Shifting Sands is a group exhibition featuring 20 painters from the world famous Turps Banana painting school. It has been curated in conjunction with Jersey based painter Tim Le Breuilly, who is himself part of the 2025 Turps cohort. This exhibition offers Jersey audiences a unique opportunity to experience the best of a new generation of painters, contributing to current developments in contemporary painting practice. The correspondence course is by nature international and these painters are drawn from far and wide, each with a unique voice articulated through their chosen medium.
Painting is an ancient medium; fluid, dirty, slippery. Each iterative mark is a measure of the moment of its appearance and as such it is the perfect medium to express the messiness, volatility and fleetingness of our human experience. What these painters have in common is the desire to use the medium of paint to act as a conduit or witness for the human condition. To confer the minutiae of daily life onto canvas, to shed light on the invisible and to articulate the very personal by way of a shared experience.
Painter and co-curator Tim Le Breuilly shares his thoughts on the exhibition: “‘Shifting Sands’ could describe an active, chaotic, living landscape. The act of looking, itself creates an even more complex dialogue as we encounter geology and flora occupying space with the overwhelming, pervasive murmuration of light. Catching fleeting scenes of natural processes whilst heavy slabs of rock emerge from the sea and jut out to meet the sky. The rocks, cousins of the finer particles demonstrating the ebb and flow of the shoreline. ‘Shifting Sands’ could also refer to painting and its chimeric qualities; a practice that constantly evolves, straddling increasingly complex systems as a way to navigate human experience. The medium’s primal smears and daubs allow the painter extension into the world around them whilst also clumsily keeping accurate recording just out of reach.
Whether the subject matter is a collection of objects, landscape or other humans these artists give gravity to their materials and subjects with some creating a window into reverie.
Most of the painters in this show have become associates through the ‘Turps Banana’ alternative schooling program which has a particularly egalitarian ethos. We’d like to invite you to come and contemplate the various works in this, far from exhaustive, survey of an inherently ponderous medium.”
Shifting Sands
CCA Galleries International
10 Hill Street
Exhibition continues until 2nd May
Monday – Friday 12-6pm
ccainternational.com
Participating Artists: CD Lewis, Ashley Holmes, Pavel Isupov, Nikki Foster, Polly Tomlinson, Sebastián Espejo, Nick Ivins, Carlo Formisano, Cynthia Harrison Orr, Elaine Quinlan, Sylvia Hill, George Badescu, Julie Annis, Fiona Richmond, Jarrod Becker, Tim Dodds, Emma Loizides, Amanda Horwood, Tim Le Breuilly and Belma Kratovic.
