The Essential School of Painting · Artist Development Year Exhibition 2026
An end of year exhibition of work by three artists
DATES
11–17 September 2026
PRIVATE VIEW
Saturday 12 September, 1–5pm
Polly Fehily
PAINTING · WORKS ON PAPER AND FABRIC
Polly Fehily’s work is a kind of archaeology, mapping the recent past. She works with tools, representing them on fragile papers and fabrics.
The tools speak for the people who used them, the repetitive use over time showing the same signs of wear and damage.
Coming from the North East of England, where signs and remains of labour and religion are soaked into the soil, she sees these images of tools as portraits, icons personifying the labour of the hand, the body that used them.
Gillian Foot
PAINTING
Gillian Foot is a figurative painter, her work leaning towards abstraction. She finds images emerge and evolve in the process of the application of the paint itself, allowing an open and intuitive approach.
These possibilities enable echoes and amplifications of Foot’s recurring themes and interests such as memory, ephemera, found objects, collage and assemblage.
The fickle nature of meaning and understanding, the poetry of the everyday and the poignancy of the lost and found infuse Foot’s painterly enquiry: finding elements unplanned or perhaps hovering almost beyond reach.
Alison Stirling
PAINTING · LANDSCAPE
Alison Stirling’s work investigates the coexistence of nature and the built-up environment, where urbanity encroaches on nature and vice versa in forgotten or in-between spaces.
Her interest lies in subverting the genre of Landscape painting as ‘scenic view’. She uses Art historical references to reimagine landscape in its elemental and psychogeographical form. The paintings evoke an almost dreamlike quality of both trepidation and equanimity.