Jack Hirons: The Journey
19 April – 7 June 2026

Jack Hirons makes monochrome paintings that sit somewhere between landscape and process. His work draws on familiar imagery: forest paths, tracks, still water, and reflections. But he isn't documenting a specific place. He's more interested in how an image forms from physical matter, and what that process reveals.

Hirons works with careful control of pigment, tone and surface. The paintings build slowly. Light and dark shift across the canvas with precision, creating depth that feels atmospheric rather than decorative. The scale is significant. Standing in front of one, you're not looking at a view. You're inside a world made entirely from marks.

Material is central to his work. He works with pigments that carry their own histories, and has previously made paintings from chicken bone pigment, sculptures from coal, and a 16mm film installation tracing the journey of silver through the manufacturing process. The substances he uses aren't incidental. They're part of what the work is about: matter changing form, objects holding memory, images that stay connected to the world they came from.

The Journey brings together paintings made during Hirons' year as the Dame Tracey Emin Fellow at TKE Studios. It marks the culmination of a sustained period of studio work and ongoing dialogue with the programme.