Rebalancing the Abstract 
An exhibition of abstract sculpture and painting 
curated by Talking Sculpture Making (TSM). 

The Margate School of Art
31-33 High Street
Margate, CT9 1DX

Private View Thursday 8 October 2026, 5-8pm 
Exhibition open Thursday 8 – Sunday 18 October 2026
Tuesday – Sunday, 10-4pm 

Free public discussion with the artists, chaired by artist and writer John Bunker
Saturday 17 October, 1.30-4pm. Everyone welcome. 

As a member of the collective Talking Sculpture Making (TSM), I am one of the curators and exhibitors.

Throughout their careers, the TSM sculptors have chosen not to make work about women’s issues and domesticity, preferring instead to focus on material, process, space and visual connections. For the exhibition at The Margate School, TSM want to interrogate and open up conversations about how the visual languages of this discipline refer indirectly to the complex world we live in and how much this can be understood as gendered, fuelling discussions that explore and dissect the content and nuance of the artists’ respective practices and how they engage with ideas. 

For this exhibition, TSM invites London and Margate based artist Melanie Ahmed to show with them. Melanie’s paintings and deconstructed painted objects offer a bridge between the more familiar genre of abstract painting and the composition of form, materiality, colour and surface in the works by the TSM sculptors.

Each time TSM exhibits they host a free public discussion about their practice, ideologies and experiences of working as women abstract artists, aiming to provide an inclusive environment for audiences to engage and respond on their terms.  The discussion for Rebalancing the Abstract will be chaired by artist and writer John Bunker in the exhibition, offering an exchange of ideas around the languages of abstract art and the evolving nature of women’s art practices. 

I am delighted to be showing ‘Optimistic Projection – Reach’, alongside the work of 100 artists in Perennial 2026 at Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth, Derbyshire.

28 August – 20 September 2026
Open Friday – Sunday, 12 -5.

Opening party 28 August from 6pm.

Selected by an independent panel, Perennial brings together over 100 artists working across a wide range of disciplines, backgrounds and approaches. The exhibition places artists side by side whose paths might not otherwise have crossed, creating opportunities for new conversations and connections.

Haarlem Artspace
The Red Lion
Market Place
Wirksworth
DE4 4ET

Featuring: Shivani Khoshia, Wren Tilbrook, Stevie Davies, Geoffrey Slater, Gavin Muschamp, Diana Green, Pat Shenstone, Gunther Walker, Esther Patterson, Rebecca Gallagher, Pat McCabe, Robert Slater, Peter Knight, Emma Buckley, Anna Spear, Philip Searle, Glennie Kindred, Kate Learmouth, Ruth Cox, another mo poet (Michael Ormond), Amanda Graham, Dan Hamer, Alison Ballard, Tracey Keeping, Paula Moss, Tricia Rice, Maxine Hall, Studio Skai / Joe Winstanley, Dermot Punnett, Danny Marsh, Caroline Hallett, Ryan Leigh, J M F Casey, Maria Dryden, Sloes, Graeme McKenna, Richard Hyde, Lucy Nelson, Peter Bonnell, Ellen Angus, David Manley, Ellen Yates, Jane Walker, Lisa Banks, Sireen Martin, John Lawrence, Jun Rui Lo, Dinosaur Kilby, Lucy Stevens, Lucie Kordacova, Theodora Prassa, Linda J Wallis, Duncan Poulton, Ash Martin, Eddy Dreadnought, Rachel Anne Grigor, Yelena Popova, Nelson + Woodward, Toby Curtis, Lois Gardner Sabet, Jackie Berridge, Lucy Marriott, Matt Midwood, Lucy Vardy, Andy Jackson, Nic Gear, Stella Baraklianou, Georgina Barney, Ava Ord, Jenny Eden, Victoria Ellis, Xin Chen, Devlin Shea, Ruby Waage Townsend, Linda Hemmersbach, Lotti V Closs, Matthieu Leger, Leon Welburn, Corrina Rothwell, Kate Langrish-Smith, Sarah Poots, Fay Nicolson, Rekha Godbole, Jack Kettlewell, Fleur Patrick, Hannah Taylor, Gabriel Tejada, Craig Fisher, Felix Wint, Sarogini Reddiar, Charlotte Coulbert, Amanda Nichol, Callum Harrison, Jo Heron, Eliza O’Boyle, Leah Nyssa Stewart, Liz Harrington, Zachary Jackson, Ivan Smith, Penny Brereton, Marie Paurin, Geoff Diego Litherland, Natasha Dixon, Fiona Allen, Abbie Canning, Johnny White and Amanda Wray, David Pidgeon, Joel Barton, Alexander Stubbs, Anna Pye, Thomas Griffiths, Emma Bolland, Gillian Brent, Orla Kurkierewicz Toland, Dale Christopher Wells, Andrew Bracey, John Rimmer, Eleanor Breeze, Sophie Mackfall, Charlotte Saint Cullen, Helen Carr, Rebecca Elves, Jennie Syson, Tyler Mellins, Alana Lake.

