Portfolio:

Resubmission:
Folk Threads:
Creative Communities For Climate Futures

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Modern Painters, New Decorators is an artist-led organisation creating collaborative visual arts programmes rooted in placemaking. From our new purpose-built venue in Aumberry Gap, Loughborough, we support artists and local residents to imagine cultural futures together through exhibitions, workshops, research and events. Our work champions underrepresented voices, fosters creative progression for young people and families, and builds long-term cultural infrastructure for the town.

The Grand Opening

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The Grand Opening of our new venue marked a major milestone for Modern Painters, New Decorators — a public celebration of accessible, community-centred arts in Loughborough. Through exhibitions, shared activity and a daytime launch gathering, we opened the doors to a purpose-built space shaped by local consultation and creative ambition. The event introduced our first programme in the new building, inviting visitors, partners and neighbours to collectively imagine what this site can become.

Jessica Ashman:

Chimera Island

Chimera Island, a solo exhibition by Jessica Ashman, inaugurated our new venue with a vivid exploration of landscape, belonging and ancestral memory. Through textiles, animation, sound and natural dyeing, Ashman reimagined rural and ecological spaces as sites of resistance and reconnection. Drawing from local histories, Caribbean heritage and global colonial legacies, Chimera Island constructed a speculative refuge — a hybrid island shaped by myth, research and personal archive, inviting visitors to consider how place might be re-envisioned beyond empire.

Studio at 17:

Greatest Hits

Greatest Hits brought together eleven artists from Studio at 17 to celebrate more than three decades of inclusive, community-driven creativity in Loughborough. Presented as part of our Grand Opening, the exhibition showcased standout works from across the group’s varied practices — from printmaking and collage to video and intimate drawings — reflecting the shared energy and peer support that defines Studio at 17. Formerly known as Albert Street Artists, the group has supported artists with lived experience of long-term mental ill health for over 30 years. Tangent Gallery, their public-facing space, sits alongside their active studio environment.

Janhavi Sharma:

My Molten Sky

My Molten Sky, a solo exhibition by Janhavi Sharma, explored how stories of place, memory and loss were formed, fragmented and remade. Through black-and-white photography and sculptural installation, Sharma developed a quiet, radical approach to storytelling, holding space for uncertainty and allowing meaning to shift rather than settle. Drawing on folklore, repetition and performative retelling, the exhibition constructed a loose, location-less mythology where images drifted between remembering and forgetting.

Issie Martin:

Futile Acts

Futile Acts, a solo exhibition by Issie Martin, explored our relationship to water, the body and the limits of control in the face of the climate crisis. Through moving image, drawing and print, Martin developed a series of poetic, impossible gestures—mopping the sea, tracing coastlines by hand, attempting to contain water in dissolvable vessels—reflecting on the futility of resisting rising tides. Drawing on hydrofeminist thinking and mythologies of repetition, the exhibition connected personal experience with wider ecological conditions, bringing the body and landscape into porous relation.

Phil Root:

Flat Earth

Flat Earth, a solo exhibition by Phil Root, presented new ceramic works that explored the limits of traditional processes through experimental casting, glazing and firing. Working with foraged and industrial materials—including unprocessed clay, wood ash and brick dust—Root developed a process-led, site-responsive approach, allowing materials to shape themselves through heat, pressure and time. Drawing on references from medieval tilework to contemporary urban surfaces, the exhibition brought together works that recorded their own transformation, from asphalt casts to ash-glazed panels. Root’s use of a self-built kiln introduced further unpredictability, positioning material change, collaboration and alchemic process at the centre of the work.

Jamie Seymour:

The Sick Rose

The Sick Rose, a solo exhibition by Jamie Seymour, brought together paintings, drawings and sculptural assemblages exploring queer anxiety, visibility and control. Taking its title from William Blake’s poem, the exhibition drew on symbolic language—roses, swans and watchful eyes—to reflect experiences of being seen, surveilled and made vulnerable. Combining cartoon-like forms with found materials, glitter, oil paint and debris, Seymour developed a tactile, lyrical visual world where tenderness and unease coexisted. Moving between personal narrative and wider cultural reference, The Sick Rose examined how identity is shaped through pressure, projection and the persistent negotiation between exposure and self-definition.