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.’

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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.

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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. 

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Fiona Richmond

Curator