Our exhibition - A Closer Look: Lewis Chamberlain, Esen Kaya, Hamish Young - is on show at Drawing Projects UK from 23 November to 24 December 2021. The is the latest In Focus exhibition held in The Entrance Hall at Drawing Projects UK while we complete the refurbishment of our gallery and education spaces. As the title implies, the drawings in the exhibition invite you to look closely and to explore the subjects, content and forms of these engaging and collectable works. 

LEWIS CHAMBERLAIN

Lewis Chamberlain graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1988 and is now based in East Sussex. He has exhibited twice at the Guillaume Gallozzi Gallery in New York in the 1990’s and has since shown extensively in the UK. He is a Pollock-Krasner Award winner, a previous winner of the Discerning Eye Competition and has shown in six BP Portrait Awards. His work is held in private and public collections in the UK and abroad.

Lewis Chamberlain has always been interested in detail, in the specific nature and character of things and in what distinguishes one from another. Chamberlain works largely from life - close observation and scrutiny of objects, interiors, and landscapes. The physical components of his surroundings - walls, doors, floorboards, and window frames - are integral to his subject matter and the claustrophobic nature of his work. He consciously builds a sense of claustrophobia by populating the works with objects that relate, however indistinctly, to people - often objects or toys relating to childhood - to create strange, self-contained interior worlds dictated to a great extent by memory and atmosphere.

ESEN SALMA KAYA

Esen Salma Kaya is a Pakistan born visual artist, curator, and educator with 1st class honours in Fine Art. She has worked in the arts for over twenty years. She founded DRAWING - a programme of exhibitions & events with NE Universities between 2014-2019; and is currently Gallery Curator, Aga Khan Centre Gallery, Aga Khan Centre, London.

Kaya works across drawing, painting, embroidery, sculpture, and installation. Her practice includes themes around hybridity, migration, and stories around her cultural heritage. She is inspired by poetics, language, objects, and embroidery, a skill learnt from her mother. Kaya has exhibited her work in many group exhibitions both in the UK and internationally. Iron Clouds is a collection of works consisting of 35 ink and graphite drawings on paper and 25 stitched drawings on cotton. Iron Clouds are a contradiction, suggesting dual identity of strength and weakness. They portray juxtaposed elemental situations of imagined internal landscapes. They attempt to illuminate imagined cellular happenings within the body, specifically, elemental clouds within the female form during transitional phases of change.

HAMISH YOUNG

Hamish Young RWA (b. 1972 Rotherham, UK) studied MA(RCA) at the Royal College of Art and became a Royal West of England Academician in 2021. His work is held in the Victoria & Albert Museum and private collections. Young’s work has been exhibited at Royal West of England Academy, Royal Academy of Arts, Saatchi Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. His work is regularly selected in prize exhibitions including the Wells Art Contemporary, New Light Prize, ING Discerning Eye, Trinity Wharf Drawing Prize and he was the winner of the Visual Arts Open in 2019.

Young’s work is autoethnographic, concerned with formalising ‘in between’ spaces drawing on feelings associated with loss and abandonment. This manifests in various ways including crossing the boundary of sculpture and drawing, objects or materials being removed from one place and placed in another, and subject matter of physical spaces that are between states. Through allusions his work triggers metaphors and personal associations, which allow the viewer to contemplate ambivalence. 

A Closer Look is open Monday to Saturday from 11am to 3pm and whenever Miranda’s Coffee Shop is open. Please email us on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with any questions or queries.