X Projects Kavel Rafferty

Islomania

Anne Ryan / Jennifer Caroline Campbell /
Kavel Rafferty / Vincent Hawkins / Cathy Lomax

11-25 May 2025 
opening event - 10 May

Post Office Gallery, 22-23 Cecil Square, Margate, Kent

Paradise islands appear in our dreams as places that offer solace from the travails of everyday life. The reality is often much less idyllic. Islomania is a group show that considers islands from many different angles. Co-curated by Kavel Rafferty & Cathy Lomax it will be accompanied by a special Island issue of independent art zine Arty. 

Anne Ryan, originally from Limerick, Ireland, now lives in London and Margate. Solo exhibitions include 'Tugann an Toreann’, Temple Bar Galleries, Dublin; 'Fighting on the Dance Floor', Exeter Phoenix Gallery (2022/23); 'Earthly Delites', Hastings Contemporary (2019/2020); 'The Cowboy Paintings', Turps Gallery, London (2017) and ‘A Barbarian at the Gate’ greengrassi (2017). The two-person commission, ‘Sirens’, Turner Contemporary, Margate, with Sophie Von Hellermann, ran from 2021 to 2023 with the work changing four times during the exhibition. 

Cathy Lomax founded Transition Gallery in 2002 and is the editor of Arty and Garageland magazines. Lomax has a Fine Art MA from Central St Martins (2002), was an Abbey Painting Fellow at The British School at Rome (2014) and won The Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2016. In 2023 she completed a Film Studies PhD at Queen Mary University of London for which she researched the role of makeup and artifice in the creation of the Hollywood star image. 

Ilona Szalay is a painter working in a range of media from canvas to tracing paper, LED light to glass. Her work engages the multitudinous dichotomies that make up both collective and individual subjective experience in restrained, poetic visual language. It is in liminal space – that between states of dominance and submission, or power and vulnerability – that the subjects in her work encounter one another. 

Jennifer Caroline Campbell makes lumpy paintings and painty sculptures that question cultural hierarchies and normative modes of living via non-linear and fragmented story telling. Campbell graduated from the Slade in 2014 and is currently associate lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts and co-host on the Garageland Salon podcast. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Cake Options and Escape Options’, Transition Projects, London (2024), ‘Ever After Slices’, Atalante, Gothenberg (2019) and ‘Glamorous’, Outpost Gallery, Norwich. 

Kavel Rafferty is a self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist, working in collage, painting and assemblage art. Where possible Kavel uses discarded materials in her practice, a frugal and relevant way of working in a time of mass production and waste. Kavel runs the gallery space at the Old Post Office building in the centre of Margate. 

Vincent Hawkins was born in Herts, England and studied painting at Maidstone College of Art, Kent from 1984-87. He lives in Margate and makes paintings on canvas paper and card. He has shown extensively in Britain and abroad including solo shows in Chicago and Paris in recent years.