizing a plethora of mixed media within arm’s reach to build richly layered, tactile surfaces. Through expressive strokes and intentional chaos, I aim to capture the raw, untamed aspects of the spirit.

There is a deliberate tension in my practice between energy and restraint. I want my work to radiate a bold, carefree confidence, yet that ‘wildness’ is always present and confined to the substrate by a compelling sense of compositional strength. Ultimately, my art is a celebration of the balance between chaos and harmony, a testament to the quiet resilience embedded in the everyday, and a reflection of how we truly experience the world.

Eugenia Cuellar (Spain)

        Carolyn, 2026

        Oil on linen, 33 x 41 cm

My paintings are mainly focused on women and the challenges they face in the contemporary world: women interacting with men and women, in different settings and situations, in non-places, subjected to other people and to social and cultural norms. Sourced from my own images, collages or mass media imagery, the female figures depicted in my compositions are either real or imagined. My work can oscillate from painful or abusive situations to idyllic ones, a kind of parallel world that includes landscapes and imaginary scenes, a world of beauty and pleasure that holds a mirror to itself.   

Women are under scrutiny from childhood, made aware that they are the owners of a face and body that can be rated and impacts their success in life. Perfection is integral to self-esteem. Women often compare their own looks to other women they admire, a body dissatisfaction that is increasing in parallel with the use of social media. 

In my practice I relate painting to society, showing a female gaze with all these problematic tropes. By choosing ordinary images, I try to reflect unconscious, ordinary female thoughts: how would it be to have a body and face like yours? How would it be to be like you?

Michelle Dovey (Wales)

In

        Pink Nudes, 2026

        Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 c

        Unfolding into the dream that surrounds you, 2026

        Oil on canvas, 21 x 26 cm

The Naked Man Project began as a way of challenging myself — working through the discomfort and unspoken rules I'd absorbed around the naked body, desire, and looking.

Drawing over seventy naked men taught me that real creative freedom lives just past the edge of what feels safe. I found that staying with what felt raw and alive, rather than pulling back, opened something up in me.

The erotic drawings in this series were actually made two years before. At the time, I hid them almost as soon as I'd finished them — they felt too exposed, too honest. I wasn't ready to stand behind them. But spending so long drawing the male body, meeting my own fear and curiosity over and over, gradually changed that. Something loosened. I came back to this figurative work with a steadiness in myself I didn't have before. These paintings are a celebration of aliveness — not of shock or provocation, but of joy, humour, intimacy, and what it simply feels like to be fully present in a body.

Harry Walsh Foreman (Ireland)

        This Bubblegum is Noice, 2024

        Acrylic paint on paper, 42 x 59.4 cm

I am interested in contemporary urban life and the distinctive characters that inhabit it.

My work imagines the hidden narratives of everyday individuals, forming the basis of

my series Mortal Engines. This series operates as a comic apologia, celebrating the

ordinary, the eccentric and the overlooked. I explore how human presence leaves marks

on the world – from the scale of architecture to the immediacy of street-level detail like tagging or signage. Through these imagined scenarios, I look for moments that hold multiple possibilities, often revealing humour within the everyday. My work reflects on how we shape, and are shaped by, our environments, finding significance in the small and the familiar

Nikki Foster (Ireland)

Suburban Garden, 2026         Boy with a Toy Camera, 2026

Oil and acrylic on hardback book cover, 28.5 x 36 cm         Oil and acrylic on paper, 84 x 59 cm

My practice is rooted in experience, memory, observation, and imagination, extending from the personal into everyday life. I often return to familial and domestic settings, where ordinary scenes take on a sense of ambiguity and quiet intensity. The familiar is not fixed, it shifts and opens, allowing space for moments that feel slightly altered or unexpected.

Across painting, photography, and text, I look at how memory and imagination reshape what seems predictable, revealing how routine brings out the quieter nuances of behaviour and interaction within the domestic space. Using a restricted palette, loose mark-making, and diaristic imagery, I work away from formal conventions, aiming for a visual language that feels direct and immediate.

Colour and atmosphere carry emotional weight, reflecting the way memory can blur and adjust over time. My work moves between closeness and distance, presenting the home as both a place to live and a space where meaning is continuously formed.

Anne Goldrick-Reedijk (Scotland)

Disentangle,  2025        Out of Time, 2025

Oil & cold wax on aluminium, 21 x 25.5 cm        Oil & cold wax on aluminium, 21.5 x 25.5 cm

Landscape and solitude sustain my painting practice. When I inhabit a landscape, I encounter conflicting emotions and unexpected contradictions that demand deeper reflection. I am often struck by the tension between tranquillity and unease, and this duality becomes central to the work. In a time of environmental instability, I am aware that many landscapes and communities are under threat. This awareness shapes my approach, as each place carries both comfort and discomfort in equal measure. My work reflects this fragile balance. Through painting, I respond to the psychological and environmental weight of landscape. These works are not simply representations of place, but attempts to process the shifting relationship between humans and their surroundings.

