Past Exhibitions

Queering Connections

Festival weekend - July 26 - 27

For the past five years, The Winchester Gallery has partnered with the WSA Library and its artists’ book collection to create exhibitions under the banner “Queering Connections.” These exhibitions have introduced innovative research, groundbreaking artistic practice, and the richness of our local resources at WSA and they have made delightfully clear the value of queering our approach to materials and relationships. In 2025-26 we are re-inventing Queering Connections as a diverse, year-round series of programmes that invites gallery visitors to queer all our exhibitions, with expert hosting by Winchester School of Art staff and students, local artists, community members, and more.

This summer, we launched the reboot of Queering Connections with a festival weekend on 26-27 July, created in collaboration with university staff and Hampshire Trans Network, Winchester Pride and Trans Pride Winchester. Our summer exhibition is ‘Small Worlds’, an uplifting celebration of the ways that people are making a positive impact on climate and ecology. Our festival incorporated a series of workshops that explored the relationship between LGBTQ+ lives and global ecologies from various perspectives, called ‘Small Worlds, Social Worlds’.

Winchester School of Art BA Degree Shows

The free-to-attend show saw our campus transformed into an exciting exhibition featuring work from the graduating students on six undergraduate programmes:

BA Fashion Design
BA Fashion Marketing with Management
BA Fine Art
BA Games Design & Art
BA Graphic Arts
BA Textile Design

Work & Play – with Southampton City Art Gallery

March 28 to May 24

30 artists, including works on loan from Southampton City Art Gallery, exploring the theme of Work & Play.

An art installation featuring a table covered with a blue and white check table cloth. There is a plate and tomato-shaped ketchup bottle, and an over-sized knife and fork. A man is standing under the table, with only his head visible on the plate. — Installation by Alice Louisa | Photo credit Dave Gibbons

A Turner Prize winner, the first female head of Painting in the UK (at Winchester School of Art) and a revered Royal Academician -- all feature in the exhibition ‘Work & Play’ at The Winchester Gallery, at Winchester School of Art.

Four works by Gillian Wearing, Roderick Buchanan, Gillian Ayres and Lisa Milroy, selected by Winchester School of Art’s MA Contemporary Curating students under the guidance of curator Julia Vogl, will be on loan from the prestigious collection at Southampton City Art Gallery. Twenty-six additional artworks will be on view alongside them, selected from a regional open call. Community artists join with WSA’s BA and MA students, internationally recognised faculty, and alumni, showcasing a myriad of multi-media, interdisciplinary artworks on the theme of work and play.

WSA Lecturer and Printmaking Fellow Julia Vogl, who led the co-curating experience, notes that the exhibition features ‘four generations of artists with diverse nationalities, socio-economic backgrounds, and senses of humour’. Championing different points of view, ‘Work & Play’ embraces the absurd, the funny, the challenging and the political. Each artwork will make you think again about work, play, and the relationship between them. Left image: A table in a gallery has paper flowing from it into a pile on the floor. There is also a lamp and cardboard box on the table. Right image: A dressmaker's mannequin wears a long coat which appears to be made from rectangular pieces of fabric or paper.

A gallery wall with several colourful artworks displayed, as well as a TV monitor showing artwork.

Images, L-R, Top to bottom: Artwork by Claudia F, artwork by Tracey Dovey - Photo credit Dave Gibbons. Gallery wall and Trinity Arts Group - Photo credit Muchun Zhao.

Queering Connections: Glitchy Kinship

January 31 to March 15 2025

This was the fifth iteration of the collaborative exhibition project ‘Queering Connections’. Based on an ongoing collaboration between sociologist Lizzie Reed and visual artist Milou Stella, the exhibition bought Stella’s recent work into conversation with selected Artists’ Books from the University of Southampton Library’s internationally renowned Artists’ Book Collection located at Winchester School of Art.

Connection can describe an inheritance: of stories, objects, or genetics. It can describe a link in a chain, something repeated, copied, and intertwined with what has come before. A connection can also be something we feel: kinship, belonging, the affective links we have to other people or animals, to objects, stories, or to our pasts and futures. Queering can mean a moment of interruption, change, or deconstruction. It might describe a rupture, gap or glitch in an otherwise orderly chain of copies.

Glitchy Kinship asks what happens when connections are interrupted, changed, distorted, and reconstructed. How do glitches create possibilities for new kinships between words, images, feelings, people, objects and imaginations? How can connection stretch, anchoring us to one another across time and space? In summary: what happens when ‘connection’ is ‘queered’? The pieces presented here invite you to consider what happens as we collect, connect, queer, forget, and reconstruct the personal and the socio-cultural - our environments, norms, language, and stories.

