Highlights:

Francisco en La Carraca (after Arturo Michelena’s Miranda en La Carraca, 1896), 2026 by Abigail Villarroel

🐄 This work sits in direct conversation with Venezuelan academicism, a grand historical tradition that helped construct the visual identity of the nation. Michelena’s original turns Miranda into a monument; it's in primary school books across generations in Venezuela.

✨ I’ve been interested in queering that archive, and here I focus on Miranda as a cassanovan figure, politically tragic, and cosmopolitan. A man with an almost excessive scope for travel. Participating in the French Revolution, moving across continents, escaping imprisonment, later betrayed by Bolívar, and dying in Cádiz before the republic was fully formed.

🍑 I limit and saturate the colour palette of the background fantastically. Thinking of a present colour inspiration in the works of Salman Toor.

🇻🇪 The desire to bring myself closer to Venezuela, to our histories, in this instance through painting. There is a Mariposa approach to this project, and her spirit is all over this project.

Sighting <> ReSighting, 2026 by Penny Hallas

Section of a triptych depicting elements from three projects which form part of the current exhibition, Sighting, and accompanying project, ReSighting, supported by Arts Council Wales, AXIS, Sgôr, Elysium Gallery Swansea and National Lottery

Bad Painting 442: Protesters against Protesters, 2026 by Jay Rechsteiner

Bad Painting 442: Protesters against Protesters presents two opposing groups confronting each other in the street. The scene captures a moment where collective anger turns inward and conflict multiplies rather than resolves. Painted in a deliberately crude and unstable manner, the work emphasises confusion, noise, and the collapse of clear positions. As in the wider Bad Painting series, the image functions less as commentary than as a record of contemporary behaviour, where public speech, protest, and counter-protest mirror and amplify one another.

178cm × 215cm
oil on canvas
January 2026

A Gallus Un, 2026 by Tracy Satchwill

A Gallus Un is an immersive installation exploring feminine folklore, superstition and the stories that gather around women in rural communities.

The work grew from research into the notebooks and writings of Lincolnshire folklorist Mabel Peacock, whose collections of dialect phrases, charms and local tales reveal a world shaped by belief, rumour and imagination. The title itself comes from a phrase once used to describe a troublesome or unruly woman, spoken half in mockery and half in fear.

The installation unfolds as a circular environment of large calico banners, painted, stitched and layered with everyday materials, feathers and small symbolic objects. Moving between an outer daylight circle and a darker inner space, the banners gather fragments of folklore: witches and familiars, drowned women, magpies, charms, and whispered warnings. These figures appear not as moral lessons but as ambiguous presences, suspended between fear and fascination.

Sound moves quietly through the installation, composed from recorded voices repeating fragments of folklore and dialect. The murmuring audio drifts through the space, echoing the ways stories pass between people, altered, remembered and retold.

Rather than illustrating specific narratives, A Gallus Un creates an environment where fragments of belief, memory and myth can accumulate. The work invites visitors to move slowly through a shared folkloric landscape where women’s voices, fears and forms of knowledge continue to linger.

Commissioned by North Lincolnshire Museum for the Rural Life Museum.

Sound design by Peter Richards
Selected photography by Marie-Laurence Boisvert