Jane Gosling (England)

        Moonshine, 2025

        Collage/oil on cradled panel, 21 x 30 cm

My current work takes the form of paintings, collages and drawings of varying scale.

I am interested in exploring the language of paint by investigating the threshold between abstraction and representation. The cycle of birth and death in life and in nature is a recurrent theme. I am seeking a pictorial equivalent of emotional situations, rather than a direct mimetic transcription: journeys real and metaphorical, places of arrival and departure, the slippage between the past and the present. Nature acts as both subject and symbol, allowing me to investigate the individual’s place in the world.

I try to use materials and processes for particular qualities, which are relevant in exploring and incorporating the ideas in my work. I ask myself, “how can this medium articulate something for me?” The cycles of nature become embodied in the processes of making a piece of work. Working between materials, the past is reexamined to create new forms, collaged from a lifetime of experiences. In the words of Louise Bourgeois, “I have been a prisoner of my memories and my aim is to get rid of them.”

Caroline Greyling (England)

        Fish Supper,

        Acrylic and oil on canvas, 82.4 x 102.5 cm

Through my paintings I aim to explore the emotional terrain surrounding memory, belonging, and the dislocation inherent in lived experiences. I strive to create visual spaces where memories are fragmented and otherworldly, evoking the uncanny sensation of recalling something that never fully existed or is only half-remembered.

Cynthia Harrison Orr (England) 

Illusory, 2026         We’re grounded but sometimes we feel like flying, 2026

Flashe and charcoal on handmade paper, 77 x 57 cm        Flashe and charcoal on handmade paper, 77 x 57 cm

I create large-scale drawings where wet and dry materials merge, allowing my subconscious to guide the process. I do not plan the outcome; each mark feels immediate and necessary, emerging through a balance of control and chaos.

I am interested in tension, both emotional and physical, explored through large, spontaneous gestures alongside moments of restraint. From this, a structured composition develops that still holds a sense of freedom. I see this as a reflection of human behaviour and its consequences, where meaning is never fixed, but continues to shift and evolve.

My recent work comes from a place of heightened intensity, where pain and compassion exist side by side. It is shaped by a sense of instability and closeness, of living within something both fragile and forceful, while also absorbing the wider turbulence of the present moment. Everything feels in flux, as if held in suspension. At the same time, the work is rooted in the complete joy of drawing, with the most compelling moments occurring when it seems to move beyond me, becoming something autonomous.

I aim to create drawings that feel alive, open, and dynamic, inviting viewers to form their own interpretations.

Cathy Hayes (England)

        The Fight is On Again (After Sirani), 2025

        Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 cm

My painting practice is shaped by philosophical enquiry into life as a woman, informed by living between Dublin, London and the Bahamas. The ocean has had a lasting influence on my work, reflected in the fluid movement of paint across the canvas. Colour is central to my practice, acting as both structure and emotional force. Recently, I have engaged with Baroque painting, particularly the artists Artemisia Gentileschi and Elizabeth Sirani, creating contemporary works that respond to these historical influences. I often place myself within the paintings, connecting past and present. My process is intuitive and layered, combining personal memory with cultural references. The work evolves through a balance of control and release, allowing meaning to surface through material and gesture.

Alex Hegazy (England)

        Lemon Final, 2025

        Mixed media on board, 33 x 55 cm

I am a London-based artist who paints, sculpts, and prints, producing mixed-media and installation-based works. Currently, I am focused on exploring experiments within painting with acrylic and other found materials turned into pigments, creating textural juxtapositions and alchemical reactions. Within this, I slip between chaos and order, exploring the tension between gestural improvisation and intentional plans.

I explore themes of indulgence, desire, excess, the cognitive sublime, and sci-fi. I am interested in making art that interrupts the perspective of the viewer by shedding light on what is located at the sides of awareness. The body of work I produce develops ideas that enter into the conversation of what the human experience is and speculatively can be in the post-digital age.

Alexandra Helm (England)

        Navigating Light, 2026         

        Oil on canvas, 45 x 46 cm                 

        Collisions of Consciousness II, 2026

        Oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm

Dreams and memory are my points of departure: fragments that crystallise into form, holding the residue of emotional and visual impressions. I transform canvases into vibrant, lyrical terrains, creating a resting space for colour, form and texture. By combining saturated colours with transparent layers, I aim to capture a fleeting interplay of light and memory to create an immersive, personal experience.

My work is grounded in drawing practice. Through close observation, I seek out the marks, gestures, colours, and textures that communicate with me; thereby bringing a tactile energy into my work. With a focus on materiality, I invite viewers to navigate rich, emotional landscapes that are both intuitive and structured.

Poetry feeds into my practice; I hope that when people experience my work, they find themselves amongst the spaces between the lines.

