Photo credit: Mary Alice Beal, ZimplePlus Studio and Wanting Wang (One of our exhibiting artists in Open Open 2025)
✨ Welcome to the Online Curatorial Tour
Thank you for joining us for the online tour of Wish You Were Here, part of OPEN OPEN 2025 at Chapel Arts Studios.
Curating this exhibition has been a deeply personal and collective journey—one shaped by more than 100 artist submissions from across the UK and beyond, all responding to memory, absence, longing, and the question of what it means to remember. Through 46 works by 60 artists, Wish You Were Here invites you to step into stories held in objects, gestures, landscapes, and dreams.
A welcome from the exhibition curator, Maggie Chiu
This tour has been structured by theme—gently guiding you through each area, from soft beginnings to surreal imaginings, and from personal loss to shared time. As you explore each section, I invite you to move slowly, pause often, and let the artworks meet you where you are.
Whether you're visiting in person or discovering the show from afar, I hope this space offers connection, reflection, and a sense of being held in something larger than yourself.
AREA A: Soft Traces, Deep Roots
1. Still Here, Somehow – Simon Peter Green
2. The Stars Reflect in the Reservoirs – Julia Keenan
3. Blood Stained Child – Wakrot Chinshaka
4. I wish I was still there – Eve Kemp-Gee
5. Nostalgia I – Julie Gayle Balliu
6. Within me, Beneath me, All Around Me – Alice Healy
7. Oyster – Will Frampton
8. Allium – Lorna Bramwells
9. Empty Nest – Liz Clifford
10. Posy – Kate Mieczkowska
11. Homeward Bound – Daz Beatson
12. Wipeout – Elizabeth Hammond
What do we carry with us—through soil, through seasons, through silence?
Area A invites you into a gentle but profound contemplation of place, identity, and the emotional textures of home. Here, the natural world acts as both metaphor and material, shaping how we remember, mourn, and belong. These twelve works explore the resonance of seemingly small moments—dried flowers in a glass, light through trees, the absence in an empty room—but speak to universal themes of loss, care, rootedness, and the passing of time.
Winner of the Hampshire Award - Liz Clifford
At the heart of this space is Empty Nest by Liz Clifford, recipient of the Hampshire Residency Award, whose tender sculptural work evokes the quiet ache of change and departure, and how care can be held in form. Alongside it, works like I wish I was still there by Eve Kemp-Gee and Still Here, Somehow by Simon Peter Green explore the blurry edge between past and present, where longing becomes landscape.
From the haunting beauty of Julia Keenan's The Stars Reflect in the Reservoirs to the visceral reflection in Wakrot Chinshaka's Blood Stained Child, this area asks you to slow down, listen closely, and reconnect—with your own roots, and with the soft traces others have left behind.
AREA B: Imagination, Grief, and the Inner Landscape
13. Over Engineered Boats – Hester Poole
14. Wish You Were Here – Richard Barnfather
15. Beaded Remains I – Coral Fowley
16. Blue Asylum – Marta Lichocinska
What stories shape the worlds inside us?
In Area B, the boundaries between memory, imagination, and emotion blur—where grief is stitched into form, and longing becomes a landscape of its own.
This area invites you to explore the deeply personal and often invisible terrains we carry within. These works reflect on mental health, familial bonds, loss, and the stories we tell ourselves to understand where we’ve been—and who we’ve become.
Over Engineered Boats - Hester Poole
Featuring expressive, poetic, and sometimes surreal visual languages, the pieces here conjure memories that are fragile and persistent, full of yearning, humour, and care. Whether through object, colour, or gesture, the artists in Area B offer windows into internal worlds rarely seen.
This is a space of tenderness and introspection—where memory and feeling are material, and where each piece invites you to pause, look inward, and reflect.
AREA C: Family, History, and Acts of Remembrance
17. Leaving Home – Cameron Scott
18. Margaret – Emily Marsh
19. Three-part Drawing – Yonat Nitzan-Green
20. Discovery – Jude Price
What do we inherit?
Area C brings together artists whose work holds space for personal and collective memory—where family histories, cultural identity, and national trauma meet.
Here, remembrance is not static—it is alive, carved, drawn, and honoured. These works explore the strength of intergenerational bonds, the complexity of personal identity, and the act of remembering as something both intimate and political.
What do we choose to remember?
In this area, a grandmother’s name becomes a gesture of strength. A child’s farewell becomes a drawing of departure. A carved village maze maps memory into wood. Together, these pieces reflect how we carry the past into the present—and how creative practice can preserve, question, or reframe it.
AREA D: Steps Toward Healing and Remembering
21. May Day – Elsie Green
22. You and Me I – Mario Lautier-Vella
23. Pray For Me Remember Me Bless Me Sancta Maria – Angel Drinkwater
24. Becoming an artist in 1950s Scotland – Gen Doy
25. Cures for Melancholy – James Choucino
26. On the Road Again – Rebecca Capewell
What does it mean to heal—to carry the past and still move forward?
In Area D, memory becomes an act of care. Through reflection, ritual, and reclamation, these works navigate the slow, personal processes of recovery and remembrance.
This space is rooted in the emotional labour of healing. Whether revisiting family lineage, exploring religious iconography, or wandering back through sunlit days, the artists here consider how we mend ourselves and how we honour what lingers. Healing is not linear—it moves in cycles, like seasons or songs.
What do we keep? What do we grieve? What do we dream into being next?
