The Channel Islands Contemporary Art Show
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ArtHouse Jersey Capital House, St Helier JE2 3NN 20 March / 3 May 2026
Surfaces and Time
Writing about Peter Weiss’s three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975-1981), Fredric Jameson concludes that its ‘ultimate and fundamental lesson’ is about the ‘productive uses of a past and a history that is not simply represented or commemorated but also reappropriated by some new future of our own present.’ Weiss is writing about the journey through the 1930s till 1945 of a group of young working-class German communists and their attempts through shared study, reflecting on art and literature, writing articles, printing pamphlets, distributing flyers, with the aim of both their own self and collective empowerment to support and sustain a wider structural change in the industrial complex and its dependent systems of finance and property relations that inevitably lead to economies of war and exploitation. The narrator joins the anti-fascist Republican cause of the Spanish Civil War before escaping from defeat and imprisonment to exile in Sweden via Paris through the early 1940s till finally returning to Germany in the closing days of the war as part of an underground resistance movement against the Nazi state. In this final stage, most of the narrators’ contacts and associates are imprisoned and executed before the final carveup of Germany by foreign states in 1945 putting an end to their own efforts from within their country to effect change as this struggle became usurped by the more polarising and disabling logics of the Cold War. The narrator nevertheless concludes:
It would again and again seem as though all earlier hopes would be brought to nothing by lost or forgotten intentions. And even if it did not turn out as we hoped, nothing would be changed about those hopes themselves. The hopes would remain. Utopia would be necessary. Even later on those hopes would flame up
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again countless times, smothered by the superior enemy and ever newly reawakened. And the realm of hopes could become greater than it was in our time, and would be extended to all the continents of the globe. The poorly repressed discontent would grow and the drive to contradict and to resist would not be lamed. Just as the past was unchangeable, so those hopes would remain unchangeable, and they - which we once, when young, burningly experienced - would be honoured by our rememoration of them.
This may, trivially or otherwise, bring us to the collection of the work of seventeen artists for this second edition of the Channel Islands Contemporary Art Show 2026. Consisting of work never before shown this space to exhibit perspectives and experiences inspired from and in relation to the Channel Islands, its diverse voices, cultural histories, ecologies, is perhaps more an invitation to an experience of the inner and outer worlds of the Channel Islands, their visual iconographies and surfaces. Or indeed the ‘impressions’ - we might also say ‘imprints’ - on those who have grown up on these islands, those who have moved here, and those who are more recent passing ‘visitors’ and yet who perhaps see with an acuity, more starkly, the qualities that define its particular sense of place whilst also extending a line to say and recall, ‘we are alike.’
This show brings together seventeen artists consisting of four artists based in Brittany, France (specifically living and working between Lezardrieux, Rennes, Plouguerneau and Paris), eight artists from Jersey (three artists working between Jersey and London), four artists from Guernsey and one from the UKbasically four regions that make up one larger region - a diamond perhaps - that can be traced from the south of England down to the Channel Islands and further south to northern Brittany. Qualities of light may have a proximity,
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architectural influences, language, geologies - shared pasts that reflect histories both of occupation, resistance and cultural appropriation.
