THE REALM OF THE SUBCONCIOUS
Joanna Beck
Mon 2 Mar – Fri 13 Mar
Coffee Bar Gallery

Joanna creates her paintings predominantly from imagination, reflecting the themes of mental health, emotion, the subconscious and myth.

Her work is intensely personal and she has spent the best part of 14 years crafting her style to reflect the themes she is passionate about expressing. She prefers to create from memory and imagination as she finds it cathartic and it sparks her creativity within the themes in which she works.

She has previously exhibited in the Queens Park centre, as well as at Obsidian Art and in a few galleries in London.

GLORIOUS MUD
Deborah de Beer
Sat 7 Mar – Fri 27 Mar
Main Gallery

The impulse for this body of work is the idea of dialogues, or conversations; with the works of friends that I cherish, the iconic works that have influenced me over time, the materials I have
come across, or even simple objects/moments that captivate me; a beautiful cup for example. The evolution of ideas may take me through different media, both 2 and 3 dimensional, thus creating a body of work that is linked, but not necessarily by the materials I use. The title of the exhibition refers not only to the wonderful material clay but also to the ecstatic wallowing of the hippopotamus (in the song)…being an artist is, for me, like wallowing in life.

Originally trained in ceramics, Deborah has always worked in other media too. Ideas may take a long time to lodge in her head and heart, but her making process can be fast, impulsive and intuitive, or painstaking, depending on the ideas and materials involved. She finds herself equally moved to make functional pieces that may find a cherished place in someone’s daily life, and work that is purely an expression of ideas and aesthetic sensibilities. Although she starts with am impulse of some sort, she rarely has a fixed idea of what the finished piece will look like; her making process is an interactive dance with her materials, constraints and dreams.

NATURAL WORLD MIXED MEDIA
AHS Textiles Students
Sat 21 Mar – Thu 16 Apr
Coffee Bar Gallery

At Aylesbury High School, year 9 students are challenged to create a “Natural World” themed textile mixed media piece. They start with creating an inspiration board and choosing which four textile techniques they will use to complete the piece, ensuring they display the range of skills they learnt across years 7, 8 and 9.

Some of the more popular techniques students like to use are hand embroidery, applique, free machine embroidery and sublimation printing. The outcomes are highly skillful and creative. 

FORTH
Paul Smith
Mon 20 Apr – Fri 1 May
Coffee Bar Gallery

Forth is an ongoing project that gives voice to the housing schemes of North Edinburgh through a series of screenplay-influenced short stories. Rooted in the language, rhythm, and resilience of the area, the work explores how place and identity intertwine within communities often overlooked or misrepresented. Blending cinematic storytelling with literary form, Forth captures moments of humour, struggle, and quiet defiance, offering an authentic portrait of life on the margins. The project continues Smith’s commitment to representing peripheral voices with empathy, precision, and a deep sense of belonging.

Paul Sebastian Smith (b. 1979, Birmingham, England) is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, text, and narrative form. Moving to Edinburgh at the age of seven, Smith’s creative outlook was profoundly shaped by his upbringing in the city’s north – a landscape marked by social and economic marginalisation yet rich in community and resilience. His work explores the lived realities of peripheral societies, interrogating how inequality, class, and cultural identity intersect to form both personal and collective experience.

Working within the expanded field of photography, Smith fuses documentary and poetic approaches to question the politics of representation and the visual language of power. His text-based projects often emerge from the same terrain, tracing the relationship between image, memory, and voice in the construction of social narrative. More recently, while studying Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge, Smith has turned his attention to screenplay-influenced short stories, developing hybrid works that blur the boundaries between cinematic and literary form. These stories extend his long-standing interest in storytelling from the margins, offering intimate, character-driven portraits shaped by rhythm, dialogue, and visual detail. 

His work has been widely published and exhibited both nationally and internationally, earning recognition for its sensitivity to the overlooked and its insistence on the humanity within the periphery.