I am delighted to have been invited by Alexandra Harley to show a piece in the annual London Group sculpture exhibition in St John’s Church Gardens, next to Waterloo Station, London.

‘Now I make a leaf of Voices’ is a free outdoor sculpture exhibition in partnership with St John’s Church and the Waterloo Festival 2026. 

Monday 6th July – Sunday 6th Sep
Open: 9am – 8pm

The theme originates from Walt Whitman’s roaring, elegant poem ‘Voices’ from his celebrated collection ‘Leaves of Grass’ published in 1855. It celebrates polyphony and plurality at the core of the creative expression. It takes the shape of personal and communal voices, expressing emotions, histories and opinions. Voices can soothe, entertain, anger or lead. The London Group members and invited artists take inspiration from the theme, combine materials, words and sounds and use the churchyard gardens to raise their ‘sculptural voices’.

I have made a new piece ‘ Divided Attention’. The Latin root for the word attention is attendere, which means “to stretch toward” or “to give heed to”.  The sculpture rises up from a tree stump hoping to participate in passing conversations. It is constructed from a collection of materials and forms, each with their own language and role.

The London Group Exhibiting Artists
Barbara Beyer, Paul Bonomini, Clive Burton, Paul and Laura Carey, Martin Darbyshire, Stathis Dimitriadis, Alexandra Harley, Aude Hérail Jäger, Annie Johns, Anne Leigniel, Jockel Liess (Partial Wave Child), Sumi Perera, Paul Tecklenberg, Marcia Teusink.

Invited Artists
Andrew Ash, Gillian Brent, Andy D’Cruz, Amanda Francis, Geoixos (Partial Wave Child), Andia Coral Newton, Jessica Palmer, Desa Philippi, Yuko Shiraishi, Mark Sowden, John Wigley, Shotaro Yoshino.

I am excited to be showing ‘Offsetting the Arbitrary’ in this exhibition:

ASSEMBLY
The Royal Society of Sculptors brings an international survey of contemporary sculpture to Sunderland
13 June – 25 July 2026
The Abject Gallery & The Moving Gallery, Athenaeum, Sunderland

This summer, Sunderland becomes the meeting point for an ambitious international gathering of contemporary sculptural practice as Assembly brings together thirty-five distinguished members of the Royal Society of Sculptors (RSS) for a major exhibition at The Abject Gallery and The Moving Gallery, Sunderland.

Presenting current and site-responsive works by artists from across the UK, Europe, Mexico and the United States, Assembly foregrounds sculpture as one of the most expansive forms in contemporary art today. The exhibition includes artists whose practices span installation, land art, performance, object-making, architectural intervention, film and expanded material experimentation.

After nearly 30 years of making a living by developing and delivering workshops and projects, I am giving it all up to focus on being a full-time sculptor.

I have worked with many thousands of children, young people and adults in art galleries such as The Hepworth Wakefield, Nottingham Contemporary, Tate Liverpool and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, schools, colleges, youth and alternative provision and in community settings.

Thanks to all the wonderful artists and programmers I have worked with over the years, and to the participants whose responses and engagement have made it a sometimes challenging but very stimulating and rewarding experience. It has been a good parallel practice to my studio practice; keeping me in touch with all the different audiences for sculpture and encouraging me to learn new skills, approaches and methods of communicating about and advocating for modern and contemporary art.

‘Optimistic Projection – Up’ has been selected for the Winter Group Show at Linden Hall Studio in Deal, Kent. It is the fifth time I have been selected for this cracking annual exhibition, which always shows a great selection of artists.

The show is on 6 December – 31 January. Open Tues – Sat, 10-4.

