Living Rooms — A New Chapter at Irving Gallery, Oxford

My solo exhibition Living Rooms at Irving Gallery in Oxford was a particularly significant moment for me. It was my first solo exhibition outside Scotland in twenty years, the culmination of an extended period of painting made possible by the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award, and my first solo exhibition since leaving higher education to concentrate on painting full-time.

In many ways, it felt like the closing of one chapter and the beginning of another.

In 2023, I was fortunate to receive the inaugural RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award. The £20,000 award offered something that is perhaps the most valuable and elusive resource for a practising artist: time. After decades of combining painting with a demanding career in art education, I was able to negotiate an eight-month sabbatical from the University of Edinburgh and devote myself to developing a substantial new body of work.

I set myself the ambitious task of producing eight large paintings. These were complex, narrative compositions, populated by imaginary buildings, cutaway interiors, fragments of remembered places and the everyday activities of people going about their lives. Some paintings were carefully planned through drawing, while others became increasingly intuitive, allowing the paint itself to suggest new possibilities.

It was an extraordinarily productive period, but also one of considerable reassessment. Having spent much of my working life encouraging other artists to take risks, I found myself confronting the same challenge. The paintings became more ambitious in scale, and in some cases looser and more painterly in their execution. I began to trust the process a little more, allowing the unexpected to find its way into the work.

By the time I left the University in August 2025, after thirty-five years in art education, I had begun to understand just how transformative that sustained period of studio practice had been.

Living Rooms, which opened at Irving Gallery on 7 May 2026, brought this body of work together for the first time in a solo exhibition. Alongside the eight large canvases were smaller oil paintings, watercolours, studies and drawings that revealed something of the thinking and experimentation behind them.

The title seemed particularly appropriate, not least because of the extraordinary setting.

Irving Gallery is an independent contemporary art gallery established in 2019 by its owner and curator, Vanessa Lacey, in her Victorian terraced house in East Oxford. Rather than adopting the conventional white-walled gallery model, Vanessa has created a distinctive and intimate space in which contemporary art is encountered within the rooms of a home.

For paintings so concerned with domestic interiors, private lives, architecture and the sometimes absurd relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit, it was a wonderfully sympathetic setting. There was something rather pleasing about exhibiting imaginary living rooms inside real ones.

But what particularly impressed me about Irving Gallery was Vanessa’s approach to the artists she works with. Her programme brings together emerging and established practitioners, giving individual artists the opportunity to present substantial bodies of work while also introducing audiences to new and sometimes less familiar voices.

Artists including Heather McAteer, Olivia Irvine, Laura Porter, Charlotte Brisland, Tereza Horáček and others have been part of the gallery’s developing programme. It is a gallery built around sustained relationships, individual artistic voices and a genuine commitment to the work itself.

There is a thoughtfulness, independence and integrity to the way Vanessa runs the gallery that I greatly admire. At a time when the commercial art world can sometimes seem preoccupied with scale, visibility and fashionable trends, Irving Gallery offers something refreshingly different: close attention to artists, careful presentation and the opportunity for visitors to spend time really looking.

Vanessa approached my exhibition with tremendous sensitivity and care, and I felt that the paintings were understood and respected. For an artist presenting such a personally significant body of work, that means a great deal.

I was also delighted that Colin Greenslade, Director of the Royal Scottish Academy, contributed an extended essay about the paintings. Colin had followed the development of the work through the Blackadder Houston Award, and his writing offered a generous and perceptive account of the ambition, complexity and changing character of the paintings.

The private view on Saturday 9 May was a particularly enjoyable occasion, and it was wonderful to see the work installed in Oxford, a city with which I have my own connections from earlier years of teaching.

Looking back, Living Rooms represented much more than the completion of a series of paintings. It was the outcome of an award that had given me the confidence and freedom to work on a different scale, and it marked the transition from a life divided between teaching and painting to one in which painting could finally take centre stage.

I remain enormously grateful to the Royal Scottish Academy and the Blackadder Houston Fund for making that period of concentrated work possible, to Colin Greenslade for his thoughtful writing, and especially to Vanessa Lacey for her belief in the paintings and for presenting them with such care and conviction.

After twenty years without a solo exhibition south of the border, it felt very good to be back.

And perhaps, at the age of sixty-one, to be starting something new.

Further reading

Living Rooms — Exhibition and Colin Greenslade’s essay, Irving Gallery

Robbie Bushe — Works at Irving Gallery

About Irving Gallery