Like a Beacon Against the Cold

Cameron’s contemplative oil paintings depict everyday scenes of people in the city to highlight the overlooked, understated, and fleeting mo- ments in life. Through his work, he seeks to imbue the everyday with a sense of beauty and grandeur. Cameron’s paintings combine the tactili- ty of oil paint, with the unintended beauty of vernacular photography to create compositions with a sense of ambiguity and open narrative, inviting the viewer to question what they see. Focusing on city life, his paintings convey the innate tension between togetherness and isolation in urban environments. Motifs and subjects such as shop windows, urban architecture and pedestrians appear as signifiers for the nature of contemporary life. His work is held in the collections of The Government Art Collection, UK; The X Museum, Beijing, China; The University of Dundee, UK; The Tayside Medical History Museum Art Collection, UK as well as private collections in the UK, USA, China, France and Germany.

Gardner creates figurative paintings and drawings with a focused interrogation on his own body and its relationship to different spaces, both real and imagined. The body is always half concealed / half revealed, emerging behind flora, fences or veils. The images are staged to slowly reveal themselves, initiating an act of looking, one where the gaze must penetrate a boundary, a threshold, a gateway through and into the picture plane. Colour is a core anchor in Gardner’s imagery, often very vibrant and glowing as if lit from within, radiating from the inside-out towards the viewer. Gardner recently won the ACS Studio Prize and completed the residency programme at Palazzo Monti, Italy. His work is in prominent collections including the V&A, the Royal Collection and private collections in Africa, Europe and USA.

Responding to an increasingly digitised world where images and time periods merge and appear in one seemingly eternal present, Gillett hopes to slow down these increasingly fast-paced encounters into images of reverie. Taking reference from the emotionally charged vivbrancy of post-Impressionism and the devotional nature of Western religious formats, her combination of traditional subjects with contemporary materials enables her to thread a line between multiple perspectives and time periods. She was shortlisted for the Ingram prize in 2020 and was one of the 2023 New Contemporaries. She undertook the Palazzo Monti Residency  in 2024.

Graduating in 2019 from Wimbledon College of Art, Lily went on to win the Lim Ai Fang Art prize at the Woon Foundation Prize. With an underlying interest in exploring narratives touching on the fluidity of gender and identities; Lily Kemp’s paintings explore escapism, storytelling, the act of dressing up and playing out imagined roles. The sense of scale in Lily’s paintings is often distorted and exaggerated with an interchangeable indistinct relationship between her figures and the space surrounding them, her landscapes seeming to breathe a life of their own. Scenes are often hyper idealised and fantastical; her figures living within these imagined worlds and dream-like realities which are both familiar, yet also border on the performative and theatrical.

Gaia Ozwyn is a Caribbean-British artist, who completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024, supported by the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship. Originally trained as a biomedical scientist and in Medicine, she spent several years working as a doctor in the NHS before committing to a full-time painting practice. Ozwyn’s work explores transitional spaces – borderlands and peripheries – as sites of tension, transformation, and truth. Rooted in the shared experience of inhabiting a corporeal and shifting world, the paintings reflect a dynamic interplay between material presence and transience. In 2025, Ozwyn was selected for the RCA BLK x Yinka Shonibare Foundation residency, held at the G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria.

Cece Philips’ luminous compositions explore ideas of spectatorship and voyeurism. Embodying the role and spirit of the flâneur, or flâneuse, and drawing on a multitude of sources; from the archive, film stills, found imagery, and memory, she weaves together historical and contemporary influences to interrogate ideas of interiority, desire and loneliness. Framing is a recurring device in Philips’ paintings, through windows and doorways, barriers and veils are constructed to challenge an easy reading of her female protagonists. Often situated within the night, the settings surrounding her figures have symbolic and metaphorical weight, investigating interior and exterior worlds, while drawing on ideas of power, performance and gender, to imagine both a differ- ent subject and viewer. The palette, as well as the attention to light and space, all lend the work a psychological and narrative depth—details that lead us through and beyond the work, and activate the viewer’s own imagination.

Ming Ying’s series of oil paintings delves into the symbolic and emotional essence of female identity, blending historical and cultural narratives with a deeply personal exploration of form and texture. Working with heavy impasto oil paint, Ying uses thick, expressive layers to create a tactile experience, inviting viewers to not only see but feel the depth of her work. Each brushstroke is a deliberate act of storytelling, where the physicality of the paint itself echoes the complexity and strength of the women portrayed. With an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2020, her work has been awarded and short- listed for a number of prestigious prizes including: First prize of “Effect Edge” International Juried Exhibition (2019); Winner of Khojaly Peace Prize for Art (2017); Chadwell Award (2020) Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize (2018); Ashurst Emerging artist prize (2018).