We explore ‘Identity’ with our first exhibition of 2026 running throughout February. Join us for our Exhibition Launch Night on Friday 13th to meet the artists, see the works on sale and display and enjoy a drink from the bar. Also find out more about our upcoming events, creative workshops and more!
Exhibiting Artists.
Arabella Yapp - @Arabellayapppainting
Arabella Yapp is a Contemporary artist from South East London, she studied fine art at Goldsmiths and Middlesex Universities.
Alongside painting Arabella worked as a teacher for many years specialising as an inclusion manager in London schools. Arabella is fascinated with the connection between the abstract qualities of shimmering light and iridescence and capturing how light falls on different surfaces. One of her earliest memories is feeling ecstatic when given metallic powder paint at Nursery school and using it to paint Princesses.
She paints using acrylics sometimes incorporating metallic paints and coloured metallic leaf. She employs vibrant jewel- like colours, focussing on creating impact and bright light by juxtaposing saturated contrasting colours, to make them “sing” and vibrate against each other. Arabella has a keen interest in portraiture and focuses on painting people and places she loves and experiences that bring her joy, using painting like a visual gratitude diary. She lives and works in a diverse, inner city setting and this inclusive life experience is a reflected in her autobiographical work. She investigates the choreography of relationships and the social harmony amongst people from diverse backgrounds in the world in which she lives and works.
Her most frequent subjects are her children, family and close friends. Swimming and water are frequent themes in her work symbolising family fun and happiness. As an obsessionally ardent swimmer she shares this love of water with her parents, siblings and her own children who feature swimming and diving in many of her paintings. Arabella loves to capture the human body in movement such as dancing or diving.
Elhaam Sahebdin @elhaam.sahebdin
“and which of the favours of your Lord will you deny?” is a rhetorical question repeated numerously in the Quran intended to encourage gratitude and appreciation for all creation through mindfulness and living with intention.
From this, I create scenes inspired by nature that use real and imagined subjects, using simple materials such as coloured pencils and fine liners. I create intuitively, allowing my mood to guide the composition and the colours as I work, resulting in art that is both personal and visually engaging. I take inspiration from different cultural art styles around the world as they quite often show me different perspectives to capturing the same subject. My drawing process is intentionally uncomplicated; I find beauty in keeping my subjects in their basic form.
Elhaam Sahebdin is a self-taught Mauritian multimedia artist, living in the UK. Her work explores the simultaneity of nature’s simplicity and intricacies. As an artist who has always found joy in creating with her hands, she takes pride in using simple materials like coloured pencils and pens to bring her own perspective of nature’s beauty to life. Her work has been heavily influenced by her involvement in the vibrant local arts scene, where she has participated in a variety of exhibitions at local galleries and community art spaces. Her style is non-technical and leans towards a simplified illustrative aesthetic. While Elhaam creates from what she finds beautiful, she also hopes to create pieces that evoke humanity in others by bringing awareness to suffering and injustice around the world.
Jartifex - @jartifex_
“I am JDN thee Artifex aka Jartifex.” Artifex - The Latin word artifex means master of an art, artist, craftsman, skilled, artistic, expert, artful. London based, London born and bred individual.
“Art is a constant love of mine since as long as I’ve been able to grasp a pencil who is self taught in all mediums. It helps me focus but also zone out. Ideas bouncing all over the place with a portfolio full of sketches and unfinished ideas due to often never being satisfied. The portfolio of completed work are some of my proudest moments. My preferred method tools being pencil or a ballpoint pen. I’ve decided to digitise my art to bring my ideas and skills to a new level and give it a life previously unseen.
“My style is Inspired and forged by: comic, manga, animation, anime, cinema, tv, music, sports, urban, British, Caribbean, urban & ethnic culture.”
Tom Norman - @tomonorman_art
Tom currently works with abstract painting to explore subconscious emotional states and responses to both the existential and the everyday.
He works primarily with acrylic paint, his process begins with either visual prompts, with what he describes as “eating with my eyes”—or emotional responses drawn from somatic therapeutic practice. His work is characterised by colour relationships, structural counterpoints, and shallow layering techniques to evoke a sense of emotional resonance.
His work for this exhibition goes back to an earlier stage just before abstraction, but very much engaged with emotional response. The paintings are from a series called ‘Liminality,’ which explores the space between good and bad mental health – two states of identity within one mind. The notion of submerging or emerging is depicted through portraiture to capture the inner personal space – to show the inside on the outside.
Sarah Guarino - @guarahsarino
Sarah's practice explores migration, displacement, mobility, identity, lately integrating the experience of motherhood. Considering the personal, overall positive, enriching experience as an Italian in the UK, the artist questions the broader topic of immigration and its almost embedded bad acceptation.
Through etching, lithography and collagraphs, Sarah’s artwork has been looking at prejudice/stereotypes, reflecting on identity and a particularly obsessive relationship with food. She has also explored the topic working on actual pasta as matrix, creating a strong link with a material directly linked to her identity.
Sarah's latest works gravitate towards exploring motherhood and fertility, looking at how they contribute to shape identity. Sarah Guarino graduated in 2020 from Brighton University with a BA Fine Art: Printmaking. She has exhibited her works in the UK mainly in group shows ever since and recently (September 2024) had two solo exhibition in Portugal (Galeria do Espírito Santo, Moura -Beja and Centro de Documentação do Edifício Central do Municipio, Lisbon).
Image credit @jartifex_ @tomonorman_art @Arabellayapppainting
See you there!