Sylvia Hill (Ireland) 

ABOVE        Art Deco Bedroom, 2025

        Oil on card, 14 x 18 cm

UPPER RIGHT        Living Room 1960s, 2025

        Oil on card, 13 x 18 cm

RIGHT        Tupperware Kitchen 1960, 2025

        Oil on card, 13 x 18 cm

I am primarily an oil painter, and my work has developed through decades of sustained practice and research. At present, I am painting historic interior scenes from ‘the Big House,’ plus retro and vintage interiors. Using vibrant, rich oil colour, these small paintings explore feelings and sentiments about the past. Themes such as romance, adventure, comfort and the home are examined while depicting the fashion and style of the period. Also through exhibiting these works, I hope to make a plea for the protection and preservation of the historic interior. All my interiors have their own colour palette, reflecting the style of the time. They offer for some of us a link back to childhood, a place

of memory, comfort and joy, or a fantastical place to dream about.

Ashley B. Holmes (Northern Ireland)

        Winter, 2026

        Acrylic and posca pen on paper on wood panel,

        25 x 20 x 1 cm

        Inner Ocean, 2026

        Acrylic and posca pen on light molding paste

        on wood panel, 30 x 25 x 2 cm

I paint images of houses of Colonial, Craftsman and Victorian architectural styles from my hometown in New England. These inspire me to imagine a shadow-house or an upside-down house that can support the house like a foundation. I think of these dual houses as  psychological portraits: the top is corporeal and conscious; the one beneath is subconscious. These houses can’t be on the ground, so they don’t exist in a traditional landscape. Instead they migrate through an atmosphere of weather and radio waves of data transmissions. They are an attempt to decode patterns in memory, history and waves of virtual information in order to better understand the world we live in. 

Amanda Horwood (England) 

Remote, 2025        Blue Room, 2026

Oil on linen, 50 x 70 cm        Oil on linen, 50 x 70 cm

I work relationally alongside the painting to reach the final conclusion. That can take a long time or can happen very quickly. It depends on the struggle that occurs, and how quickly the work resonates to find balance. 

My use of colour, texture and mark-making helps me to build layers, and create areas that could be seen as zones. I manipulate the paints to indicate something, an example being that a character belongs in another realm, or is both ‘in and out’ of the ‘Real and the Painting world.’

‘There, and not there’ is a continuing theme, along with loss and trauma.

The painting process has developed into a visual language for my storytelling. Aesthetic decisions become metaphors. I use memories from my personal history and sometimes present experiences. The content merges with what I see and read; familiar faces often surprise me in the paintings. I have unexpected visits from film and TV characters, themes from music and literature, which I have absorbed and will magically appear.

Sometimes I lose characters, as their presence doesn’t benefit the composition anymore. That can be hard – but the painting will stop moving on until I can bring myself to do it.

I’m not a spiritual person, but within my ‘Painting world’, there is an afterlife – a supernatural world beyond this one, parallel to the physical.

Sheila Hough (Ireland) 

        The Disorder of Desire 1, 2026

        Acrylic, 30 x 30 x 2 cm

My work has long focused on the subconscious, hidden narratives and liminal spaces – those ‘in-between’ states where meaning is fluid and unresolved. I explore psychological landscapes and subcultures, often drawing on ideas of collective mythology.

More recently, I have turned to the Irish bog as a central subject. I see it as a repository of the collective unconscious, as both a place of preservation and concealment. It holds layers of ancestral memory and cultural identity, deeply embedded in the Irish psyche. Through this lens, I engage with Bog Gothic and Eco-Gothic traditions, exploring how landscape carries history, memory and the traces of human presence.

Pavel Isupov (England)

        Passage, 2024

        Oil on canvas, 100 x 150 cm

                Street in Winter, 2024

                Oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm

I am a painter whose practice is grounded in sustained studio work and a commitment to observation and process. Since completing my studies, I have developed a practice centred on painting as a way of thinking through image-making. Drawing on both contemporary and historical influences, I approach painting as a space for exploration rather than resolution. My work evolves through time, shaped by repetition, revision and attention to surface. I am interested in how painting can hold tension between intention and accident, allowing meaning to emerge gradually through the act of making.

Helen Jones (England)

        Hot, 2025

        Acrylic and cradled wood panel, 30 x 30 x 3.5 cm

        Rhythm in Green, 2025

        Acrylic and cradled wood panel, 30 x 30 x 3.5 cm

I came to painting later in life after a career in nursing, specialising in palliative care. These experiences have shaped my awareness of life’s fragility and value. Living in Yorkshire, I am deeply connected to nature, and its rhythms and transformations are central to my work. My practice is experimental and intuitive, often working in acrylic on canvas or wood. I am interested in how internal and external worlds interact, particularly in relation to environmental concerns and ongoing change. My paintings emerge through this tension, reflecting both personal experience and broader questions about the world. By pursuing my practice, I continue to explore my potential as an artist while responding to the shifting landscapes around me.

