Tinker, Tailor...
18 September - 9 October 2026
PV: Thursday 17th September 6.30-8.30pm
A group exhibition featuring works by:
Cato
Johnny Izatt-Lowry
Lisa-Marie Harris
Beth McAlester
Gloria Pescaru
Tanoa Sasraku
Laila Tara H
'Tinker, tailor...' explores the idea of tailoring as an expression of identity. It follows thread as it weaves literally or figuratively through the compositions of different artists. Referring back to the nursery rhyme in which children counted prune stones to determine their future profession (or girls the profession of their future spouse!) the exhibition investigates the idea of clothes as both a joyous expression of selfhood and the inevitable flip side; the 'uniform' as a societal straight jacket to promote conformity.
Cato
Toby Grant, known professionally as Cato (b. 1999, Brighton, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist and musician. His large-scale works are distinguished by their candid portrayals of Black elders, often depicted in domestic and communal settings such as barbershops and domino games. Drawing inspiration from a diverse range of references, media, and materials, his paintings centre on “uncle-like” figures engaged in cultural exchanges that resonate across the Black diaspora. His practice is grounded in a physical process that emphasises both the layering and erasure of images, creating a dynamic interplay between presence and absence. Cato’s work invites viewers into intimate spaces, encouraging a reimagining of Black identity and community through a contemporary lens.
In ‘Tidy, 2026’ Cato uses his signature application of collage and paint to depict a monumental close-up of a tie running down the centre of a great ravine of dark suit. There is a whisper of Claes Oldenburg in the fetishistic scale of the object and Cato’s pop delight in colour. As with his broader practice however the work is a homage to the person wearing the suit (of whom only a sliver of neck is visible), it reveals an obsessive eye turned towards Black culture and how it is sartorially expressed.
Johnny Izatt-Lowry
The artworks of Johnny Izatt-Lowry (b. 1995, Durham, UK) analyse memory and the ways in which we collectively process imagery in a digital age. His paintings originate in stock images sourced online that the artist collects, edits and finally paints from memory. Largely depicting still life quotidian objects like shoes, flowers, jeans, pencils, cigarettes and reproductions of artworks, his works are filmic in their quiet intensity, and self-consciously aware of the history of painting.
In an age of vaping and plummeting cigarette sales (in the UK at least!) ‘The Smoker’ feels almost anachronistic. The suit and the cigarette once so inseparable are seen here in a monochrome sepia hue. The image at once pays homage to an age of the ‘Marlboro man’, but it is also blurred, nostalgic, slightly soft around the edges. As with all of Izatt-Lowry’s work there is a timeless familiarity to the composition. In the words of Elizabeth Fullerton, “These blurry, stagey tableaux with their floating objects have a hallucinatory, out of time quality; like in a casino where clocks are banned, the artist denies the viewer cues as to time or place, yet one has the undeniable sensation of deja-vu.”
Lisa Marie-Harris:
Lisa-Marie Harris (b.1983, Trinidad and Tobago) interrogates the dehumanisation of women and how their bodies are reduced to sites of desire, labour, and extraction. Through sculpture, moving image, performance, and publishing, her practice asserts female autonomy by employing an interoceptive (internally-sensing) methodology, sensuality, tactility and an economy-of-form across her works. Harris examines these issues with the feminine-coded labour of hand-sewing reclaimed leather skins and material from womenswear garments, discarded furnishings; and harvested Caribbean material such as calabash gourds. Harris is concerned with locating and releasing what she has termed the “flesh memories” of the female body by invoking personal histories of motherhood and reproduction; Trinidadian culture, folklore and ecology; and migration.
In the three works included in the exhibition Harris uses her signature materials to convey her preoccupation with the female form. In ‘The First Binding’ and ‘The Second Binding’ reclaimed leather and stainless-steel hooks appear as opposing forces. Hooks and eyes are usually the hidden tool of the tailor, deftly moulding and aligning the body they help clothe. Here they are exposed and appear to be in combat with the material ‘body’ they enclose or confine. The artist reflects upon the spectre of girlhood that silently shapes the older women we become, nodding to the societal values that shape or restrict us and the resulting tension this creates.
‘Splayed Form’ on the other hand appears as something infinitely vulnerable, the rigid steel frame in immediate contiguity with the delicate paper form it supports. Harris seeks to show the viewer ‘the flayed ambiguity of a female body picked apart and used beyond clear recognition’ and asks, ‘how much looking is too much; should any body ever be seen this intimately?’
