Two Shows, One Opening: Jack Hirons and Johnnie Shand Kydd at TKE Studios
On 18 April, TKE Studios opens two new exhibitions side by side. They don't share a subject, a medium, or a generation. What they do share is a commitment to working slowly, attentively, and with close attention to what matter can hold.
Jack Hirons: The Journey
19 April – 7 June 2026
Jack Hirons completes his year as the Dame Tracey Emin Fellow with a body of new monochrome paintings that feel, in the best sense, earned.
Over the course of the fellowship, Hirons has deepened his work built around a deceptively simple question: what does an image carry beyond what it depicts? Working with careful control of pigment, tone, and surface, he draws on landscape motifs (pathways, reflections, forms that recur and shift) not to describe a specific place, but to track something more fundamental. These are paintings interested in cycles of transformation, in how material changes state, and in how the physical world leaves its trace in the images we make from it.
The result is quietly rigorous work. Nothing announces itself. Meaning accumulates through looking, through the patience Hirons asks of his viewer. For those familiar with his earlier work (the bone-black chicken paintings made from pigment he produced himself), this new work continues that same insistence on the relationship between image and the matter from which it comes. The medium is never incidental.
The Journey is a confident culmination. It signals a painter who has used a year of sustained studio time well.
Johnnie Shand Kydd: Ramsholt
19 April – 7 June 2026
Johnnie Shand Kydd is best known as the photographer who documented the Young British Artists before they became the YBAs: an insider chronicler of a generation, shooting Emin, Hirst, and their circle with the intimacy of a participant rather than an observer. Ramsholt is a different kind of project entirely.
These photographs come from years of daily walks through the landscape of Ramsholt on Suffolk's Bawdsey Peninsula: fields, river paths, woodland. Shand Kydd works with analogue cameras and film, embracing the slowness that process demands. There is no decisive moment here, no single dramatic encounter with the land. Instead, the images build through repetition: the same paths walked again and again, the same light read across seasons, the same quiet attention brought to bear on a place that might, to a passing eye, seem unremarkable.
What emerges is a body of work about presence and absence in equal measure. The landscape carries its history (of people who worked and lived within it, of things that no longer exist but still shape what remains). Shand Kydd's photographs don't illustrate that history. They register it, in the grain of the film and the patience of the process.
For collectors and curators, this is a significant departure worth paying attention to. The work stands apart from the portraiture and social documentation Shand Kydd is known for, and it stands up.
Preview: Saturday 18 April, 6–8pm TKE Studios, 99 Victoria Road, Margate CT9 1RD Open Saturdays and Sundays, 12–5pm