Belma Kratovic (Sweden)

        Arrived, 2026

        Glazed stoneware, rope, stainless steel ring

        Standing figure  9.5 x 3.5 x 2.5 cm, Hanging ear  7 x 3 x 0.7 cm

        Promised You a Miracle,

        Oil on aluminium panels, each 12 x 7.6 cm

I work across disciplines, exploring themes of memory, time, loss, and various borderlands. As a painter, I’m particularly interested in the portrait as a symbol, drawing inspiration from art history and popular culture as much as from my own life, observation and, not least, imagination. I primarily work in oil, and my paintings are often populated by solitary figures floating in liminal spaces, bringing nothing but themselves and an atmosphere.

In my most recent visual works, I draw inspiration from ancient rituals, further exploring themes of loss, faith, and magic. I consider my paintings reflections on condensed moments, while my sculptures – though solid clay objects – suggest a continual dissolving, almost moving in both shape and meaning. Although relatively small and figurative,

many of my works allow the materials to speak for themselves rather than simply illustrating a subject.

Tim Le Breuilly (Jersey)

My practice in painting and printmaking across a range of processes builds a visual language rooted in the natural world. I develop works through marks and gestures that

aim to capture nature as a living, animate force. Forms emerge and dissolve within atmospheric spaces, creating a sense of flux and shifting visibility. I am interested in how we perceive the world – how things appear, disappear and transform depending on how

we look. My practice is grounded in an embodied experience of landscape. Through colour, contrast and layering, I shape forms that reflect the density and vitality of the environments I encounter.

CD Lewis (England)

        Cave of the Heart, 2025

        Oil on cradled wood panel, 28 x 35 cm

I explore the interdependency of humans and nature through painting, engaging with the vibrations of matter and the essence of human experience.

Fictive, poetic, powerful, my oil paintings are instantaneously abstract, landscape and a state of mind, moving between abstraction, landscape and psychological space, creating images that function as both physical and emotional environments.

I draw from the real world and create something that takes on a life of its own within the canvas world. My approach is intuitive and poetic, allowing the work to evolve organically, avoiding explicit storytelling and instead rely on the subtleties and illusions to create an ambiguous and layered narrative.

Working from my studio in Dartmoor, landscape and embodied experience are central to my practice. I aim to create paintings that feel both immediate and expansive, grounded yet open.

Ben Llwyd (Wales)

        Pebediog 31, 2025

        Ink and oil on board, 28 x 23 cm

In my series Pebidiog, I use loose ink brushwork and liquid oil paint on board, incorporating decalcomania to introduce chance into the process. This allows forms to emerge organically, creating landscapes that remain open to interpretation. The works evoke shifting terrain and invite viewers to construct their own readings. The title Pebidiog, referencing the pre-Norman region of St Davids, connects the work to a specific yet enigmatic landscape. Across my broader practice, I explore painting, sculpture, installation and film, always balancing intention with unpredictability. I am interested in how materials behave and how images can emerge through process rather than prescription.

Emma Loizides (England)

        ABOVE        Blue Beach Hut 14th Street, 2024

                Oil on panel, 30 x 30 cm

        UPPER RIGHT        Docs Delray, 2025

                Oil on panel, 50 x 50 cm

        RIGHT        Venice Canal, 2025

                Oil on wooden panel, 35 x 26 cm

My fascination with Americana began in childhood through cinema, shaping my interest

in architecture, streetscapes and atmosphere. My path into art was non-traditional; after working in banking, I turned to painting through evening classes, developing my practice alongside travel. I draw inspiration from road trips, sketching and photographing moments of curiosity: sunsets, palm trees, signage and urban forms. My sketchbook acts as a

record of presence within a place. London also plays a key role, where I paint idealised, often empty, city scenes that evoke calm, stillness or quiet melancholy. Texture is central

to my work, influenced by painters like Wayne Thiebaud. I build surfaces that feel rich

and tactile, combining pastel tones with saturated colour. My paintings explore escapism and nostalgia, offering moments of reflection and pause within the intensity of contemporary life.

Joy C Martindale (England)

        Dear Moon, 2024

        Newsprint on canvas, acrylic, paint marker, 40 x 50 x 2 cm

I have a studio-based practice, working with paint and employing collage. I strive to make questioning, reflective works that are full of vitality and expression and have an affective impact. I love painting, writing, tracing, cutting out and collaging equally, where I can go back and forth between these different approaches to create surprising events and dialogues that could not be achieved through painting alone.

Associative, intuitive and always playful, the paintings, made through a process of documented thinking, construction and collage, are manifestations of reflections on life and the imagination. Using text, imagery, repetition and motif, situations and scenarios can begin with words or images, for example, written notes, transcriptions of a conversation, a saved newspaper story or page, or as notations in paint of moments of reflection, expression, experiment or catharsis. Their potential to make their arguments as paintings is then tested, as ideas, thoughts, gestures, and gathered source material are woven together into dialogue. Decisions are influenced by daily shifts in perspective, mood and energy.