Repeatedly across all these works we see representations of landscape. Works created from, using the materials of, imbued by and depicting through lense, paint, drawing, a perceived and felt sense of landscape, often closely followed by, or in relation to, a visible horizon. What is contained within these landscapes, and how do the processes and systems that inhabit, or rather sustain, these islands - specifically the mechanisms and laws of global finance and property, and how such mechanisms are more widely related to the accumulation (or dispersion) of extraordinary wealth among nations (and individuals) - take a perceived or a sculpted form, a gesture at a human scale? Why are such liquid mechanisms so invisible, so hidden? When we see, hear and study water - saltwater, drinking water, streams - the liquidity of the air and the environment that surrounds us, what is ‘not for drinking’ (see Nicole Sheppard’s Avau L’Ieu / Downstream)? Or, how then do we make our own enclaves of culture within such strata of experience (see Hayley Gibaut’s Botanica Jersey: Two Ilhas Together); perspectives to laugh at the absurd theatre of political ‘fish’, ‘pigs’ and ‘cows’ (see Louise London’s Tides of Influence). Or rather, is there a ‘glossary’ contained in these images, that might help us put together a puzzle for how these islands function and what are the inner and outer consequences - in state of mind, in how every day individuals ‘fashion’ their existences, their lives? (see Vincent Malassis’s Islands Glossary). Or indeed what are the spaces of retreat, that might act somehow as ‘portals’ to other worlds (see India Silvester’s Portals, Malgorzata Krzysztofik’s Memories Woven in Colour, Emilie Knight’s Weathering Space), other kinds of seeing, other spaces of existential belonging (Ruby Butler’s In the Space Between). What is the hope that joins us, and that is
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reawakened as we see other communities and nations bombarded to extinction in the name of ‘security’. And how does this hope lead us to places of escape - the Alps, the tropical lushness of South East Asia, the Balearic Islands, our own cosmic selves - how do we define ourselves and what do we need to connect to when these Islands are not enough?
This Channel Islands Contemporary Art Show, in its intention, is about trying to make a space that can open a pathway to ‘a new future of our own present’. How much darkness we let in may be what enables us to recognise our own shadows, and to articulate, through feeling, through objects, through those ambiguous yet certain gestures of expression, of mark making, of enabling some ‘sense’ to take a defined even if incomplete shape, what we give light to. Where is light most needed? Or do we just add super-gloss - or pithy irony - to what is already super-sleek?
I hope this Channel Islands Contemporary Art Show provides a few pieces of a puzzle that is likely incomplete, but that nevertheless offers its own space of resistance - a glossary to slow down, to take stock of where we are, what we connect to, what it is we invest our time into, the spaces of our mind - and what is it that burns our experience into ‘rememorating’ our pasts towards a new future.
James Tyson
Reference:
The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (Vol. I, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson, 2005) and Joel Scott (Vol. II & III), Duke University Press (2005, 2020, 2025)
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List of Works
[1]
Charlie McFarley Le Vitrail
Toby Rainbird Martello
Vincent Girard Coloured Mist
Ruby Butler In the Space Between
Hayley Gibaut Botânica Jersey: Two Ilhas Together
[2]
Bridget Spinney Earth Matters
Helen Glencross Nature Doesn’t Grieve: Notes on Impermanence
Gabrielle Herveet Quelques Rêves de Grêves (including Riverskin Cover; In November I dreamt of Ocean; River’s Branch; Tempest; The Lines of the Rock; The Quartz on La Grève de Lecq Under the Blue Light of the Storm)
Iwan Warnet Before the Water Rises
[3]
Malgorzata Krzysztofik Memories Woven in Colour
Victor Guerin Loudspeaker
Louise London Tides of Influence
Vincent Malassis Islands Glossary
Nicole Sheppard Avau-L’ieu / Downstream
Charlie Buchanan I am the Sea and Nobody Owns Me
[4]
Emilie Knight Weathering Space
India Silvester Tidal Portals
Biographies
Charlie Buchanan is an artist, illustrator and photographer based in Guernsey in the Channel Islands. She gained a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Falmouth University College before travelling extensively and painting in Spain for a number of years. She has exhibited in both solo and group shows in the UK, Spain, Guernsey & Jersey. Charlie’s work, although painterly in size and ambition is illustrative in its close relationship to stories and their power to conjure other worlds. The large scale of many of the paintings means they work as discrete images weaving their own spell but can also work as part of a narrative. Watercolour and ink provide her images with the lyricism of the ‘happy accident’ as pigments move, swirl, flutter, congeal and grow into an image on the paper. Charlie finds inspiration in literature, photography in all its richness (archival and contemporary) and the magic of storytelling. She has developed a deep interest in the beauty of the book since childhood and has now published three of her own with her husband and co-creator Magnus Buchanan. Charlie exhibited her illustrative work for a lavishly illustrated edition of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page published by Extraordinary Editions in 2022 and had recently been involved in their re-publication of Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake.
