Hinterland

18.04.25 - 17.05.25

Shipton is pleased to present Hinterland, a group exhibition exploring liminality, memory, and shifting notions of place. Drawing from Alfred Kubin's The Other Side, the exhibition features Olivia Bryant, Elizabeth Dimitroff, Wenhui Hao & Jack Whitelock whose works navigate terrains where form is fluid, time loops, and the line between reality and dream softens. Please join us for the private view from 6-9pm on 18th April at Shipton Gallery, E9 5LN.

Historically, the hinterland referred to what lay beyond the settled or known—a space imagined as distant, untouched, and rich with potential. Its position at the edges allowed for projections of purity, value, and possibility. Here, the hinterland becomes as much psychological as geographic—a realm where figures and landscapes are shaped by memory, projection, and desire alongside material reality.

Across the exhibition, a shared sensibility emerges: landscapes are unsteady, bodies appear and dissolve, and narrative is approached obliquely. Elizabeth Dimitroff’s paintings trace the fleeting nature of memory, figures adrift in luminous spaces that resist resolution. These spectral presences echo in Olivia Bryant’s works, where forms hover between emergence and collapse. Their fragility suggests not only impermanence but also an ambient sense of surveillance—figures inadvertently fixed in the frame, observed without consent, intention or resolution.

This sensitivity to transformation continues in Wenhui Hao’s paintings, where flesh, food, and wounds surface as moments of tension and repair. Her canvases render the body both vulnerable and resilient, caught in cycles of change. Jack Whitelock’s works move through similar oscillations, shifting between figuration and abstraction. Trees, flowers, and landscapes become containers for memory and emotion, reflecting processes of loss, growth, and renewal.

Together, the artists in Hinterland create a porous world where bodies, stories, and landscapes remain open and unresolved. More than a place, the hinterland becomes a conceptual lens through which to consider what exists beyond dominant narratives—a zone of ambiguity where meaning is unstable and potential remains unrealised. In our contemporary moment, the term speaks to both physical and psychological margins: spaces overlooked, left behind, or yet to be defined. Hinterland lingers in these edges, inviting viewers to consider the value of what exists just out of focus—spaces where new forms, connections, and perspectives quietly gather.