Four artists breathe new life into old magic.
Ancient Modern brings together the work of Carl Anderson, Emma Black, Jonathan Michael Ray and James Dearlove, artists who draw from deep historical imagery while remaining firmly rooted in the present. Armour, puppetry, stained glass and ritual gesture appear throughout the exhibition not as nostalgic relics, but as living languages that continue to evolve. Each artist looks backwards in order to understand how symbols of protection, devotion, labour and transformation still resonate within contemporary experience.
Carl Anderson’s ceramic sculptures reinterpret the physical and psychological weight of medieval armour. A gauntlet plucked from a knight’s arsenal forms a contemporary “OK” gesture, collapsing centuries into a single ironic movement. Glazed moths hover quietly nearby, suspended between fragility and endurance. Working with clay, a material that carries the memory of human touch across millennia, Anderson confronts masculinity, authority and vulnerability, turning objects of defence into contemplative forms that question the nature of power itself.
Emma Black’s ceramic marionette occupies a space between folk tale and fever dream. Its joyful yet unsettling presence suggests both play and judgement, an ancient figure wandering through a contemporary landscape. Drawing on personal narratives of illness, disability and non normative experience, Black constructs sculptures that feel simultaneously familiar and strange. The marionette’s unblinking mask seems to observe its surroundings with quiet intensity, inviting viewers to reflect on the roles we perform and the expectations placed upon the body.
Jonathan Michael Ray works with salvaged fragments of stained glass sourced from decommissioned churches, reassembling sacred light into new devotional objects. History fractures and reforms through his process of assemblage, allowing discarded artefacts to speak again in unexpected ways. By layering material histories with contemporary gestures, Ray creates works that feel both reverent and speculative, as if remnants of past belief systems have been reconfigured to hold new meaning in a secular world.
James Dearlove’s paintings present a twilit, hallucinatory world haunted by the human figure. In Three Figures With Net, a group of contemporary men repair fishing nets, continuing a communal activity that stretches back thousands of years. The scene echoes ancient labour and survival, connecting present day bodies with ancestral rhythms of making and maintenance. Dearlove’s fractured compositions and layered surfaces create an in between space where intimacy, mythology and everyday ritual merge, suggesting that the past persists not as history alone but as a lived inheritance.
Together, these artists mine the visual language of another time. Armour becomes gesture, puppetry becomes self reflection, cathedral windows become collage, and communal labour becomes mythic narrative. Ancient & Modern proposes that history is not fixed or distant. Instead it pulses beneath the surface of contemporary life, crackling with new energy, as if the medieval fair never truly left town.
βΈ»
Artist Biographies
Carl Anderson (b. Shoreham-by-Sea, UK) lives and works in West Sussex. His ceramic sculptures draw on medieval armour, animal traps and historical objects to explore masculinity, violence and vulnerability. Anderson studied at the Architectural Association and completed the Turps Mass Correspondence Course. Recent exhibitions include Salon at Tone, London; Morphogenesis at XXijra Hii, London; and Buried at OHSH Projects, Thames-Side Studios Gallery.
Emma Black lives and works in London, creating sculpture and installation that examines the pressures of conformity and the complexities of embodied experience. Working with ceramics, casting and found materials, Black explores themes of illness, disability, gender and neurodivergence through forms that balance humour with the comic grotesque. Black graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2024 and is currently part of the MASS Sculpture Programme at Thames-Side Studios.
Jonathan Michael Ray (b. 1984) lives and works in Penzance, Cornwall. His multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, collage, photography and installation, often incorporating salvaged historical materials such as antique stained glass. Ray completed an MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Recent exhibitions include Tate St Ives, Newlyn Art Gallery, Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens and Bo Lee and Workman. His work is held in public and private collections internationally.
James Dearlove lives and works in Cornwall. A graduate of the Slade School of Art (MFA) and Turps Art School, Dearlove’s paintings explore desire, disquiet and the human figure within twilight worlds shaped by collage and fragmentation. He is a recipient of the Ingram Prize and has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, New Contemporaries, London Art Fair and The British Art Fair, with solo presentations in London and Paris.