Ruby Butler is a writer whose work explores language, perception, and the subtle rhythms of thought. She grew up in Jersey, a small island where early awareness of limits coexisted with a curiosity to expand and inhabit ideas fully. This shaped her sensitivity to nuance, space and the small shifts in experience that continue to underpin her practice. Her writing is primarily literary, but she treats text as a material and poetry as a fine art, attentive to rhythm, texture and presence on the page. In occasional projects, she has translated writing into physical form, exploring how language can occupy space, interact with bodies and create conditions for pause and reflection. Her work consistently engages with liminality, hesitation and transitional moments, advocating for poetry and writing as active, living forms that require attention, patience and space to resonate.
Hayley Gibaut is an award-winning mixed media artist and ceramist from Jersey with Portuguese (Madeiran) heritage. Her practice explores themes of archaeology and anthropology, examining identity, place, and cultural memory through research-led processes and hands-on experimentation across ceramics, painting, drawing, digital media, and collage. She holds a BA in Fine Art and a MA in Communication Design from which she developed a multidisciplinary practice influenced by archaeology, anthropology, folklore, and the psychology of the uncanny. Her work often responds to the intersection of personal narrative and collective memory, creating space for stories that exist between islands, cultures, and generations. Hayley is also the co-founder of The Stoodio Jersey, a community art space developed in partnership with ArtHouse Jersey and Andium Homes. The Stoodio provides accessible arts education through creative classes, an open art studio, a shop, and exhibitions, and is committed to uplifting local voices through playful and inclusive approaches to art-making.
Vincent Girard is a visual artist currently living and working in Rennes. He graduated from the École Supérieure d'Arts & Médias in Caen in 2021. Originally from the Poitou region, he grew up immersed in fantastical tales woven around the surrounding forests and marshes. Abandoned dolmens in the heart of towns or fields, graves without bodies or epitaphs, the Red Hand, an eerie bogeyman who grabs the unlucky and drags them underwater, all of these stories now form a visual and symbolic corpus that guides his artistic research. Vincent’s work is primarily pictorial, though it also encompasses performance, writing, and drawing. Often imbued with a certain mysticism drawn from the references he assembles, his paintings reflect and amplify the strange, mysterious, even spiritual aspects of the real world. To achieve this, he draws on a wide range of influences, crossing eras and mediums. He strives to make his painting a psychopomp yet living substance, open to the future. This passage from life to death that he evokes, he also likes to imagine it as existing between the real and the unreal. The fantastic plays a central role in his paintings, permeating each of his subjects.
Helen Glencross has pursued photography as an amateur for more than 25 years, using both analogue and digital cameras. Her hobby deepened in 2023, and since then, she has been building a portfolio that reflects her evolving practice. Photography is, for her, a deeply personal and contemplative pursuit. It is an escape that allows her to slow down, notice the world around her, and connect with the moments in between. She often works in black and white or subdued tones, exploring patterns, shapes, and depth of focus to create images with an evocative, ethereal quality that invite reflection and challenge perception. In March 2025, Helen curated her first exhibition, Beyond the Shadows. One series explored old greenhouses, spaces that intrigue her as monuments to a past industry, holding beauty in their deterioration as nature slowly takes hold.
Victor Guerin (b. 1993) is a Franco-British artist and engineer working across sculpture, installation, and painting. He holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (2024) and an MEng from Arts et Métiers ParisTech (2016). In 2025, Guerin received an institutional commission from neimënster (Luxembourg, LU), and was made an ArtLoft fellow. Guerin was a finalist for the Hyundai Award for Excellence in Sustainability and Creative Practice (2024) and received the Averil Picot Art Award (2023). His work has been exhibited at Saatchi Gallery, the Royal Scottish Academy, Dalkeith Palace, and the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, and is held in public collections in China and private collections in the UK, Canada, and France.
