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2026
Artist Talk: States of Becoming
Saturday 14 March 2026
2pm
Join us for an artist talk hosted by Virginia Verran as part of the group exhibition, States of Becoming.
Drawing on her encounters with each of the artists through theTurps Off-site programme, Verran will reflect on the process of coming to know each artist and the ideas, materials, and questions that shape their work.
Each artist—Verity Woolley, Mina Courtauld, Raoul Coombes, Camilo Parra & Kate Burnett—will then be invited to respond, sharing their own reflections before the conversation opens up to questions and discussion with the audience.This is a chance to hear directly from the artists in a shared, evolving dialogue around practice, process, and becoming.
2025
British Art Fair Announces Exhibitors List For Autumn 2025 Edition
Artlyst
Now in its fourth decade, the British Art Fair returns this autumn as both a marketplace and a living archive. At this rare convergence point, Hepworth’s carved forms share space with Hirst’s dot paintings, where Riley’s optical vibrations dialogue with Emin’s neon confessions. This isn’t merely an art fair; it’s a temporal crossroads where Modern British stalwarts and contemporary disruptors occupy the same critical space.
The 2025 edition doubles down on its founding mission: to recalibrate the value of British art beyond the usual Bacon-Freud-Moore triumvirate. Dealers from Austin/Desmond to Messums will showcase underappreciated modernists, such as Ivon Hitchens, alongside YBA provocateurs, creating unexpected genealogies. Look closely and you’ll spot Fedden’s still lifes whispering to Rego’s narrative tableaux, or Auerbach’s impasto finding distant cousins in Albert Irvin’s chromatic explosions.
Vestry St is going to the British Art Fair 2025
We are delighted to announce that we will be participating in the British Art Fair, in the SOLO CONTEMPORARY featuring paintings by Dan Coombs.
Find us in the Solo Contemporary section at stand 3.
Opening hours:
Collectors’ Preview, Thursday 25 September, 11AM – 9PM
Friday 26 September, 11AM – 9PM
Saturday 27 September, 11AM – 7PM
Sunday 28 September, 11AM – 5PM
Live Art Performance:
Sarah Kent + Sharon Leahy-Clark
On Friday 12 September 2025, 6-8pm for the Opening Preview of The Discontents: Part II, artists and collaborators Sarah Kent + Sharon Leahy-Clark created a wonderful new piece whilst visitors were able to watch from the sides. The Hand of Vestry Street, is a hand-drawn piece created by mark-making on paper, situated in the centre of the Vestry St. gallery.
The Discontents: Part II assembles a group of artists whose practices extend beyond the boundaries of conventional studio production. These individuals are not only makers but also thinkers, writers, curators, critics, and institutional figures—a cohort of contemporary polymaths who actively challenge the separation between artistic creation and cultural discourse.
Mark Woods: Formula + Fetish – Artlyst Book Of The Week
Artlyst
In Formula + Fetish, the first comprehensive monograph devoted to British artist Mark Woods, readers are drawn into a world where the decorative and the disturbing walk in lockstep. Published to coincide with Wood’s rising prominence beyond the niche spheres of contemporary jewellery and fetish culture, the volume traces four decades of work that refuses categorisation.
FORMULA + FETISH
By Mark Woods
Published by Black Dog Press, this is the first monograph on the work of Woods, featuring a range of media including sculpture, installation, photography and jewellery-making. The book offers new essays and conversations about his work by leading art critics Paul Carey-Kent, Michael Petry and Peter Suchin, who offer individual and insightful responses to Woods’ world of objects and imagery.
Formula + Fetish is a fully illustrated book that brings together four key aspects of Woods’ practice: “Objects” – luxurious objects of desire and contemporary art fetishes; “Jewellery” – the origins of the artist’s skills in object making; “Photographs” – creative images; and “Self-Portraits” – a performance with the camera lens.
Mark Woods Formula + Fetish: A Cronenbergian Encounter – Interview by Paul Carter Robinson
Artlyst
Mark Woods (b. 1961, Surrey) is a British artist whose work straddles the charged space between adornment, provocation, and artifice.
In the late 1980s, Woods designed groundbreaking jewellery for Electrum in South Molton Street, which led to commissions, eventually drawing him into the orbit of pioneering gallerists and fashion icons.
In the raw energy of the 1990s Hackney and Shoreditch, Woods developed a sculptural language that merged fetishism, religious symbolism, and sexual ambiguity. His Cronenbergian pieces—lurid, lavish, and loaded—speak to human longing with equal parts seduction and discomfort. Championing craftsmanship while dismantling the polite traditions of jewellery…
Paul’s Gallery of the Week: Vestry St
FAD Magazine
Vestry St Gallery opened in Hoxton in 2022, effectively as an outpost of Cross Lane Projects, in a first floor space that’s some way from the conventional white cube. Cross Lane Projects – which also has a publishing arm – was founded in 2018 by artists Rebecca Scott and Mark Woods in a former Kendal Mint Factory in Kendal, Cumbria…
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
By Paul Carey-Kent
ARTIST TALK:
PETER SUCHIN ‘THE EXHIBITION AS PROPOSITION’
Sunday 8 June, 2-4pm
We invite you to join is for an informal talk by curator Peter Suchin on The Exhibition as Proposition, discussing the current exhibition and related themes.
Malcolm Bowie has observed that the most famous thing about the 19th century poet Stephane Mallarme is the “often exceptionally difficult” nature of his work. For The Mirror at Night twenty-one artists have been invited to respond to the final stanza of Mallarme’s notoriously elusive poem Ses purs ongles tres haut dediant leur onyx (1887), and have been given, together with a copy of the original French sonnet, seven different English translations of the relevant three lines. The lack of a strict correspondence between the various renditions only serves to emphasise the poem’s inherent ambiguity, a term defined by William Empson as “alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”
Review: The Mirror at Night
Instantloveland
The exhibition The Mirror at Night at Vestry St, London, curated by Peter Suchin, is centred on a poetic fragment by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), using it as an anchor and launch point for the show. Mallarmé’s work is striking in its commitment to ambiguity. He did not write merely to confuse, but to affirm ambiguity as a vital, creative force.
By Patrick Bryson featuring an interview with curator Peter Suchin.
2024
ARTIST TALK: ANTHONY CORNER
Thursday 10 October 6-9pm
Vestry St. presents a special in-conversation featuring artist Anthony Corner who will be speaking to psychologist, neuroscientist and author Michel Banissy, philosopher and writer Alex McKeown and curators Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei from VeniceArtFactory.
“Anthony’s artistry evokes a profound and often unconscious merging of the senses. While visually captivating, his work delves deeper by alluding to the realms of touch and sound, creating a synaesthetic- like experience for the observer;” says psychologist and neuro-scientist Michael Banissy, in describing Corner’s work, which will be on show from October 10th, 2024.