Emotional Legacies explores heritage not as a fixed relic of the past, but as a living presence shaped and transformed by landscapes and nature. The exhibition considers the landscape as more than a backdrop, presenting it instead as a narrative space where memory and emotion are inscribed, and where the accumulation of time generates meanings that link individual experience with collective identity.
Through distinct approaches, the works of Celia Hempton, Martyn Cross, and Tomo Campbell illuminate this perspective. Celia Hempton incorporates fragments of demolition sites into her oil paint, embedding the material traces of dismantled and rebuilt structures within the surface of her canvases. Her paintings transform the city in transition into a site of memory, preserving what is often erased while evoking both vulnerability and resilience. Martyn Cross depicts the British countryside as a custodian of memory. His muted colours and simplified forms conjure landscapes that feel at once familiar and distant, inviting viewers into a space of quiet reflection where nature itself carries emotional resonance and the layered weight of time. Tomo Campbell, by contrast, envisions landscapes as spaces formed through history and myth. His rhythmic brushwork and layered compositions generate dreamlike scenes where memory and imagination converge, rendering heritage as something fluid, mutable, and alive.
Taken together, the works in Emotional Legacies reframe heritage as a dynamic and evolving condition. Rather than a static inheritance, it is presented as an organic force that moves through memory, emotion, and place—an enduring presence that continues to shape and enrich the identities of those who encounter it today.