Gabrielle Herveet was born in Brittany, France in 1988. She has exhibited work and completed residencies across France and Europe over the past 16 years. She most recently took part in a residency with Arctic Lab in Iceland in association with the d’Islande Laboratoires de Mathématiques de Bretagne Atlantique, UBO, Brest. The forms she proposes are the result of the interrelationship between the realm of the sensible and the theories, predictive or descriptive, developed over thousands of years to describe the world (geometry, geology, meteorology, thermodynamics, chaos theory or elementary physics). By using science in an empirical way, without numbers or equations, she induces a poetic reading of the mechanics of landscapes
and more generally of the physical phenomena that construct everyday space, universal or anthropogenic. Since 2022, she has focused her research on time and its occurrences, producing calendar sculptures that question our common representations of the temporal, between astronomical and natural, intimate and universal phenomena.
Emilie Knight studied a foundation year in Art and Design at Plymouth College of Art before completing a Fine Art degree at the University of Plymouth. She loved the space and time she had to create but struggled to convey her concepts when she discovered it wasn’t enough to say, ‘it just happens.’ She held her first solo show at JARO Gallery in St Helier in May 2024. Her work is now held in several collections on the Island, and she has collectors in the UK, Europe, America and Canada. She held a collaborative exhibition at ArtHouse Jersey in January 2025. She runs abstract expressionist painting workshops which can be adapted to children and young adults and has recently started working with Highlands College in Jersey, delivering workshops to their neurodivergent students. Emilie also sits on the autism advisory council for Autism Jersey and use her painting as a platform to raise awareness and attempt to break down misconceptions around autism.
Malgorzata Krzysztofik was born in Krakow (Poland) in 1976. After gaining her masters degree in teaching she relocated to Jersey in 2004. Her journey of art making had started after a brain tumour diagnosis in 2017. As a result of the illness, she partly lost her eyesight but also gained more appreciation for the beauty of life. Krzysztofik works intuitively creating abstract paintings. There is no plan or precision, the process is the goal. She works mostly with acrylic paint, occasionally incorporating collage in her work. Experimentation and play are significant in her art making.
Louise London is a multidisciplinary artist based in Jersey, working primarily in ceramics, painting, and mixed media. Their practice explores the intersections of identity, history, and place—often through tactile, symbolic forms that reimagine storytelling. Recent exhibitions include Jersey Summer Show 2025 (CCA Galleries), Quantum Entanglements (Jersey Art
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Centre) and What Shadow? (Ce Que Dit La Bouche d’Ombre) (Les Atelier Du Vent, ArtHouse Jersey and Guernsey Arts). They are drawn to themes of migration, ecology, cultural memory, and the politics of craft.
Vincent Malassis was born in 1979 in Brittany, France. He lives and works in Rennes and Paris. A photographer, composer and sound artist, he develops work at the intersection of documentary and experimental practice, exploring the relationships between people, places and memory. His projects combine portraits, landscapes, textures and field recordings, creating fragmentary works where image and sound coexist. Active in performance and installation, he investigates social realities and the atmospheres of a place, both geographic and intimate.
Charlie McFarley is a professional artist and arts educator based in Minehead, West Somerset. Originally from Hackney, East London, he was shaped by the urban environment. His journey began with graffiti in his teens and later took a formal turn with a foundation course at Camberwell College of Arts. London has remained a powerful influence on his work. Since 2001, he has been an active part of the London art scene, painting public murals and showing in exhibitions across the city. Highlights include curating and producing two group shows at the Underdog Gallery, London Bridge, and being one of 16 artists commissioned to paint a decommissioned police riot helmet for the R.I.O.T exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery (2023). Since relocating to Somerset in 2018, he has developed a strong focus on arts education, delivering creative workshops for young people and collaborating with local schools and pupils to design and paint murals. These projects give students hands-on experience with professional techniques and foster a sense of creative ownership and confidence. Through his work with the young people he has been inspired and challenged to learn and grow as a creative practitioner and artist.
