While It Holds
Artist
Georgia Beaumont, Bobbye Fermie, Beatrice Hassell-McCosh, Rosie Harbottle, Selby Hurst Inglefield, Anna Kesäniemi, Katy Papineau, & Sophie Smorczewski
While It Holds brings together new work by Georgia Beaumont, Bobbye Fermie, Beatrice Hassell-McCosh, Rosie Harbottle, Selby Hurst Inglefield, Anna Kesäniemi, Katy Papineau and Sophie Smorczewski. The exhibtion is curated in collaboration with Susan Davis.
While It Holds considers landscape as a living archive – a place where memory, emotion and experience are held within the natural world. Bringing together painting alongside selected ceramic and sculptural works, the exhibition explores how environments retain traces of lived experience, carrying stories of belonging, inheritance and cultural memory across time.
The title reflects the idea of something briefly suspended: a moment of stillness before light changes, before a season turns, before something slips from view. Across the exhibition, landscape is approached not as static scenery but as something intimate, emotional and shaped by the past. Fields, flowers, gardens and shifting terrains become places where experience and imagination meet.
The artists gathered here share an attentiveness to the natural world, exploring how place can shape identity, preserve stories and evoke personal and collective memory. Landscape becomes a space where histories accumulate like sediment – where traces of family stories, folklore, ritual and lived experience remain embedded within the land.
There is a gentle tension throughout the exhibition between permanence and fragility. Katy Papineau's paintings filter observed landscapes through recollection and imagination, allowing atmosphere, colour and feeling to shape the visible world, while Beatrice Hassell-McCosh explores cycles of growth, decay and renewal through richly layered painterly surfaces.
Georgia Beaumont transforms botanical forms into a personal symbolic language, drawing parallels between the cyclical rhythms of the natural world and our own inner landscapes of thought and emotion. Rosie Harbottle's luminous works weave together folklore, pattern and close observation of place, reflecting on family, belonging and what living systems leave behind. Rooted in time spent in wild landscapes, her paintings consider how stories, rituals and connections to place are carried across generations.
Bobbye Fermie's figures emerge through earthy palettes and intimate compositions that explore intergenerational relationships, inherited connections to land and family histories, while Sophie Smorczewski's dreamlike paintings blur the boundaries between landscape and longing, creating spaces that exist somewhere between the felt and the remembered. Ceramic works by Anna Kesäniemi preserve delicate natural forms in moments of suspended stillness, while Selby Hurst Inglefield's sculptural works evoke the quiet resilience of the natural world, reflecting on growth, transience and what place holds within it.
Throughout the exhibition, flowers bloom and fade, seasons shift and memories are continually remade. Rather than presenting landscape as distant or picturesque, While It Holds invites viewers to encounter the land as intimate and embodied – a place where private memory and collective experience meet, through painting, ceramics and sculpture, and where the stories we inherit, remember and pass on remain held within it.
Date:
25 June – 24 July 2026
Georgia Beaumont (b.1996) is a UK-based painter whose work reimagines botanical and floral forms through thin oil glazes on panel, exploring femininity, natural cycles and a shared life-force. She has exhibited in London, Barcelona, Milan, Mexico City and Sydney.
Bobbye Fermie (b.1990, Amsterdam) completed a BA at the Royal Academy of Fine Art Antwerp before undertaking the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School, London. Working in watercolour, collage and printmaking, she creates dreamlike figures navigating imaginary spaces. Her work is held in the Royal Collection and the Moritz-Heyman Collection.
Beatrice Hasell-McCosh (b.1990) studied at Leith School of Art and the Royal Drawing School. Her large-scale paintings are rooted in close observation of the natural world, working as much from memory as from life, and are held in private collections across the UK, Europe, Japan and the USA.
Rosie Harbottle is based on the edge of Dartmoor and studied Illustration at Plymouth University. Working in oil pastel, watercolour and acrylic, her paintings draw on folk art, pattern and the rhythms of the natural world. She has exhibited at the Garden Museum and Charleston House.
Selby Hurst Inglefield (b.1997, Brighton) studied at Central Saint Martins. Her textile-based practice uses rug punching to create wall hangings rich with domestic memory, nostalgia and dream-like imagery, winner of the Other Art Fair Award.
Anna Kesäniemi is a Helsinki-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves between ceramic sculpture, textile design and painting. Guided by a foundation in illustration and graphic design, her work is defined by rich textures, intricate pattern and bold colour, and she is known particularly for her ceramic butterfly reliefs.
Katy Papineau (b.1991, London) graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bristol and completed the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School, where she is now faculty. Her paintings begin in observed drawings of everyday life, transformed in the studio through memory, colour and imagination. Her work is held in the Royal Collection and the Moritz-Heyman Collection.
Sophie Smorczewski is a London-based painter recently graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where she was awarded the Cass Art Painting Award. Working across oil on canvas and paper, she draws on close observation of gardens and landscapes, making pigments from organic materials that continue to alter over time.
