Image: Newlyn Art Gallery
Newlyn Art Gallery will open ‘SHARP & Alice Mahoney’ in The Picture Room on 12 September, bringing together two distinct but complementary bodies of work across photography, sound, printmaking and sculpture. Running until 31 October 2026, the exhibition connects concerns of identity, landscape, material and the body. A first-look event, with both artists present, will take place at Newlyn Art Gallery on 11 September from 16:00 to 18:00.
SHARP will present ‘AWAKENING’ alongside photographs from the ‘Lavender Menace’ series. ‘AWAKENING’ was recorded live during ‘To Moor The Sun’ in August 2026. The work is inspired by SHARP’s West Penwith Dykeland project, described as a re-awakening of ‘the Women’s Land’.
The photographic series ‘Lavender Menace’ explores the queer body within the natural landscape in parallel with histories of coding and activism in queer culture. Its title refers to a term once used negatively for lesbians within the feminist movement, then reclaimed by lesbians who protested their exclusion. In the photographs, coded associations between colour, plants and clothing are carried through a figure obscured by lavender, with abstracted glimpses of a denim jacket and cherry Doc Marten boots.
A queer working-class, socially engaged artist, activist and producer, SHARP works across experimental video, photography, sculpture and sound installations. At Newlyn, the selected works focus on queer histories and reclaimed resistance: ‘Lavender Menace’ uses flowers and clothing as part of that coded visual language, while ‘AWAKENING’ retains the live-performance origin of ‘To Moor The Sun’.
Alice Mahoney will show monoprints and small ceramic sculptures first presented as part of ‘Soft Ruins’ in 2025. The monoprints sit between painting and printmaking, while the works feature hairy, drippy, lozenge-shaped forms that hover between abstraction and something more bodily or animal. Mahoney is a Cornwall-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice also encompasses sculpture, sound, film, painting and printmaking, with an interest in material, form and relationships between bodies and their environments.
