​Happy Place
Participating Artists: Caroline Streatfield, Daniel Shadbolt, Susan Rocklin, Nicole Price, Tom Farthing, Lara Davies, Micheal Coppelov & Vanessa Brassey
Preview: Thursday 7th May 6-8PM
Open Friday–Sunday, 12–5PM
8th - 10th May
The world is chaotic and stressful. This exhibition brings together a collection of artists whose work takes you to places that bring joy or tranquillity. These are the artists’ happy places.
Michael and Lara draw on their cycling and travelling experiences to create paintings that transport us to another place either via humour, Michael, or transcendency, Lara. 
Caroline captures peaceful views both from memories and in situ. We feel her quiet contemplation and recollections.
Daniel paints his immediate surroundings, here in his studio, the airiness and his lightness of touch convey the comfort in his space. 
Susan takes us on a journey to ethereal or fantastical landscapes with her gentle otherworldly scenes.
Both Tom and Vanessa return to familiar landscapes to record the restful meditative qualities of water and the countryside. We are calmed by their paintings.
Nicole’s work reflects on her happy moments, memories of travel or the serenity of home.
This is Happy Place
Caroline Streatfield
Caroline’s work investigates ideas around memory, history and identity through her own familial narratives and her maternal Eastern European heritage. Her figurative paintings are set against the backdrop of wider socio-political histories and allow her to engage with a world that is both familiar and foreign to her. . Her contextual practice writing has employed a diaristic form and shifted between the present, past and a projected future in an inventive approach to critical writing. Caroline is also is a curator and believes strongly in  community engagement 
Caroline Streatfield has a MA in painting and a PGCE (FE)in  Education, she combines her art practice with teaching and curating art exhibitions. She was selected for John Moore’s Painting prize (2020) and received Arts Council funding for a community lead project ‘People of Oxford Rd’
Instagram: @carolinestreatfield
Nicole Price
Nicole Price’s art practice centres around familiar environments, her paintings documenting her everyday observations. Whether Nicole is painting the banality of the cluttered insides of her kitchen cupboards, or the tangled woodlands near her home, an uneasy feeling is evoked by the lack of empty space in the images. Still life and landscapes are treated in the same way, forms, colours, textures and cropped compositions drawing the viewer in. The human presence is felt by the associations of the objects and the familiarity of well travelled paths.
Nicole Price lives and works in London. She studied at Leeds University, Heatherley’s, and Wimbledon College of Arts (UAL) for her MFA and more recently on the Turps Banana Studio Painting Programme. Her work has been exhibited regularly in group exhibitions including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the RWA, the SWA, the Beep Painting Biennial, the Oxmarket Open and the ING Discerning Eye. She was a shortlisted finalist for the 2019 Ingram Prize, the Beep Painting Prize 2024 and the Jackson’s Painting Prize 2025. Nicole is represented by Tregony Contemporary. 
Instagram: @nicolerprice
Lara Davies
Lara Davies works across figuration and abstraction to explore the interplay between place, memory and personal history.  Lara’s paintings act as photograms, absorbing the life around her, such as the wilderness and magic she experiences when on cycling adventures.  Paint is applied in thin layers to create a mottled surface, like a faded photograph or grainy reel of film. The soft, powdery surface evokes a sense of nostalgia and is an attempt to hold on to the memory of a place, a souvenir, preserving a moment that otherwise eludes capture. 
Lara Davies was born in 1985 in Maesteg, Wales and lives and works in London. In 2022 Lara completed a Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art. Lara has exhibited widely, including in the 2018 John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Museum, Liverpool. Her work is held nationally and internationally in both private and public collections, including the Contemporary Art Society of Wales.  Lara is represented by Canopy Collections, and in 2025, Canopy Collections curated Lara’s first solo exhibition, We watched the day grow older.
Instagram: @larad123
Daniel Shadbolt
"The studio interior is a familiar compositional setting which is always different whenever I observe it. The objects and architecture seen at different times of day sometimes reveals unexpected results. The muted tones of the north facing West London location contributes to my palette choices, influencing this search for descriptions of atmospheric light. The picture with a figure was made over the course of a year while the smaller painting was done in one session." 
Originally from Hertfordshire, he has lived and worked in London since 2000. Shadbolt studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and then at the Royal Drawing School. He has been exhibiting for twenty years at various institutions, galleries and open submissions events. Recent shows include the Wykeham Gallery in Stockbridge (2026), the Regent’s Park Gallery (2025) and a solo exhibition at 155a Gallery in Dulwich (2024).
