Opening Event Thurday 30 April from 6pm
This exhibition brings together selections from ink and watercolour travel journals, created during archaeological excavations and research across the Middle East and Mediterranean, alongside newly completed oil paintings of the same sites, landscapes, and finds. Titled Ancient Nostalgia: Mourning Paintings That Could Have Been, this project is not about regret, but reflection, a tribute to the places and moments that shaped me, both as a researcher and as an artist. As I travelled for my PhD research, there were countless missed opportunities to paint like great outdoor painters would have: ancient vistas, temples, desert towns and busy port cities– all slipping by in the urgency of academic work.
However, these moments have stayed with me. Through this project, I allow myself return to them, not to mourn their passing, or wish I had of done different, but to celebrate them, to honour their ‘imprint’, and to share the mosaic of memory and transformation that they left behind. This exhibition aims to be a reflection on memory, place, and the traces we will always carry. It asks what it means to return, not to a location, but to a feeling or a lost moment, and how art can imagine what could have been, and what remains.
Image: Phronesis, Madaline Harris Schober
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