Margo McNulty (Ireland)

        Self, 2025        Entangled 2, 2025

        Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 cm        Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm

My practice focuses on painting and printmaking as a way to explore ideas through materials and process. I see making art as a form of thinking, where meaning develops through working with surface and texture. By layering, reworking, and repeating marks, my surfaces build slowly, reflecting how memories and histories are formed in fragments over time. Painting allows me to work freely with gesture and space, while printmaking involves processes of transfer and layering that create depth and structure. Moving between the two helps me to balance spontaneity with control. My work explores memory, history, landscape, place, and still life. I see landscape and still life not just as physical subjects, but as emotional and psychological spaces shaped by experience.

Chloe S Moncrieff (England)

ABOVE        And the soil, the ancient nurse

        (Title after Ted Hughes), 2026

        Acrylic and oil mounted on wood,

        23cm x 30cm x 2 cm

UPPER RIGHT        Murmur of the Mountain, 2026

        Oils on mounted wood panel, 23 x 30 x 2 cm

RIGHT        Muliebrity, 2026

        Oil and oil stick on wood,         12 x 12 x 2cm

I’m seeking benevolent, unashamedly feminine worlds. There’s an element of joy, the saccharine and the sublime that I embrace. Alongside this, in the studio, an electric rod of energy, anxiety, pulses through my practice. This drives me to create spaces that function as portals, with distorted scale and heightened atmosphere.

Lately, I’ve been exploring the balance between order and chaos, the tension between art as a lived experience versus the interior. Capturing consciousness before it's too organised is slippery, a movement between intuition, emotion, memory and sensation. At times, it feels like limbs everywhere, disconnection but fluid, which is an element I’m exploring now. 

From women in a misty blue vista, to anthropomorphic floral-female hybrids, the composition is regularly informed by quotes I jot down or words I write. The written word

is symbiotic in my practice.

Martina O’Connor (Ireland)

As a multidisciplinary artist and writer working across painting, sculpture, installation, video, text, and large-scale works, I am drawn to themes of transformation, fragmentation, memory, and connection. Having moved across borders, geographical, professional and corporeal, I explore how identity shifts through place, perception and lived experience. These crossings are both personal and political, shaping how I navigate the world and how I create within it.

My background in multimedia production and long-standing writing practice inform a highly narrative and atmospheric approach. I create tactile worlds of sensation, silence, and emotional intensity, spaces where viewers are invited to step inside rather than simply observe. Painting often becomes the emotional centre of this process, but I move fluidly across mediums to find the most honest form for each idea.

The work explores how internal states can be made visible, how grief, resilience, memory, and identity can be translated through form, material, and atmosphere. At its core, my practice is about perception and positionality: how meaning shifts depending on where we stand, what we carry, and how we choose to look. I create to make people feel, reflect, and question, because art, to me, is a conversation starter, a catalyst and a bridge.

Michael Paramore (Wales)

        The Fear, 2025

        Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 100 cm 

        Death of the Wicker Madonna, 2025

        Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 300 cm

Drawing is fundamental to my practice. Whether in sketchbooks, life drawing or directly onto the canvas, everything begins with line. The initial stage is always a negotiation, working through composition, movement and pattern until the image starts to settle.

My paintings often contain figures, animals and environments that feel both familiar and unsettling. There is a tension between simplicity and intensity, with forms appearing flattened, stylised and slightly disquieting. Narratives emerge from personal history: childhood fears, difficult relationships and emotional memory. Innocence and unease coexist, where decorative or seemingly benign elements carry an undercurrent of tension. Through this, I construct self-contained worlds that feel at once playful and unsettling.

Annie Pender (England) 

        ABOVE        Interior, 2025

                Watercolour on paper, 35 x 35cm

        UPPER RIGHT        Skin, 2025

                Watercolour on paper, 30 x 30 cm

        RIGHT        Second Hand, 2025

                Watercolour on paper, 35 x 35 cm

I work in watercolour, using painting to find symbols for the unseen and to represent the moments that exist between us. Painting allows me to be present within these subtle, often intangible, experiences, helping me to understand the felt sense of the world. My background in psychotherapy and costume design informs my sensitivity to gesture, material and emotional nuance. These disciplines shape how I approach painting, allowing me to explore what sits beyond language – quiet exchanges, emotional undercurrents and relational spaces. Painting has been present in my life since childhood, and more recently I have deepened my practice through sustained focus in watercolours. My work seeks to hold and make visible the invisible connections that shape our experience of being.

Elspeth Penfold (England) 

Lamb 1, 2026         Lamb 2, 2026

Hand spun rope, fleece, gesso ground, watercolour,         Hand spun rope, fleece, gesso ground, watercolour,

sheep marker dye, hand spun thread on stretched         sheep marker dye, hand spun thread on stretched        

canvas, 20 x 20 cm        canvas, 20cm x 20 cm

I was born in La Paz, Bolivia to Argentine parents, and my practice moves between cultures, shaped by both my Andean heritage and my life in the UK. I work across disciplines, exploring relationships between people, place and language. My work is informed by Quechua, an indigenous Andean language that reflects a relational world view. Central to my practice is the concept of Ushuay: the energy that exists within people, nature and the cosmos. Through listening, observing and making, I seek to connect with this shared energy. My studio practice is fluid, responding to materials and contexts. I am currently working with a whole fleece sourced through a long-standing relationship with a farming family, continuing my interest in connection, process and exchange. Making art is both a source of energy and a way of holding the energies of the people and places I encounter.

