What Remains Within, an exhibition curated by Paola Lucente, brings together the work of three contemporary artists — Chloe Bonfield, Kate Lyddon and Zulfiya Spowart — concerned with memory, inheritance and the traces experience leaves behind. Conceived in parallel with Nicola Turner’s I Tear Secrets from Your Yielding Flesh, the exhibition considers the histories we inherit and the physical and emotional traces they leave within us. Across painting and sculpture, the works touch upon material, gesture, the body and domestic life, treating memory not as a fixed record of the past but as something continually absorbed, altered and passed on. Each work shares an interest in what persists without being consciously remembered, surfacing instead through repetition, an altered object or a material trace.
Throughout the exhibition, bodies, materials and objects become unstable archives of experience: they retain traces without preserving them intact. Pigment permeates fabric, gestures accumulate across painted surfaces, and familiar objects are altered so that their expected relationship to the body is disrupted. Personal histories intersect with domestic routines, psychological states and experiences transmitted between generations, suggesting that inheritance can be physical and material as much as consciously remembered. Rather than seeking to recover the past intact, the artists consider how its traces are continually reworked through acts of making, allowing what has been absorbed or inherited to resurface in altered forms.
Chloe Bonfield is a painter whose practice explores memory, gesture and the psychological landscapes of everyday life through fluid, intuitive painting. Working with swift, liquid brushstrokes, she creates paintings that emerge from moments of urgency and flow, developed within the fragmented temporality of caregiving. For this exhibition, Bonfield shifts from her usual butter muslin to unstretched canvas, allowing greater freedom in the movement of paint across the surface. The paintings build through repetition, interruption and return, so that the conditions of their making become absorbed into the work itself. Figures drawn from observation, art-historical sources and found imagery appear within domestic interiors, forests and imagined landscapes, often caught looking elsewhere. Rather than illustrating specific memories, the paintings hold fleeting psychological states: presence and retreat, intimacy and distance, attention and escape.
Kate Lyddon is a painter whose practice explores transformation, memory and lived experience through an intuitive and materially driven approach. Often rooted in bodily experience and domestic space, her paintings create unstable environments in which bodies, objects and their surroundings merge and shift. For this exhibition, Lyddon presents new paintings made by pouring and staining pigment diluted in size and thinned oil paint directly onto unprimed linen and jute. The colour soaks into the weave rather than sitting on its surface, so that paint becomes inseparable from its support. Across these stained surfaces, figures emerge and recede between figuration and abstraction. Lyddon’s own body and the presence of her daughter recur throughout, taking form as skeletal structures, domestic objects or fields of colour, so that pigment becomes a porous archive of lived experience.
Zulfiya Spowart is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, textiles and wood, whose practice explores embodied knowledge, material memory and the invisible systems of care, labour and cultural transmission embedded within everyday objects. Working with recycled and previously used materials that retain traces of touch, repair and use, she approaches materiality as a living archive through which histories are transmitted across generations. For this exhibition, Spowart presents a new sculpture in the form of a rocking horse, one of the earliest domestic objects through which a child encounters balance, rhythm, coordination and trust. The work retains the horse’s familiar geometry, but its centre of gravity has been altered so that it can no longer rock. Drawing on her family history, including generations of women shaped by migration from Siberia to Central Asia and by Soviet colonial policy and its collapse, Spowart uses the altered horse to think through interrupted inheritance: experience passed between generations through the body rather than through conscious memory.
Paola Lucente is a London-based independent curator with over 20 years of experience across the public and private contemporary art sectors, having worked with institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, Marian Goodman Gallery and the Zabludowicz Collection, and whose practice is rooted in feminist perspectives on lived experience, identity and care.
Alongside the main gallery’s exhibition programme, the Project Room operates as a space in its own right, inviting artists to show work outside of the gallery’s core roster. Located on the first floor of the gallery’s Grade II listed Georgian townhouse, the space extends Annely Juda Fine Art’s programme beyond its historic exhibitors, offering a platform for artists at earlier stages of their careers alongside the gallery’s ongoing support of established names.