RITUALS OF PERCEPTION

Rituals of Perception brings together the work of Bissy Riva Nina Ogden, Charlotte Aiken, Cas Cambell, and Corinne Vogel—five artists who approach the act of seeing as an embodied and durational inquiry. Across their distinct practices, perception emerges not as a passive process but as a ritual: cyclical, tactile, and deeply intertwined with memory, imagination, and the material world. Through layered gestures and transformative techniques, their works invite us to reconsider how images, objects, and sensations are constructed, dismantled, and reimagined.

Spanning painting and sculpture, the exhibition explores the poetics of observation and the politics of attention. Each artist foregrounds presence and transformation in their process: forms are fragmented and reassembled; surfaces are built through repetition, erasure, and intuition. Here, making becomes inseparable from meaning—an iterative exploration of care, embodiment, and awareness.

The exhibition moves fluidly between the tangible and intangible, the remembered and the imagined.

Nina Ogden’s paintings dissolve familiar skyscapes into fields of abstraction, evoking transient states and probing the human condition, our connection to nature, and the fragile consequences of that relationship. Charlotte Aiken centres her work on the notion of infinity, often through depictions of the sky. Her compositions are guided by cloud formations she photographs, with the deliberate use of decorating brushes to accentuate texture and imperfection, creating impressions rather than literal portrayals. Cas Cambell explores the intersections of nature, ancient history, mythology, and queer culture. Through intricate, cyclical processes—using paper pulp, mineral pigments, oak gall ink, and recycled materials—she creates paintings, wall hangings, installations, and ceramics that embody ritual and transformation. Corinne Vogel’s abstract paintings trace personal experiences of nature and solitude. Working energetically and intuitively, she explores opposing forces—simplicity and chaos, visibility and invisibility, outer and inner worlds—using colour, line, and form as points of departure. Bissy Riva’s work celebrates bold color, gestural freedom, and layered textures rooted in both her textile background and printmaking sensibilities. Though still emerging on the international scene, her expressive paintings have found resonance among collectors and galleries in London, New York, and beyond.

 

Across the exhibition, the works pose questions: What constitutes visual truth in an age of simulation? Where do sensation and interpretation converge? How is meaning shaped in the space between what is seen, sensed, and remembered? By embracing imperfection, materiality, and repetition, these artists root their practices in the body, the senses, and the earth. Painting and sculpture become rituals of grounding and revelation—acts of sustained attention in an era of visual acceleration. Through gesture, layering, and transformation, they create spaces for quiet contemplation and heightened awareness.

Ultimately, Rituals of Perception offers more than an aesthetic encounter; it proposes a mode of being in relation to the world. Through the work of Ogden, Aiken, Cambell, and Vogel, the exhibition calls us to attune ourselves to the subtle, shifting dynamics of perception—to consider how the world is not merely seen, but continually sensed, shaped, and reimagined through the layered lenses of memory, material, and imagination.