Fiona Richmond (Guernsey)

        TOP LEFT        Pathway Through the Sea Beet at Port Grat, 2025

                Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm

        TOP RIGHT        Le Guet Watch House Diptych, 2026

                Oil on Canvas, 29 x 35 cm

        LEFT        The German Stone Crusher, 2025

                Oil and ormer shell on wood panel, 40.5 x 30.5 cm

My painting is landscape-based, but it asks questions about our human connections to the natural world.  It is grounded in my island home of Guernsey, but examines universal issues linked to the notion of ‘contested landscapes,’ tapping into the social, political, and environmental; personal and collective memory; and the conflict between the natural world and the man-made. Landscape acts as a metaphor for many interconnected human experiences: loss, desire, fragility and transience, rather than being a literal depiction of place.

Drawing in the landscape is often my starting point, making me think of past events that have reshaped the land, the people and their histories: the WWII occupation, and the changing industries and their impact on the land and community. The shapeshifting nature of oil paint allows chance and accident to work alongside deliberation and intuition, pushing work into unexpected directions at times. The surface of the painting acts as a site of accumulation, where mark and colour are laid down, disrupted, and reworked, allowing the past to surface obliquely. A work is complete when it feels emotionally charged and autonomous, but remains open for the viewer to make their own connections.

Arabella Ross (England)

        Entering into the Golden Light, 2024

        Gold leaf, drawings, ephemera, ink and pastel on

        recycled card, 70 x 58c m

My gold leaf collages began as a series in 2020. These quiet yet richly textured works weave together fragments of pencil drawings, family ephemera, paint, gold leaf, vintage diaries, dried flowers, and postal markings. They act as vessels for stories often left unspoken, stories embedded within the rich tapestries of women's everyday lives. Through a process of excavation using archival materials, I telescope through time and different eras to the present day, gaining a deeper understanding of the past.

Each work follows an impulse: an intuitive mark-making process, the placing of fragments combining figuration and abstraction, where the search for form and poetic meaning is firmly rooted in the present. Marks, symbolic imagery, and written words emerge intuitively as part of a visual language that invites personal interpretation. Hidden beneath the bold colour palette lies an exploration of deeper emotional terrain: grief, loss, darkness, light and joy. Angels represent heightened vibrations of light, embodying love and compassion. Gold leaf functions as a symbolic, alchemical material seeking expression and the transmutation of matter; used throughout the centuries, it evokes reverence, hope, and spirituality.

My part-Cypriot heritage on my maternal side equally informs my exploration of memory and identity.

Clare Scott (Ireland)

LEFT        June Drive, 2025, Acrylic on cradled board, 23 x 15 cm

CENTRE        Digger, Westtown, 2025, Acrylic on 12mm MDF, 21 x 15 cm

RIGHT        In the Shadow of the Carbuncle, 2025, Acrylic on cradled board, 23 x 15 cm

LEFT        21st Century Mermaid, 2024, plastic, concrete, expanding foam, H21 x W18 x D16 cm (variable)

CENTRE        Your Goofy Smile, 2024, Mirror stand, chain, plaster teeth, gloss paint, H15 x W20 x D10 cm (variable)

RIGHT        Remains (of a Pretty Dress), 2025, Remains of a dress, H25 x w40 cm (variable)

I am an Irish artist working across a range of media including large scale installations, sculpture, and smaller assemblages, all of which are underpinned by my origins as a painter. My paintings are largely figurative, emphasising the brush stroke and the energy of the process to lean on the dissonance between the painted image and the artwork as object. My sculptural practice, incorporating recycled and found materials, as well as elements of ‘failed’ studio experiments, expands on that dissonance, setting materials, process and figuration against each other, using it to explore issues which are both personal and global.

My process is slapdash and ‘shonky.’ Larger structures are created on site, jerry-rigged from materials to hand, wobbly results of knock-on decision making. Smaller studio works are (slightly) more considered. There is humour as well as pathos in this process, in the awkward pairings of materials, in the use of flunked attempts at self-expression and in the shakiness of the craftsmanship.

The small landscape paintings in Response might appear to be of a different nature to the sculptural work, but the immediacy and energy of the process is the same across the board, as is the subject matter, which touches on issues of destruction and waste for the sake of the ‘development.’

