Travel means to take a journey – somewhere away from home and often abroad. Journeys take so many forms – expeditions, trips, tours, excursions, voyages, treks, safaris, pilgrimages, cruises, and sometimes just roaming.
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CIRCLE’s summer travel show promises to be a visual delight. No cliche’d mediterranean watercolours painted from villa gardens – instead a contemporary exhibition of new works by our core group, plus some fine pieces from guest artists. In keeping with our location the main body of the show has a coastal vibe with plenty of blue and yellow – sun, sand, surf and glistening turquoise water evoking everyone’s experience of summer holidays.
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We have chosen an eclectic mix of work which reveals the strong individualism of each artist – Tracy Emin’s I LOVE YOU beach towel from her Margate installation and Adam Bridgland’s witty cruise badges keep a light touch. Foreign travel: Egypt, Morocco, Australia, China, Croatia and California are seen through artists’ eyes and artist John O’Carroll promises desert road videos to accompany his wide angle landscapes.
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In keeping with West Coast tradition TRAVELLING LIGHT includes must-have coffee table books and exclusive postcard editions.

Inspired by ancient methods of painting this exhibition features works which draw on Egypt’s ancient landscape and culture. New paintings address the moors and coastal spaces around his studio in Cornwall. This exhibition follows on from O’Carroll’s solo show at the Galerie Roger Katwijk, Amsterdam in 2018.,

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John O’Carroll, like his Modernist contemporaries, makes ‘alchemy’ with paint and pigment to captivate the eye of the viewer. By calling upon their memories of place – no particular place, rather a place of sublime evocation, O’Carroll draws the viewer into participating in an expression of his experience, bringing into consciousness an air of nature. Paul Cezanne always stated that nature is on the inside, and John O’Carroll has never relinquished the natural forms he experienced on his travels through Texas, Mexico, New York and Holland, and in later life, the chalky flat topped cliffs of the Western desert, Egypt. These places have become his muse and master, forever emerging in new guises, surfacing and vanishing in the process of painting.
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John O’Carroll’s new paintings pay homage to ancient metallurgy and his understanding of pigments. A process painter of oblique symbols, O’Carroll’s work reflects the timelessness of essential nature through his very – successful alchemy.