LMH Fine Art Students Bring Spring to the Chapel

LMH’s Chapel has been reimagined as an exhibition space for this year’s annual Fine Art show, 'Under the Blanket of Spring', as six second-year students present work inspired by the season and the college’s gardens. From painting and sculpture to installation and performance, the exhibition moves through the Chapel in a way that reflects both the theme and the energy of the cohort behind it.

The exhibition opened on Saturday in the Fellows’ Garden, where students Hattie Hone and Sky Lily Ellis created a parachute piece as part of an opening event that also featured a folkloric performance. It will conclude on Thursday 21 May.

Among the works on show is Grace Steinberg’s imposing, stylised portrait of a man’s back, a vivid painting that stands out for its huge scale and intense use of colour. 

Grace said the work was inspired by Oxford-based artist Jenny Saville’s exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery last year. “The monumental scale of her figurative works made the bodies intensely confrontational, and I became immediately fixated on the idea of painting a figure on the largest canvas I possibly could,” she said. “I have been researching the relationship between proprioception, paint, and the body, exploring how painting can communicate sensation and embodied feeling, and the distinction between introspection and interoception.”

She added that exhibiting at LMH has been “a great opportunity to integrate and showcase our subject within college, and celebrate the arts as a diverse form of learning and engaging with the world.” Grace hopes that her cohort can continue to integrate the arts within LMH, and display more of their work here in the future.

Se Lyn Lim said her contribution was inspired by the idea of creating work that would “inhabit and activate the interior architecture of the Chapel”. Se Lyn’s work combines paintings, miniature sculptures and transparent words hanging from the Chapel's chandeliers.

 “In suspending the words ‘hear sunlight weeping’ from three of the chandeliers, I displayed these poetic fragments, inviting a relationship between language in written form, the visual language of the transparent letters and how it would interact with sunlight filtered through the stained-glass windows at different times of day,” Se Lyn said.

The exhibition reflects the collaborative spirit of LMH's second-year fine artists, with each student approaching the theme of spring in their own way. Taken out of the studio and into the Chapel, the work gives visitors a chance to see LMH’s artistic talent up close, and to experience the space as somewhere both contemplative and creative.

Contributors to this year’s exhibition are: Sky Lily Ellis, Se Lyn Lim, Grace Steinberg, Hattie Hone, Gruffydd Price and Rachel Briggs. Open to all, the exhibition will remain in the Chapel until Thursday 21 May.