Hales is delighted to announce A room for keepsakes, a group show featuring works by Basil Beattie, Zoë Carlon, Ally Fallon, Carole Gibbons, Richard Slee and Zach Toppin. The exhibition brings together a cross-generational group of UK based artists exploring interior scenes imbued with psychological meaning.

A A room for keepsakes offers a meditation on the spaces we inhabit, both physical and psychological. The artists in the exhibition explore perception, memory and identity through interior scenes, where domestic and public settings are laden with ideas, narrative and imagery. Depictions of rooms, space and objects communicate a deep inner life, devoid of people but not presence.

In Beattie’s paintings, pictorial elements hold significant meaning and psychological implications through the manipulation of painted surface. Throughout his career, Beattie has returned repeatedly to motifs of steps, ladders and staircases, where the motion is upward and on the diagonal. Not only are these images metaphorical vehicles in Beattie's personal arsenal but also formal tools which have shaped some of his most dynamic works.

Carlon’s painterly process is slow and considered as she builds the surface of her works in layers of oil on aluminium. Her quiet, contemplative scenes capture fleeting instants of stillness, inviting engaged and sustained observation.

Fallon’s compositions combine structure and spontaneity rooted in personal experience, where rooms with tiled floors are a space for gestural mark making. Tangible scenes with a deep sense of perspective are intersected with painterly abstraction and geometry creating an uncanny presence.

Gibbons’ still life paintings are poetic, tender and mystical, imbued with imagination and subconscious. Her work is charged with psychological intensity, where boundaries between space and her treasured objects dissolve, revealing a world both familiar and dreamlike.

For Slee the ceramic objects he makes are intrinsically about the domestic interior and a love for the ‘great indoors.’ There are references in the work to the decorative, the ornamental and the symbolic both from past histories and within contemporary culture. Through his surreal transformations of ordinary domestic objects, Slee’s work also explores questions of personal and national identity.

Toppin’s paintings are saturated with cultural reference, narrative and symbolism in carefully crafted compositions. In contemporary still lifes Toppin explores queer identity, desire and longing through meaningful objects. There is a sense of a person who has just left the scene or out of view, with remnants of a moment left behind.