Toby Rainbird (b. 1994, Jersey, Channel Islands) is a British artist and curator based in London. He completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, where he was awarded the Hine Painting Prize. In 2016, he graduated with First-Class Honours in Fine Art from Bath Spa University,
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receiving the university’s Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Award. Rainbird has exhibited widely across London and the UK, as well as internationally in Japan, Germany, and Canada. He is currently the recipient of the Freelands Studio Fellowship as artist-in-residence at the University of Brighton, and is one-half of the curatorial platform Lee Scully.
Nicole Sheppard is a sculpture and installation artist whose practice is driven by research and experimentation. She often engages with landscape through a new materialist lens, drawing connections between shifting boundaries, world-making, and objecthood. In doing so, she focuses on how we relate to the material world and how meaning is created through making and experience. These playful studies often draw on natural heritage, social history, liminality, and feminist theory. She works closely with her local surroundings, using found and discarded objects, as well as libraries and archives, as sources for her work. Born in Fife, Scotland, and now living and working in Jersey, Nicole draws on personal experiences of movement, placemaking, and social identity in her practice. Nicole was awarded the VAO Emerging Artist Prize (2024) and exhibited as part of New Contemporaries (2022) at the Ferens Gallery, Humber Street Gallery and South London Gallery. She was a resident artist at NGVU, Podgorica, Montenegro (2024). Projects include Translation in the Angle of Reflection, commissioned by ArtHouse Jersey (2025), and Muck & the Mire, Paradise Works (2024).
India Silvester is an Art Director, Motion Designer, and Illustrator using mostly digital tools to create visual art. Her creative journey began early, sparked by a fascination with traditional mediums and a love for alternative music. This led her to pursue and graduate with a BA (Hons) and MA in Illustration, specialising in abstract motion and animation for live music. India works as an Art Director at Specsavers Creative, where she continues to explore innovative ways of communicating creative visual storytelling in the advertising world.
Bridget Spinney since 2016 has based her work on the theme ‘The Art of Nature on Paper’ concentrating on facilitating nature to interact with paper. It is based on environmental principles highlighting the awe and wonder of nature and the fear of its loss in its purist form. She has developed techniques of printing the patterns left by the tide on beaches, in charcoal powder. Printing fish, birds and seaweed in cuttlefish ink. The medium became as important as the outcome, it being of the least possible environmental impact. Which has led her to where she is today making her own organic inks from plants grown in her garden. Over time the inks continue to interact on the paper, their colours subtly changing. They continue to evolve.
Iwan Warnet was born in 1996 and lives and works between Alfortville and Plouguerneau. Through his painting, he blurs the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, exploring, through the ambiguities of representation, the active role of the viewer in the perception of an image. His practice leans toward allusion rather than assertion, playing with the hint of appearance. He creates a body of work built on clues and fragments, guided by an intimate relationship with the human figure, which often appears in filigree, surfacing through traces or subtle evocations. Infused with his experience as a scenic painter for theatre and opera, his conception of painting is doubled by a scenographic sensibility. In his exhibitions, he unfolds his work as installations that borrow as much from the scale of the theatre stage as from the more intimate one of domestic interiors, where one carefully places, displaces, and arranges objects –useful or not, often charged with emotion – in a kind of scenography of intimacy. His meticulous arrangements of canvases, drawings, materials, and objects become a way of inhabiting a space. They create a place even as they are meant to be seen. This place invites a sustained, active gaze that composes its own viewpoints, enters the discreet complexity of surfaces, and sets the works into resonance with one another.
The Channel Islands Contemporary Art Show
Produced by ArtHouse Jersey in partnership with Art for Guernsey and in association Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brest.
ArtHouse Jersey
Director: Tom Dingle
Head of Programme: James Tyson
Gallery & Events Manager: Katherine Wood
Exhibitions & Projects Assistant: Nicole Sheppard
Programme Coordinator: Amy Baker
Technical Manager: JP Le Blond
Art for Guernsey
Chair & Co-Founder: David Ummels
Director: Jock Pettit
Gallery Manager: Megan Wyatt-Nicolle
Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain
Director: Loïc Le Gall
Communications & Partnerships: Emmanuelle Baleydier
Design by Robert Hoskins / www.designbyhoskins.co.uk
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