Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Charles Williams

A former student at the Royal Academy Schools and a founder-member of the Stuckist movement, Charles Williams is a painter, writer and lecturer whose work has been exhibited in the UK, Europe and the United States. He is President of the Royal Watercolour Society, a member of the Accademia Internazionale dell’ Acquarello, and is represented by New Art Projects, London.

Williams describes himself as a painter who also writes. His work builds through improvisation, where narrative, surface and image are tested against the possibility of presence in painting, moving between autobiography, fiction and studio anecdote. Recent work continues this enquiry through shifting personae and an interest in therianthropy.

Lily Hughes

Lily Hughes is an artist exploring everyday life including the political, the poorly, the mundane and the strange. The work could be described as boring to the point of comedy, she is interested in showing things as they are - often spilling the beans on herself in the process.

Her ongoing project “The Cleaner” explores artists second jobs through writing, data collection, works on paper, film, and sculpture; and has prompted three exhibitions to date. Ceramic objects from this body of work were also seen as part of Quench Gallery’s kiosk at Unit London and in public art galleries across Berlin in 2025.

As an artist, Hughes feels herself a spy - documenting and archiving the ordinary. This voyeuristic impulse lending an air of the uncanny to overlooked or unseen aspects of life. The work is obsessive and unintuitive. It drives her crazy and makes her sick.

Writing is a large aspect of Hughes output: she performs regularly at poetry and open mic nights, and keeps an online blog that covers everything from smut to repressed trauma; art criticism to supermarkets; Crip theory to local history.

Hughes studied History of Art at Golsdmiths, University of London before going on to receive an MRes in Art Theory and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins in 2017. She has lived and worked in Margate since 2019. Alongside her art practice, she works as a chef in a fine dining restaurant. She shares a studio with her partner with whom she regularly collaborates.

 

Jay Rechsteiner

Jay Rechsteiner is a Swiss-born multidisciplinary artist working across painting, objects, video and performance. His practice examines how violence, language, media and private life intersect, using direct and deliberately simple strategies to keep meaning unstable rather than resolved.

Alongside the ongoing Bad Painting series, recent work extends into unstretched canvases, masks, domestic scenes and video, foregrounding process, vulnerability and transformation. He has also initiated participatory platforms including The Washroom Projects, The Washroom Talks and monoloqueArt, and has worked collaboratively under the name Sardine & Tobleroni.