Instagram: @daniel_shadbolt_painting
Susan Rocklin
"I’m interested in the softness and strangeness that lie behind the solid, visible world.  My paintings use the translucency and slipperiness of oil and pigment to express this.  Narrative threads move under and over the painting surface.  Characters and creatures drift through landscapes which evoke lost cultures.  My work is influenced by traditional Japanese painting, where space is as significant as the objects enclosed. Edvard Munch’s innovations in colour and line and his understanding of the feminine are also inspirational.
Bio
Susan Rocklin is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, with an MA in Painting.  She also has an MA in English Literature and worked as a creative director and copywriter before re-training as a painter.  She has had two solo shows at 163 Gallery, London and has participated in group shows in the U.K. and Europe.  In 2025, Susan won the NG Art Creative Residency Prize, part of Wells Art Contemporary Open.  She has been shortlisted in Jackson’s Art Prize (2025) and longlisted in the John Moores Painting Prize (2020/1) and the Cass Art Prize (2024). Her work is held in private collections in the U.K., US  and New  Zealand.
Web: www.susanrocklinartist.com Instagram: @rocklinsusan
Tom Farthing
Tom Farthing’s recent work is involved with an experience of place and landscape.  He paints his surroundings, finding places with which he feels a sense of connection and relation.  Through a combination of drawing in the landscape and photography he finds subjects which are then worked on in the studio into larger paintings. The experience of time is an important part in the making of the paintings, and the process by which he makes paintings is non-linear, almost circuitous.  Memories of places and landscapes, images made a long time ago might resurface in the studio to become paintings that speak to his present.  Subjects are returned to repeatedly – the buildings along the canal near where he lives in London, the woods near his wife’s home in Vilnius.  The paintings are often about finding moments of calm and stillness, beauty even, within a chaotic and ever changing world.  
Tom Farthing (b. 1982) lives and works in London. He gained his BFA at the Ruskin School of Fine Art (2005) before completing an MA at Chelsea College of Art (2013). He also completed two years of the Turps Studio Programme between 2018-20. He has exhibited widely. In 2022 he had a solo presentation of his work with Zimmer Stewart Gallery at the London Art Fair. His work is held in numerous private collections in the UK and abroad.
Instagram: @t.farthing
Vanessa Brassey
Vanessa is a figurative painter and academic philosopher interested in the presence and character of time in still images. Movement, memory, and the way emotional moments linger sit at the centre of her work. In the studio, she collects the world in fragments; glass shards, copper plumbing tiles, wine box lids, torn canvas, and old paper, layering them with paint, ink, transfer, and collage. She works instinctively from impressions gathered in sketchbooks, on her iPhone, and in fleeting films. There is no fixed plan, only the pull of what feels right. This summer she discovered painting outdoors, directly from the scene, and has folded this into her magpie habits by preparing vintage found book covers and heading out with her travel easel. 
Vanessa works in series because it allows her to look, digest, and then see more clearly what it is she needs to record. Once she has a few pieces, she uses them to understand what she was thinking, and what might be bothering her or lighting her up. She is not aiming at repetition, but variation, each work a study in time.
Vanessa Brassey worked in commercial branding for twenty years before retraining as an academic philosopher and lecturing at university. Fascinated by the way time behaves in ordinary seeing compared to memories, dreams, and pictures, her research increasingly gave way to a compulsion to paint. She spent a year at The Art Academy, both indulging this habit and professionalising her practice. Her series Version, a four-metre painting made up of moveable panels, marked a shift toward and alignment with her published research on time, empathy, and what makes a painting emotional. Her work has been exhibited at Triptych Studios next to Tate Modern, the Affordable Art Fairs, ING Discerning Eye, Jackson's Art Prize, and the Women in Art Prize. Alongside painting, she continues to publish philosophy, teach at the National Gallery, and make short films for researchers and public events.
Michael Coppelov
Michael Coppelov uses rhizomatic and psychogeographic links in his artwork to investigate the networking and interconnection of our world. Based on his travels, he makes site-specific wearable paintings, which take the form of pairs of spectacles which he wears in-situ before they are presented as sculptures within the gallery. He also makes paintings on paper which reference books from the travel-writing genre.
Born in Lancashire in 1983, Michael lives and works in London. He gained a BFA from the Ruskin School of Fine Art (2005), an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2008) and completed two years at Turps Art School’s Onsite painting programme (2020). He has been awarded the Abbey Fellowship at the British School at Rome, a two-year scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust and an Eramus+ funded residency to the Cyprus College of Art.
Instagram: @michael_coppelov
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