Durdica Selec (England)

        Hypnic Glow, 2025

        Acrylic, 46 x 38 cm

I explore the transient nature of being through abstract, process-led painting. My research draws on disrupted patterns and intangible forms created by fleeting mental, sensory, digital and optic phenomena. My work bridges the substantial and the spiritual via distortion and ambiguity, addition and subtraction. The paintings become visual investigations of perception and embodiment, at times fragmented, at times profoundly interconnected. They hover between visibility and dissolution, tracing fleeting impressions as they unfold within the quiet gaze of consciousness. 

Emma Sheridan (Ireland)

        Spread Like a Veil Upon a Rock, 2026

        Oil paint and mixed media on canvas, 40 x 30 cm

My practice is rooted in observation, memory and imagination, emerging from the fleeting rhythms of everyday life. I distil, layer and distort forms encountered in daily routines, allowing them to exist beyond rational understanding while remaining familiar. Through a diaristic approach, I transform acts of care and repetition into evolving visual language. My paintings expand into biomorphic, ambiguous spaces where shapes feel both grounded and untethered. These compositions hold a tension between structure and instability. I am interested in how these shifting forms invite the viewer into a state of reflection – adrift yet engaged – where meaning is not fixed but continuously unfolding.

Victoria Snazell (England)

        Creeping, 2026

        Oil and oil pastels, 20 x 25.5cm

My work sits in a space between representation and abstraction, shaped by my background in sculpture and engagement with materials. Through an intuitive process of constructing, breaking down and reassembling forms, my paintings and sculptures question what is valued, preserved or discarded over time. I am interested in themes of visibility, vulnerability and the ageing body, approached with a sense of humour. The work evolves through layering and revision, incorporating diverse materials to create tactile, shifting surfaces. I embrace instability and imperfection, allowing awkwardness and vulnerability to become strengths. For me, a successful artwork exists in an in-between state: alive, uncertain and open.

Diana Terry (England)

        Drystone Veins, 2024

        Oil on linen, 60 x 70 cm

        Winding Walls, 2024

        Oil on linen, 60 x 70 cm

I move between drawing, painting and sculpture, exploring the shifting relationship between humanity and the natural environment. Based in the Pennines, my practice is shaped by a landscape of moorland marked by deep geological histories and the traces of industrial extraction.

I am drawn to the scars left by quarrying, and to the quieter processes of healing and reclamation that follow. Through close observation and physical engagement with the land, I study the field walls, translating these into a visual language that sits between mapping and abstraction.

The paintings presented here are rooted in the landscape but do not describe it directly. Instead, I break it apart and reconfigure it, layering planes, lines and colour to reflect both the imposed geometries of human intervention and the more fluid, organic movements of the land itself. These works hold a tension between control and erosion, structure and collapse, inviting a slower, more tactile way of seeing.

Polly Tomlinson (England)

        Out of the Depths, 2026

        Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 120 x 90cm

My practice is rooted in intuition. I do not plan my paintings, I steal moments of stillness and dedicate this to my practice. I pay deep attention, responding to the canvas as it evolves in a creative conversation. Working in acrylics, oils and oil sticks, I build and strip back layers, allowing colour, texture and marks to tell stories words cannot hold.

For over 25 years I have been a homeopath and healer, which is inseparable from how I paint. Both practices ask the same thing, to be fully present and to trust what emerges rather than impose what is expected.

I am interested in the invisible – in what a painting can carry, that can only be felt.

Out Of The Depths evolved over a number of sittings and kept pulling me back. The work was waiting to surface as I continued to paint intuitively. I didn’t know what this would be;

I rarely do.

There is such an overlap between how I paint and how I work with my patients, the journey, the listening and presence. And knowing when to respond and when to act, as well as knowing when not to.

Eve Tudor (England)

        In a Room Full of People I Look for You,

        Oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm

Through drawing and oil painting I have found a personal and symbolic language that allows me to explore the iconography of motherhood and femininity, as well as personal mythology and sexual personae in a way that feels recognisable to me and hopefully to the viewer. I am interested in exploring uncomfortable aspects of human experience, particularly feminine rage, deep emptiness and grief, whilst also allowing the duality in love to embody my work and to create a deeper sense of self.

The application of paint and its movement on the surface of the canvas is a sensual element in the work, and the pictorial calmness it evokes belies the intensity of the emotion that inspires it. This alludes to how the ‘feminine’ often hides the rage beneath the calm.

My paintings are imaginary and mostly derived from organic forms and landscapes, as well as a mixture of figurative, often with a geometric structure. Sensory elements of memorised sun on skin or light through trees are evoked as a remembrance of feeling as much as a figurative element.

Channelling the rage of Tracey Emin, Frida Kahlo and Hilma af Klimt, and the colours of Edvard Munch and Friedensreich Hundertwasser, I am expanding my themes to include ageing and the feminine archetypes.

In a world of shifting order and perspectives I hope my work reflects the masks and moods of female experience.

