A group exhibition curated by Berfin Cicek featuring Shelley Kirkwood, Evgeniya Strygina, Emily Hana Johnson and Ilsa Britain.
Soft Alchemy brings together four women artists whose practices transmute the everyday into the surreal, the sensual and the sacred. Working across photography and painting, each artist conjures a language of transformation one rooted not in spectacle but in subtlety, tactility and emotional depth.
In Shelley Kirkwood and Evgeniya Strygina’s photographs, nature is not just observed but felt. Their images hum with a quiet intensity: petals blur into skin, leaves morph into gestures and landscapes become psychological terrains. What appears still is charged with motion; what appears delicate is layered with power. Their photographic surfaces are soft, yet carry the weight of memory, desire and vulnerability.
In dialogue, the painted works of Emily Hana Johnson and Ilsa Britain extend this alchemical logic. Johnson’s sculptural canvases, with their surreal figures entwined in vibrant yellow gloves, explore the slippages between care and constraint, intimacy and performance. Britain’s hyper-patterned, almost textile-like paintings wrap the viewer in a labyrinth of texture, a visual echo of protection, repetition, and hidden codes. Both artists use materiality as metaphor: garments as skin, pattern as memory, gesture as emotional residue.
Together, these works form a collective study in transformation: how emotion imprints itself on matter, how the body is abstracted into myth and how softness, often dismissed, becomes its own radical force.
This exhibition also celebrates the feminine gaze not as a monolith but as a dynamic, evolving lens through which to reimagine vulnerability, resilience and connection. In Soft Alchemy, the female experience is neither prescribed nor sentimentalised. Instead, it is rendered strange, sacred and alive.
Artists:
Ilsa Brittain
Emily Hana Johnson
Shelley Kirkwood
Evgeniya Strygina
Curator:
Berfin Cicek
Address:
261 City Road
London
EC1V 1JX
Private View:
11 Sept
6-9pm
Opening times:
12-17 Sept
12-6pm
Admission is free. RSVP is required for Private View on 11th Sept.
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