If art is the amalgamation of experience and imagination, to view it is to be granted a magnifying glass upon a world. Each of the artists in Transmissions–Fiona Berry, Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell, Fergus Polglase, Daniel Kerrison Stock, and Maddalena Zadra– use artmaking as an intuitive channel for, varyingly, folklore, cultural heritage, personal narratives and ancestral paths. Though their mediums span across painting, woodwork, textiles, film and metallurgy, they collectively utilise processes which incorporate both the intentional mastery of material and unbounded intuition.

The result is a kind of poetry, at play in the materials of these works as much as that which they depict. It can be seen in Zadra’s textiles, which transcend their medium to painterly terrains, and arrange their symbols in associative patterns, or in Berry’s wooden horse head, which acts as an amulet alongside her delicately geometric, dream-like drawings. It is also visible in the expressive mark-making which forms Kerrison Stock’s figures, and the abstracted scenes and automatic writing which coalesces on Polglase’s canvases to produce monumental landscapes of the subconscious.

These artists also draw on more tangible folkloric and historic narratives to imbue their work with a resonance which defies temporal and geographical boundaries. A collaborative film by Gurung-Russell Campbell, for example, uses the folk song Wayfaring Stranger, and the Nepali folkloric figure of the Lahkey, to explore intergenerational memory, migration and the British Empire’s lingering shadow over the diaspora. Polglase also anchors much of his practice in Cornish folklore, mermaids and pixies sometimes emerging from his ostensibly abstract scenes.

Ultimately, what unites the work on show in Transmissions is its ability to articulate the past’s tentacular influence on the present, whether through our understanding of ourselves, our environments, or the stories we are told. Art, and materiality, become poetic vehicles for grappling with the great web of identity which forms the world as we experience it. As Olivia Laing writes in Everybody: A Book About Freedom (2021), “freedom doesn’t mean being unburdened by the past. It means continuing into the future, dreaming all the time.”