Hester Vermeer (Netherlands)

        Untitled, 2026         Untitled, 2026        

        Ink, watercolour, charcoal and collage on paper,         Oil on linen, 50 x 60 cm

        49 x 64 cm        

My work stems from visual traces from the world around me, art history, and a fascination for colour, space, form and composition. To me painting is poetry. I have a need to digest what I see. I think it is about trying to understand, to explore, and a compulsion to make something.

I am interested in how the structure of a painting is connected to elements like colour, light, form, line and space. Drawing is important in my practice, which I make next to painting and it helps to find something of a core. With painting there is a constant dialogue with the material itself, between intention and chance, predictability and daring, the temptation of colour and gesture and how to react to it. There are so many different ways of saying something; a certain nuance can steer a work in a whole other direction. I like this sensitivity of the material. I work mostly with oil paint, which has its own way of behaving. It can be difficult sometimes, but I try and let doubt and uncertainty be part of the work. My paintings are landscapes, though not in a fixed or descriptive way. They become a space where ambiguity is held rather than resolved. I want colour and form to make their own poetry.

Robyn West (England) 

ABOVE        What Once Was Held, 2026

        Powder coated steel, solder, H62 x W50 x D40 (variable)

UPPER RIGHT        Separation II, 2025

        Waxed raw copper-coated steel, solder, acrylic sheet, H71 x W17 x D17

LOWER RIGHT        Tracery I,  2026         

        Blasted steel, solder, acrylic sheet, H26.5 x W27 x D27

My practice responds to the forms, lines and materiality of the built environment, referencing processes in construction and structural frameworks to make abstract sculptures. A key element is colour that harnesses the ephemeral qualities of natural light, producing transient illuminations. I find the human response to unexpected encounters with illuminations intriguing, which is an ongoing aspect of my practice. Through the choice of materials and relationship of sculpture to space, contrasts emerge between light and shadow, the physical and intangible, the fragile and unyielding, the static and fleeting.

Drawing on architecture, industrial spaces and stained glass, I create works that explore how structures, materials, colour and light affect perception and experience.

Emma Withers (England)

        The Control. Tower, 2025        Cadair Idris, 2025

        Watercolour and pastel on gesso-coated        Watercolour and pastel on gess0-

        plywood, 9 x 10 cm        coated plywood, 9 x 10 cm

My painting is often of landscapes, animals or birds. I attempt to unlock the human. I am interested in and adore the details of renaissance paintings and fascinated with medieval illumination, e.g. a pelican shown pecking at her own breast in order to feed her children.

I reuse surfaces and old work. There is beauty in the degradation. I use plenty of layers of gesso, marble dust, acrylic, pastel, oil and homemade ink. The result reminds me of rediscovered frescoes, or sometimes satellite photos or ultrasound scans. 

In landscape I am interested in how nature survives millions of years and reinhabits the decommissioned military bases and industrial farmland where I live. 

In all these images, I seek beauty and find warnings. There are battles, there is kindness in all communities… even among siblings. Withers’s own family, like many others.

There are clues in the irregular, seemingly broken or useless, for here is potential for change, even beauty. 

Without chaos there is no sense of order. 

Energy always leads to a breaking down. 

We are completely entangled with nature. 

Mariane Zenker (USA)

        Bunny Ears (Superbowl), 2026        Space Junk (Minneapolis protests ICE), 2026

        Oil on gessoed paper, 27 x 27 cm        Oil on gessoed paper, 30 x 30c m

My work explores the intersection of culture and ecology. While interested in spirituality and in the spirit inherent in living things, I am also guided by literature and current events. 

In everything there are metaphors: how perception is affected by memory, how seeing is shaped by feeling, feeling somehow becomes thinking, comprehension constrained by belief. So much is trapped within language, but painting thankfully happens outside of that framework. For me, art is an essential form of communication. 

But this is also a metaphor: pushing around negative and positive space to determine which is ascendent, while layering color to make more color. I draw daily, and paint primarily with both oils and Flashe. Working on gessoed paper allows me to readily overlay, draw and rework, allowing chance to have a place in the work. 

Being a first-generation American artist, the politics of our time are profoundly unsettling. These pieces were done during a particularly fraught period: the Minneapolis ICE protests and Bad Bunny’s Superbowl performance.

Split Collective Members in the Guernsey Show

Additional Members of Split Collective

Adam Linus Charlton (Wales), Anna Shin, Alison Berry (England), Shirley Copperwhite (Ireland), Carlo Formisano (England), Catharine Davison (Scotland), Catherine Wynne-Paton, Charmaine Evans, Elaine Quinlan (Ireland), Emily Morey (Germany), Fabienne Herbert (Ireland), Jennifer Cooke, Jo Fleming, Josephine Phillips, Josie Appleby, Judith Shaylor (Scotland), Kerrie Oliver (Australia), Khanh Van Dang Nguyen (Vietnam/UK), Lucy Threlfall, Maeve Curtis (Ireland), Nick Ivins (England), Penny Green (England), Shirley Copperwhite (Ireland), Tracey McMaster, Vivian Verbrugge, Zelga Miller (England), Zerrin Atakan (England).