Images by Millou Stella

A grid of abstract, glitch-style images transitions from bright blue, pink, and white hues in the top rows to a more natural floral field in the bottom row. The lower images display wildflowers in vivid colors, blending into darker tones, while the top emphasizes digital distortion and layered textures.

A vibrant, color-enhanced photo shows a person's legs walking barefoot on a beach, leaving footprints in the sand, with three eggs placed in a line in front of them. The sky is an intense orange, and the surrounding buildings are slightly distorted in bright pink and purple tones.

Collecting Sue Clowes: 1980s Fashion and Textile Design

November 15 to January 18

An 80s fashion exhibition featuring leading designer Sue Clowes who created clothing for 80s pop icons such as Boy George and Culture Club. Southampton based collector Mikey Bean has generously loaned his archive of Sue Clowes clothing and related ephemera in this celebration of 80s culture.

We were delighted to welcome Boy George to the gallery to witness his iconic contribution to the Collecting Sue Clowes exhibition.

Watch the video of Boy George's visit

Follow Sue Clowes on Instagram: @sue_clowes_fashion

Follow 'Collecting Sue Clowes' on Instagram: @out.of_the_fryingpan

Photo credit: Dave Gibbons

Sue Clowes and Mikey Bean stand together in Winchester Gallery. They each have an arm around each other and both hold floral bouquets.

Three people looking at white vests displayed on a gallery wall. The vests have colourful prints featuring flowers and pentagrams.

A view down the middle of two rows of mannequins dressed in clothes made from colourful printed fabrics

WSA Painting Prize 2024

September 23 to November 2

The WSA Painting Prize has been developed to support artists at an early stage in their practice and celebrates outstanding painting practice at undergraduate level

The Prize is an international initiative with young Greek artists in collaboration with their contemporaries in the UK. This initiative invites every higher education institution in the UK and in Greece that offers a BA Fine Art or Painting course to nominate a BA student to submit work. Nominations are reviewed anonymously and the final selection will be made by British artist Vanessa Jackson RA and Greek artist Christiana Soulou.

Exhibiting Finalists for 2024:

Randolfh Ayson Calina - Oxford Brookes University
Bella Kim - University of Chichester
Alexis Charisis Maerkl - Universiy of Ioannina
Ellie Memmou - Athens School of Fine Art
Alexandra Papavasileiou - Aristole University of Thessaloniki
Eustacia Patmanidi - Athens School of Fine Arts
Oliwia Rodak - Teeside University
Jessica Rowe - London Metropolitan University
Aarthiha Sasitharan - University of Northampton
Vasiliki Siatara - Universiy of Ioannina

How To Draw A Bicycle

July 6 to August 3 2024

This summer, The Winchester Gallery featured ‘How to Draw a Bicycle’, a participatory exhibition produced in collaboration with Cycle Winchester. The exhibition brought artists into the gallery to offer hands-on opportunities for visitors to contribute to the exhibition.

Visitors were invited to create work for the bicycle wall, recall a favourite cycling memory, be inspired by local creatives making hand-crafted bicycles and cycling-related artworks, and explore what cycling meant to them.

‘How to Draw a Bicycle’ was a space to collectively shared our stories, memories, and reasons for riding. From commissioned artists to drop-in workshops, the gallery space was filled with making and creating, supporting everyone to express their views and narratives around how, why and where we ride.

All photographs by Dave Gibbons

You Crazy Child

July 27 to August 4 2024

Location: Turps Gallery. The Chaplin Centre, Taplow House, Thurlow St, London SE17 2DG

The Winchester Gallery collaborated with Turps Gallery to present You Crazy Child, a contemporary art exhibition showcasing recent works by a new generation of young artists. The show was curated by Esme Keenleyside and Rhiannon Richardson- both recent graduates from the Winchester School of Art.

Taking its title from a Billy Joel song, the exhibition was aptly reflected in the song's lyrics: "Slow down, you crazy child / You're so ambitious for a juvenile." This generation has navigated unprecedented times and emerged with a renewed commitment to analogue creation. Despite a formative education largely through Zoom during the pandemic, these artists consciously chose to eschew digital and social media, instead focusing on tangible, handcrafted works.

You Crazy Child featured a dynamic collection work from the graduates of five art schools. In the spirit of peer-led organizations like Turps Banana, this exhibition was both organized and curated by the young artists themselves. This collaborative approach underscored the ethos of community and mutual support, highlighting the importance of artist-led initiatives in today's art world.

