Project Room: What the Surface Holds: Morag Caister, Alexandria Couch, Ludi Leiva, Camilla Perkins and Martha Zmpounou
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RHODES is excited to present What the Surface Holds, a new group exhibition bringing together five artists working in monotype, each approaching the medium as a space where memory, emotion and atmosphere can take form.
Across the exhibition, the surface becomes more than a point of contact; it becomes a site of accumulation, where gesture, colour and image carry traces of interior experience.
The monotype sits at the centre of this dialogue. Singular by nature, each work emerges through a process of transfer that allows for immediacy and unpredictability, balancing control with surrender. Rather than connecting these artists through medium alone, the exhibition draws together practices united by a heightened emotional sensibility: each artist treats the surface as somewhere feeling can be carried, concealed and revealed.
Morag Caister brings a psychologically charged approach to figuration, presenting subjects suspended in moments of vulnerability, reverie and quiet intensity. Her work anchors the exhibition’s interest in emotional presence and the figure as a vessel through which interior states become visible.
Martha Zmpounou extends this dialogue through a practice shaped by the body, memory, love, loss and transformation. Her works hold a tactile sense of emotional residue, reflecting the exhibition’s wider concern with how personal histories are embedded within surface and gesture.
Ludi Leiva introduces a more liminal visual language, moving fluidly between landscape, body and memory. Her compositions evoke states of transition and belonging, blurring the boundary between inner and external worlds.
Camilla Perkins brings pattern, texture and dreamlike still-life into the conversation. Through layered colour and decorative detail, her works transform surface into something immersive and emotionally resonant rather than purely descriptive.
Alexandria Couch expands the exhibition into the territory of dream, archive and myth. Her layered and often shapeshifting imagery explores fragmentation and transformation, engaging with the ways images can conceal, distort and preserve experience simultaneously.
Together, these artists construct a conversation around intimacy, recollection and emotional visibility. What the Surface Holds considers what an image can contain: not only colour, form and mark-making, but tension, tenderness, atmosphere and the lingering imprint of experience.
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Selected works
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Collecting
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