Lore: Group Show

Drawing on folkloric storytelling, spirituality, and personal mythologies, Lore explores the ceremonies that shape how we live. While their approaches vary, the artists’ works share a sense of otherworldliness, creating spaces of comfort, safety, and quiet reflection.

Lore names the stories we inherit; law names the rules we live by. Between them lies the way we organise a life; the small covenants, symbols, and practices that hold meaning. Through their distinct perspectives, Ruban, Hamer, and Vallance Cantor transform folk themes into living grammars, where ritual becomes personal and the mystical folds seamlessly into the everyday.

Diana Ruban explores folklore and spirituality through a recurring blue female figure, a symbolic embodiment of her inner world. Her rounded forms carry a naïve, folklike sensibility while drawing on personal reflections and spiritual narratives. Her sculptures extend this dialogue, resembling devotional tablets, objects that hold memory, offering, and meaning.

Delia Hamer’s connection to folklore, mythology, and spirituality is intimate and deeply felt. Through repetition, emblematic geometry, and symbolic figures, her paintings read like seals or standards; ornament transformed into instruction. A recurring female figure embodies the vulnerability of the soul and the strength found in nature, while gold leaf and tarot-like compositions evoke the divine through personal interpretation.

Sophie Vallance Cantor creates vibrant portals into imagined worlds, “antidotes,” as she describes them, to her lived experience with autism. Cats become tigers, self-portraits grow horns, and neon-lit figures inhabit dreamlike spaces where the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve. Within these oversaturated landscapes, Vallance Cantor explores folklore as escapism, crafting a realm of comfort where mythical creatures and liminal figures keep watch over private freedoms and unspoken desires.