Body and Identity
BODY AND IDENTITY is the first of CBP’s new structure of annual themes which will run from September to August, sitting alongside our existing exhibitions programme, the Prize and other projects.
Our aim is to create a lively discourse about painting and culture, both between CBP members and other artists, reflecting the rich diversity of practices that we have at CBP. They are a chance for artists to connect, to discuss and make work together.
This page will be the go-to resource and a record of everything that happens during the year. Here you can find many different items related to the theme that have been submitted by CBP members – for example information about an exhibition; a transcript or film recording of an artist to artist dialogue, symposium or Pecha Kucha; a text, catalogue essay or blog link; or images of a collaborative artistic project.
Explorations about Body you find here might include for example the bodily physicality of paint, the relationship between the artist’s body and the act of painting, the body’s vulnerability, or the body in space and within phenomenology.
Explorations of Identity may cover many facets including identity and migration, its contingent nature, as well as identities of gender, sexuality, race, class and disability – but these are not exhaustive lists.
Body and Identity runs from September 2026 to August 2027. The subsequent themes are Translation and Information, and then Materiality and Process.
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Natalie Dowse: The Fragmented Body
Phil Illingworth traces the themes that connect Natalie Dowse’s practice, and how her engagement with particular imagery, from archival footage and found photographs to film and television, led to her Mise en scène series.
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This Is All the Treasure We Can Have or Hold
This essay by Dr. Stephanie Cussans Moran is from the catalogue for Ruth Calland’s solo show This Is All the Treasure We Can Have or Hold, held in 2025 at 20:21 Visual Arts Centre in Scunthorpe, and touring in 2026 to Hastings Museum & Art Gallery. As I began to find a language for my own nonbinary identity…
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Of Bodies New and Strange
‘Of Bodies New and Strange’ This is from a recent talk given for Turps Margate at Turner Contemporary in which I discuss metamorphosis in my painting of human figures.Susie Hamilton I often paint solitary people in desolate environments yet push this bleak but ordinary world towards something unfamiliar and uncanny. My figures morph into other…
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Declarative Language
Declarative Language Declarative Language was a group exhibition presented at Amici Studio in Hastings in collaboration with artist-curators Kelly Jessiman and Alexis Soul-Gray, bringing together artists whose practices have been shaped by sustained caregiving within families of neurodivergent children.
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Daniel H Bell: Strange Nature
by Louisa Buck This essay about the work of Daniel H Bell, winner of the CBP Prize 2024, was published in the CBP Prize 2024 exhibition catalogue. The essay forms part of the prize. ‘Every normal human being (and not merely the ‘artist’) has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely…
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Selfish, Sticky & Successful
An essay by Beth Hughes (independent Curator and Researcher) about the work of Rich Jellyman the winner of the CBP Prize 2023. This essay was published in the CBP Prize 2023 exhibition catalogue. The essay forms part of the prize. ‘Human creativity is a process of variation and recombination’ Susan J. Blackmore, The Meme Machine (1)…