Beth McAlester:
Beth McAlester (b. 2003, Belfast, Northern Ireland) is a Northern Irish artist based in London. Working primarily in oil on wood, her paintings examine identity, place, and acts of commemoration through semi-biographical narratives informed by post-Troubles contexts in the UK and Ireland. Her work draws on personal experience and inherited histories, using material and image to consider how these are constructed and carried forward through individuals, objects, and places.
The works included in the exhibition examine the various ‘uniforms’, both cultural and political worn in Ireland. In ‘Sock Glue’ McAlester depicts a floor level image of a line of Irish dancers with their distinctive cross laced dance pumps. The work shows a girlish yearning for a clannish ritual that the artist was unable to engage with due to growing up in a small protestant town in Northern Ireland. In the other two works it is the Orange Order that are depicted, a fraternal protestant organisation in Northern Ireland. In ‘The Game’ the OO are shown marching from above, the atmosphere of the work is ambiguous - the bystanders potentially complicit or threatened. McAlester is less interested in resolving this tension than in thinking about the moment in which communal gatherings become oppressive tools of force. Similarly, ’Men For No Seasons’ is an interior scene taken from a video filmed inside an Orange Hall during the Twelfth, a gathering McAlester was encouraged to avoid long before she understood the implication of attending.
In all three works the focus is less upon those wearing the ‘uniform’ than upon those who exist in the same sphere and yet do not. In her own words “my work is a mode of questioning where I (and by extension the viewer) stand in relation to those left on the wayside of our contemporary Western imagination, but also tribalism in a more universal sense.”
Gloria Pescaru
Gloria Pescaru (born, 2004, Cluj, Romania) is a Romanian-British artist who works with oil and acrylic on alternative materials. Her work is an attempt to manifest the presence of the feminine without directly portraying it. She uses the object in place of the subject, as a kind of reduction, but also as a form of iconography, reflecting the way femininity is expressed through objects in consumer culture. Pescaru works through a series of fixations on a single article, repeatedly painting the same object. With each repetition she discovers something new about its form and beauty, while also revealing something about her own way of seeing.
In ‘The Zip’, ‘The Red Thread’ and ‘Two Brown Buttons’, each painting reveals an obsessive attentiveness to the mundane object being depicted. Dislocated from context the objects are presented with the reverence of relics, signifiers of a femininity that is at once familiar and rendered alien.
Tanoa Sasraku
The practice of Tanoa Sasraku (b. 1995, Plymouth, UK) encompasses sculpture, drawing and filmmaking. Her work is rooted in the material and symbolic properties of land via landscapes, pigments, and minerals, and informed by a personal relationship to textiles and pattern making. She is currently short listed for the Turner Prize.
‘Vest Front L’ belongs to ‘Terratypes’, a body of work which draws on the Sasraku’s personal and historical connection to the British landscape. Each ‘Terratype’ is unique, a sculptural hybrid of painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, and textile. To create these works, the artist foraged for million-year old earth pigments in locations like Dartmoor, the Jurassic Coast, the Scottish Highlands, and Ghana, hand-rubbing them into sheets of blank newsprint, which were then sewn, soaked and ripped, revealing past layers of pigment and pattern; the intersection of geological time and personal memory. Ghana was the homeland of her late father who worked there as a couturier. Informed by her experience of his death when she was a teenager growing up in the West Country, the artist here fuses together red iron earth pigments, foraged from mining regions of both Ghana and Cornwall, whilst using garment patterns to re-imagine her father’s body via the tools of his trade. The result is a mysterious, ceremonial-like object, weathered with centuries of materiality and presenting a new way of engaging with the landscape.
Laila Tara H
Laila Tara H (b. 1995, London, UK) is a British-Iranian artist working to deconstruct the aesthetic framework of the Indo/ Persian miniature tradition, hybridizing traditional painting methods with radically contemporary compositions and concepts. Her imagery is composed of repeated motifs that, once recognized, become a visually and politically charged lexicon by which to 'read' the work. Conceptually the paintings interrogate the quiet politics of the domestic sphere and the tension that exists between the personal and public realm. Often monumental in scale, comprising multiple parts and incorporating sculptural elements, Tara H's practice challenges our traditional perception of what constitutes a work on paper.
‘Loqmé 6’ is part of an ongoing series of jackets, intended by the artist to act as templates where periods of history can be made simultaneous. They also function as acts of accumulation in which the garment becomes a record of political and daily life. The anatomy of the jacket (kaftan) provides a system of placement, referring to talismanic shirts which would contain and organise verses, numbers, diagrams and protective symbols across the architecture of the body.
