Clare Unsworth
Charleston Composite 2025
Sue Venables
Oscar Wilde portrait 2025
Have you ever stood in a gallery and wondered about the lives behind the portraits — beyond the fine clothes and composed expressions? I’m drawn to those untold stories and the human threads that connect us across time.
By painting paper party hats onto historical figures, I gently disrupt traditional portraiture. The hats act as playful crowns — celebrating and honouring queer people of the past whose identities were often hidden or erased.
My work balances reverence and irreverence, using humour and colour to acknowledge queer presence in history while imagining more joyful and hopeful futures.
Dolly
Quince screen print Dec 2025
Dolly Demoratti is a contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans screen printing, painting, and photography. Working predominantly at large scale, she constructs layered images that play with illusion, materiality, and expectation.
Originally trained within the professional print world in London, including formative years at Pictures on Walls, she later established the Berlin-based studio Mother Drucker. Over fifteen years, this environment became both a site of production and technical mastery, grounding her work in a rigorous understanding of screen printing as both craft and language.
Now focused on her own artistic practice, her work examines the quiet dissonance between surface and subtext. Seemingly calm or familiar scenes carry embedded references to mental health, addiction, and gender identity, deliberately resisting direct narration. Ambiguity is central to the work, allowing meaning to emerge slowly and reflect the complexity of lived experience.
Testing
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Blue Mind
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Susan Churchill
I am currently exploring portraiture building on a research project that looks at Queer heritage and how important it is to find queer lives represented in public collections. Ive discovered there are many gaps and so Im on a mission to make portrait paintings based on historic photographs and drawings.. I have embarked on a series of portrait studies to identify how we perceive queerness and the importance of reengaging with portraiture and claiming queer creatives from the recent past. I am inspired by the need to identify Queer Heritage and to make new visual references and to celebrate important queer creatives from 1920/1930’s. I am motivated to celebrate important people such as Virginia Woolf, Gluck and to make paintings that reflect their significant cultural contributions. I am inspired by the queer creative community who lived and worked in and around Rye. I continue to develop my paintings as part of a queer heritage journey that brings me a great deal of joy and positivity.
Violet oil on canvas