Archive
Celia Hempton
Ocean Terminal
10.05.2025 – 26.07.2025
Flatland Projects presents Ocean Terminal, a new commission by British artist Celia Hempton and the artist’s first UK institutional solo exhibition. Ocean Terminal brings together new works that consider the coast as a margin where our structured human-made environment exists in constant negotiation with the movement and unpredictability of the ocean. Through paintings made in situ on demolition and building sites, as well as from online weather surveillance cameras and from encounters with the human body, the artist deepens her exploration of the act of transgression and trespass, whilst speaking to the emotional currents of the inner psyche. Hempton’s work often confronts, activates and reorients the dynamic of a given situation through the act of painting as a form of temporal performance.
There is an intensity in the process of looking that occupies Hempton; her modes of painting shaped by the duration and conditions of their making. Densely packed plein air paintings contain the rubble and debris from demolition sites of former social housing, reflecting the pace of development and social change in the area in which they were made. Loose, gestural marks echo the speed and urgency necessitated by the live disintegration of the active, often hazardous contexts of their creation.
These documents of architectural upheaval are interspersed with compositions depicting medical surgeries, painted from sketches and photographs taken during in-person observation of a kidney transplant. The subject matter – here scaled to the enclosed intensity of the operating theatre and the body’s exposed interior – is inflected with the charge of personal experience, the same surgery having been performed on the artist’s young daughter in recent years.
Meanwhile, smooth renderings on aluminium (observed from weather surveillance cameras and tourist website livestreams of European coastal towns) capture ocean horizons - blurred, fish-eye or tilted lenses showing digital viewpoints turned away from the land and towards the water. The exhibition space is dissected by a sculptural intervention that echos the form and function of coastal groynes - low-lying structures designed to shield the shoreline from erosion and dissipate wave energy. These painted forms, along with wall paintings made by the artist, transpose the shifting terrain of the coast into the gallery.
Ocean Terminal’s survey of personal, public, and live spaces testifies to the expansive, gestural painterly language that Hempton is known for. Encompassing ways of looking from the remote or digital to the up-close and immediate, the installation asks how we inhabit, disrupt, and are shaped by events and our surroundings.
Celia Hempton (b. Stroud, UK. Lives and works in London) has been included in group exhibitions including ‘The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970 - 2020’, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2024 - 2025), ‘British Art Show 9’ (touring), Aberdeen Art Gallery and The Box, Plymouth (2021 - 2022) and ‘My Life in the Metaverse’, Abu Dhabi Art, Manarat Saadiyat, UAE (2022). Solo presentations include ‘Transplant’ at Phillida Reid, London (2024); ‘Celia Hempton’, Southard Reid, London (2020); Art Night with ICA London (2016); Gwangju Biennale (2014).
This exhibition runs from 10th May - 26th July 2025 and has been generously supported by essential funds from Arts Council England, Rother District Council, De La Warr Pavilion, Talent Accelerator, and The Ministry of Communities, Housing, and Local Government.