Featured Artists:

Jessica Babbini-Baker, Winchester School of Art

Megan Berry, Winchester School of Art

Isidore Bishop-Sauve, Slade School of Art

Eleanor Cunningham, City & Guilds of London Art School

Alice Delhanty, City & Guilds of London Art School

Issy Eberlin, City & Guilds of London Art School

Esme Keenleyside, Winchester School of Art

Ted McKenzie, City & Guilds of London Art School

Emily O’Hara, Arts University Bournemouth

Rhiannon Richardson, Winchester School of Art

Thea Scultz, Arts University Bournemouth

Carys Tupper, Arts University Bournemouth

Yingying Zheng, Winchester School of Art

Moving Colour

March 7 to April 13 2024

Moving Colour was a multi-disciplinary group exhibition exploring phenomenological qualities in formal aspects of colour. The idea of static colour and pattern conveying emotional space is not new, and yet artists to this day are mystified by the Rubik’s cube of the proposition. Each artist’s work in this exhibition demonstrated a unique explorative path to capture the seemingly moving magic of colour

Showcasing myriad artists’ investigations—from paint, print, sculpture, and film to participatory work that allowed the visitor to share their views on weather and mood—Moving Colour was a world in which viewers of all ages had some fun and found a space for contemplation.

Featured Artists: Rana Begum, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Eleanor Lines, Jon Malis, Bridget Riley, Julia Vogl and David Whitaker.

Event: Marimba music with James Larter.

Moving Colourwas curated by Julia Vogl, Lecturer and Fellow in Printmaking in the Department of Art and Media Technology at Winchester School of Art.

With thanks to Frankie Whitaker, Cristea Roberts Gallery, and Southampton City Art Gallery.

A collection of images showcasing a contemporary art exhibition featuring colorful geometric and abstract artworks. Visitors are seen observing the pieces in brightly painted rooms, with vibrant shades of yellow, teal, and purple as backdrops, while some sculptures and framed prints are displayed on the walls.

Spatial Media, Inhabitations and Relocations: MA Global Media Management Exhibition.

May 16 to May 26

In 1994, the Marxist geographer Doreen Massey argued in Space, Place and Gender that communication via electronic mail and fax resulted in a ‘compression’ of space and time, and altered the experience of local space. Thirty years after Massey’s publication, the exhibition ‘Spatial Media, Inhabitations and Relocations’ asks to what extent new forms of technology and media rearticulate the meaning and the political stakes of the ideas of ‘space’ in the era of geopolitical unrest, increased precarity and climate catastrophe. The exhibition is an exploration of critical media practices to interrogate how different media approaches trouble the production and experience of space as it is inscribed with socio-political meaning. The exhibition comprises of creative group projects produced by MA Global Media Management students at Winchester Gallery.

The Winchester Gallery - Queering Connections: Triangulation

January 30 to February 25 2024

Queering Connections: Triangulation brought three women — Katherine Anteney, Sally Schuh, and Louise Siddons — together for a queer experiment in co-creative, collaborative cartography, curated in conversation with the WSA artists’ book collection.

Seattle, USA-based artist Sally Schuh works with text and image, blurring the line between printmaking and concrete poetry. Katherine Anteney, a WSA alumna based in Southampton, makes prints that explore the strangeness of words and local landscapes. Invited to collaborate, they quickly persuaded curator Louise Siddons to join in. Selections from the WSA book collection amplified the conversations their work collectively introduced about mapping, movement, disability, communication, activism, erasure, and more.

An art exhibition showcasing a variety of media, including photography, sculptures, books, and graphic art. Visitors walk through a gallery with walls adorned with photo series, while displays feature small sculptures, printed materials, and interactive pieces, with some text-based art and typography visible on the walls.

Design For Future

20 January 16 to 20 2024

The Winchester School of Art Global Smart Lab was established to advance research at the interface of art and design with respect to smart technologies, experiences and living. Ranging across the domains of health, well-being, education, learning and leisure, the Lab is focused on core challenges relating to the futures of AI, AR and VR, social and smart technologies, inclusivity, data culture and sustainability. In order to address real-world problems and challenges, we encouraged multidisciplinary collaborations and provided our students with opportunities to engage with world-leading researchers, external partners and end users.

The Design for Future Exhibition was based on six student live projects at Global Smart Lab and two research projects at the Design Department at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. In these projects, our students and staff worked with expertise from a variety of disciplines, including design, engineering, computer sciences, psychology, health sciences, cultural heritage and museum studies, exploring how smart technologies can be applied to improve people’s quality of life and make our society more inclusive.

An interactive exhibition featuring design concepts and virtual reality experiences. The images show visitors using VR headsets to explore virtual environments, such as a digital grocery store. The gallery walls display design posters, prototypes, and research materials, with mannequins and product layouts also featured.

Three people are closely examining an artwork hung on a wall

On view now

Details of the exhibition currently on in the Winchester Gallery.

A colourful sculpture is displayed on a white table

Coming soon

Details of the exhibitions coming up in the Winchester Gallery.