Every Autumn artists and curators Sean Williams and Tyler Mellins sensitively select and curate a show that showcases the wide-ranging practices and talents of artists who have studios at Yorkshire Artspace. I am pleased to have been one of the 40 artists selected this year. My sculpture ‘Optimistic Projection – Reach‘ is placed in the centre of the gallery, giving viewers plenty of space to walk around it and look both close up and at a distance.
Yorkshire Artspace, Persistence Works, 21 Brown Street, Sheffield S1 2BS.

The exhibition coincides with the Yorkshire Artspace Open Studios on 15th & 16th November.

curated by Cathy Wills

Hypha HQ, Unit 3, Euston Tower, 286 Euston Road, NW1 3DP

PV: 14th October, 6 – 9pm
Curators Tour: 18th October, 11am
Open: 15th October – 19th October 202511am – 7pm

Adding to the mix of cultural events across London coinciding with Frieze art fair, Hypha Studios are pleased to announce their exhibition A Moveable Feast. A curated exhibition of over 40 artists selected by renowned curator and art collector, Cathy Wills, all works will be available to purchase directly through Hypha Curates, a new sales platform designed to support the charitable work of Hypha Studios.

Highlights include Katherine Giordano’s oil painting Roaming Turf, a fragment of which is used on the exhibition promotional literature. Exploring the shifting ground between familiarity and estrangement, Giordano has a singular style here capturing in soft light a body at once relaxed and in comfort, but also compressed and seemingly confined. Another work, Weight / Tension / Restriction, by Gemma Holzer, is inspired by Neolithic sites and relics, but recomposed into a steel-framed construction with uncanny representations of unknown elements suspended by chains. Himani Gupta’s Lunar Crossings is an oil and pigment work inspired by a Tarkovsky film, foreground and background combining into one contemplative scene.

The Hypha Studios HQ gallery will be punctuated by sculpture. Sheffield-based artist Gillian Brent’s Not a Pair of Scales is a pillar topped by an assemblage of discarded materials, reforming nostalgia and familiarity. Lizzie Cardozeo explores the softness of breath and material volume with Folded Breath, a poetic conjoining of blown glass and rock. Aren’t you going to light them? II is an oak totem by Robin Bigret investigating industrially scarred landscapes and industrial fragments found within them. 

The exhibition traverses pictorial to conceptual: Michalis Karaiskos’ Untitled (Partner) is a tender oil painting of a body leaning against a radiator, intimate and silently charged, while Rafa Roeder’s Useless Device is a sculptural “experimental machine” created to question the relationship between capital and technology. 

A Moveable Feast marks the launch of Hypha Curates, a new purpose-driven online art sales platform designed to open the doors of collecting to wider audiences, directly supporting UK artists. Launched by arts charity Hypha Studios, the platform gives 70% of sales income directly to artists, with the remaining 30% funding Hypha Studios’ charitable work, which has already provided free studio and exhibition spaces for over 2,100 artists in 64 UK locations since 2021.

I am so pleased to have been selected for the Royal Society of Sculptors’ Summer Show this year. It is at Burgh House in Hampstead, London.

The Summer Show 2025 has been selected and curated by Polly Bielecka, Gallery Director,
Pangolin London Sculpture Gallery and the theme she has selected for the show is ‘Sculpture in the Home’

About her choice of theme for the Summer Show 2025, Polly has said: ‘Given the unusual location of this year’s show, Burgh House, a beautiful 18th Century Queen Anne Style Home built in 1704 in the middle of Hampstead, the exhibition takes as its inspiration the innovative series of Post War touring exhibitions organised by the Arts Council under the title ‘Sculpture in the Home’. These exhibitions explored and celebrated the important role sculpture plays in a domestic environment.’

Exhibition: 
Thursday 17 July – Sunday 21 September

Opening times: 
Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays + Bank Holidays, 10am to 4pm

Address:
Burgh House, New End Square, London, NW3 1LT

FREE ENTRY

I am delighted to have had my sculpture ‘Argumentative Map – Middle’, 2024 selected for this exhibition.

The exhibition features an inspiring selection of works by artists over 50 who have not only honed their skills but have also navigated the challenging landscape of the art world with unwavering determination. It seeks to honour those who have consistently pushed forward, demonstrating that true artistic success is a marathon not a sprint.