Lore, the group exhibition at RHDOES, is an exploration of myth, ritual, and imaginative interior life. Open from 3 to 25 October 2025, it brings together three distinct artistic voices: Diana Ruban, Delia Hamer, and Sophie Vallance Cantor. Each traces their own path through folklore, spirituality, and personal mythologies.
At its heart, Lore depicts the stories and the small rituals through which we give life meaning. Lore names and explores the stories we inherit, and so becomes a guiding frame through which we can examine both the laws that order society and the inward lore with which we order ourselves.
Ruban is a Ukrainian artist whose works layer symbolic imagery onto sculptural and painted forms. Often centred on a recurring blue, feminine figure, her work blurs the line between devotion and self-portraiture, becoming a personal iconography rooted in folklore and spiritual meditation.
Hamer, who lives and works in Amsterdam, has a more emblematic approach. Through repeated motifs, geometry, and symbolic figures, her paintings resemble talismans or seals: intimate stories written in visual language. Here, the female figure is expressive of vulnerability and strength, while gold leaf and tarot-like motifs evoke a sense of the sacred made tangible.
Cantor, working through a lens of neurodivergence and escape, crafts “portals” into alternate dreamscapes. Mythological transformations and landscapes become spaces of refuge and comfort. Through these oversaturated and liminal spaces, she interrogates how fantasy can offer solace when the everyday feels constraining and unsafe.
Walking through Lore, the viewer encounters shared visual threads in the motifs and themes throughout. In these day-to-day moments depicted, symbols move us and personal rituals and stories are raised above all else. The three artists together weave a contemporary narrative of care, attention, and safety. Lore asks you to slow down, to read each piece separately and together, to listen inwardly to the stories you carry. Each work reminds us that meaning grows from the small, personal ceremonies we engage with every day, and we can create our own symbolic stories and folklore.
For more information, contact us at info@rhodescontemporaryart.com
