UNFOLDING PRACTICE
In 2024, I began my MA Fine Art at Brighton University to provide the space to pause, reflect, and reshape my creative practice. I found myself asking big questions: Why do I paint what I paint? Why flowers, why vases? And what happens when I give room to the many creative voices I’d kept hidden?
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For years, I was primarily known for my semi-abstract still-life paintings - flowers in vases exploring memory, light, and emotion. But beneath the surface, I had quietly developed other creative identities that hadn’t yet been given space to breathe. The MA has provided that room.
The first year has been a journey of exploration, conversations, and risk-taking. I started to see my work as a whole - not just the paintings, but the threads of memory, identity, and storytelling woven through everything I create.
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I spent time looking back over my work from the years - creating a photo book that documented the subtle connections between my past paintings and the images that had subconsciously inspired them.
Alongside this, I physically burned and sanded back layers of paintings, revealing excavated marks and memories beneath the surface. These peeled-back layers, born of hours of patient work, were exhibited in my interim show in February, offering viewers a glimpse into the hidden processes and histories embedded in my practice.
THE BOOTH: A MANY MINDS PROJECT
The culmination of year one was The Booth, my first installation. An immersive self-portrait, it brought together all the strands of my practice. As a gallerist, who predominantly shows at art fairs, the booth concept was the obvious platform in which to exhibit each persona, communicating who I am in a clear voice.
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The Booth invites you to step inside, explore, and play gallerist - engaging with a complex landscape of a creative life lived through many voices. I decided to curate all the personas I had kept separate or hidden. It is a playful yet deeply personal exploration of memory, identity, and the many selves that shape my work.
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For the first time, these personas were shown together, in conversation with one another and with my primary practice. Their coexistence reflects my belief that creativity is rarely linear or singular - it is layered, contradictory, and sometimes surprising.
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The Booth was awarded a Distinction, which I’m deeply proud of. More importantly, it marked a shift in how I see my practice: not as a single track, but as a rich, layered story.
Drawing on over two decades of navigating the art world and a deeply personal journey through the first year of my MA, this project embraces multiplicity, memory, and the neuroscience of creativity. It is a thoughtful meditation on how identity is built, fragmented, and reassembled - a place where colour, emotion, vessel, and memory collide.
The Booth, 2025
Brighton University Summer Show
The Booth is a semi-theatrical way of exploring all these disciplines. It is a form of artistic chorus that provides a platform for both exploration and explanation.
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Practically, it was built to feel authentic and personal, using standard procedures, my regular furniture items and accurate signage. The carpet came from a skip after an art fair. Inside the booth, drawers held the essentials I’ve discovered I need at art fairs - tools, office ephemera, snacks, Berocca, and even nail varnish. A simple lighting rig from the gallery lit the space, highlighting the work without fuss. A visitor book, lanyards, spare works in the storage space all made the structure feel authentic. creating a space that felt approachable and genuine. More than just an exhibition, it was a glimpse into my unique creative world.
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In creating this installation I have made connections, revealed hidden parts and achieved a deeper understanding of my practice. Here, past, present, and future combine, revealing the ongoing process by which a creative practice unfolds.
Lara Bowen Atmospheric floral paintings that explore light, colour, and the emotional resonance of memory. These works form the core of my practice, where still life becomes a metaphor for fleeting moments and the passage of time.
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Will Howell Textural mixed media abstractions inspired by synaesthesia and the archaeology of time. These pieces dig into layers - literally and conceptually - revealing the marks, patterns, and rhythms of memory.
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Ceridwen Large, reformed vessels that act as mythic containers, holding emotion, memory, and personal narratives. These ceramic forms echo the idea of the vessel as both a protective space and a body.
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Elle Be Layered photographic self-portraits that act as a visual journal of memory, womanhood, and presence. This strand of work examines vulnerability and the shifting relationship between the self and the gaze.
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Colourful Language Humorous, chart-like works that explore our emotional connection to colour and the vocabularies of different life phases - from the chaos of lockdown to midlife reflections.
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Irene Catt Quiet, powerful life drawings from 1929–30 by my maternal grandmother. These works create a generational thread, reminding me that creativity, resilience, and observation are part of my artistic lineage.
LOOKING FORWARD
The Booth marked the start of something bigger - an invitation to keep expanding my creative language. Next term, I plan to push beyond painting and deepen my work across different departments at the uni. I’ll be spending time in the photography studio, developing larger, more ambitious works under Elle Be, using screen printing and working with a model to explore layers of identity and selfhood in new ways.
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I’m also drawn to tactile and material experimentation: weaving on the looms to explore textiles as holders of memory, and working with blown glass in a private studio to develop sculptural forms that echo and expand on my ceramic vessels. These explorations feel like natural extensions of my practice - different voices and media, but all part of the same conversation about light, memory, and emotional resonance.
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Each of these experiments feeds directly back into my core painting practice, enriching it with new textures, ideas, and cross-disciplinary energy. The floral works remain at the heart of what I do, but these explorations allow me to expand their language - to think bigger, work bolder, and create pieces that speak on multiple levels. Over the next year, my goal is to bring this expanded practice to a wider audience - through exhibitions, collaborations, and by connecting with galleries and collectors with work that is both contemporary and deeply personal.