From the warm haze of Elsie Green’s May Day to the delicate devotion in Angel Drinkwater’s layered textile, this area reveals the small gestures that tether us to memory. Gen Doy’s reflections on creativity and resilience unfold beside James Choucino’s poetic offerings to melancholy. Together, these works create space for personal restoration and quiet transformation.
AREA E: The Unseen, the Surreal, and the Still Unfolding
27. Stay!! – Caroline Perkins
28. A boy who lost an eye – Ravi Modi
29. Field and Dreams – Ian Smith
30. Remember Tomorrow I – Laurence Dube-Rushby
31. Insomnia I – Xin Zhang
32. Birds of a Feather – Leigh-Anna Barber Corbett
33. Common Threads – Heather Burwell
When memory slips, what rushes in to fill the gap?
In Area E, reality softens. The works here float between what is remembered, imagined, and half-understood—inviting you into a world of transformation, distortion, and possibility.
Memory isn’t always reliable. It stutters, shapeshifts, or shimmers just out of reach. The artworks in this area embrace the uncertainty of recollection and explore how the surreal can speak more honestly than the literal.
What do we keep? What do we grieve? What do we dream into being next?
Dreamlike, disjointed, and rich with layered narratives, these pieces reflect states of mind and imagined futures. Ravi Modi’s haunting portrait of altered vision, Xin Zhang’s insomnia-riddled distortion, and Heather Burwell’s tender stitching all speak to absence—what’s missing, what’s changed, what might yet emerge.
Some of these works whisper. Others disorient. All invite you to consider how memory might not just record, but recreate.
AREA F: Places of Pause and Presence
34. Road Trip – Richard Gregory
35. Party 1 – Jill Iliffe
36. Echo -3 – Xuesheng Ma
37. Missing – Olamide Jasanya
38. Milk Float – Ryan Dodd
What places hold us even after we’ve left them behind?
In Area F, the road, the room, and the landscape become vessels for memory—quiet places where echoes linger and presence is felt long after absence.
This is a space of stillness and return. The artworks in Area F explore how we revisit people, places, and feelings that continue to live within us. From long-gone road trips to half-remembered parties and missing companions, these pieces are layered with longing and reflection.
Who do we still carry with us? And who are we waiting for?
These are not grand moments, but fleeting ones—countryside drives, plastic cups on the floor, a glint in the mirror, or the silence of waiting. Richard Gregory’s Road Trip and Jill Iliffe’s Party 1 evoke the bittersweet warmth of the past, while Xuesheng Ma’s Echo -3 and Olamide Jasanya’s Missing sit with what’s gone but not forgotten.
AREA G: Objects of Home, Fragments of Time
39. Fragmented and Unified – Wanting Wang
40. Maybe Tomorrow – Liv Gregory
41. Leftovers: What we haven’t yet said – Lisha Zhong
42. Presence (of the former and future) – Hannah Cantellow
What everyday things hold stories we no longer speak aloud?
Area G transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary—daily objects, leftovers, shadows—offering small anchors to memory in a world that moves fast.
In this intimate section, personal objects become emotional archives. These artworks draw on domestic spaces and daily rituals, capturing fleeting presences and unsaid words. Each fragment points to something larger: a bond, a loss, a promise.
Here, the everyday becomes sacred.
Wanting Wang’s Fragmented and Unified gathers the scattered and holds them together. In Lisha Zhong’s Leftovers: What we haven't yet said, what remains becomes a tender confession. These works suggest that home is less a place than a feeling, something built from habits, hauntings, and hopes.
AREA H: Circles of Learning, Loss, and Love
43. Resting Chair – Shujing Shen
44. In Rhythm Together – Mim Teasle
45. In Circles – Marian Obando (Judge’s Favourite Award)
46. Two of Us – Natalja Poplavska
How do we carry care across time?
Movement becomes memory, rest becomes resistance, and inherited gestures are honoured through repetition, rhythm, and devotion.
This final area brings us full circle. Here, grief, love, and learning converge in tender and embodied acts. The works reflect on relationships across generations, the passage of time, and the ways we honour those we’ve lost by continuing their motions, stories, and softness.
Winner of the Judge’s Favourite Award - Marian Obando
Mim Teasle’s animated dance with her late mother in In Rhythm Together is both a goodbye and a continuation. Marian Obando’s In Circles (Judge’s Favourite Award) delicately maps the looping paths of mourning and love. And Shujing Shen’s Resting Chair becomes a space of recovery—not just physical, but emotional.
Glad you are here this time!
OPEN OPEN 2025:
Wish You Were Here
3 - 26 July 2025
Open Thursday to Saturday from 11am - 4pm
FREE!
This summer,
Open Open 2025: Wish You Were Here presents 46 works carefully selected from over 100 submissions by 60 artists. Together, these pieces explore the many ways we hold memory—tender, fragmented, joyful, and unresolved. They ask what it means to remember, and what it means to long for someone, something, or somewhere no longer close.
WHO ARE WE?
CAS is a socially-engaged, contemporary visual arts organisation based right here in Andover. It supports artists of all ages and backgrounds, and runs projects that connect art with the community in meaningful ways. We’re also proud to be one of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations.
Since opening as an artist studio in 2009, CAS has grown into a hub for creativity and questioning. It became a charity in 2019, which was also the Chapel’s 150th birthday—and yes, CAS really did send artwork into space!
