Abreast: A Kintsugi Art Exhibition for Breast Cancer Awareness Month

This October, I'm taking part in Abreast, an exhibition at The Tinker Gallery in Ilkley, North Yorkshire, marking Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The show runs throughout October, Thursday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm.

Each year, around 55,000 people are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK, most of them women, many of them over 50, though it can affect younger people and men too. Abreast has been curated to support everyone touched by that number, and to celebrate the female body in all its diversity along the way.

About the exhibition

Throughout history, women artists have used the body to explore identity and autonomy. In a world where female identity is constantly debated, the body itself stands as a symbol of ownership and control of self. Over a lifetime, and especially through illness and surgery, a woman's body changes and carries the marks of everything she's lived through. Scars, stretch marks, wrinkles, laughter lines, and sometimes more dramatic surgical changes. Abreast is about celebrating all of it, showing the female body as we see ourselves, and as we are seen by others.

Gallery sales from the exhibition are split three ways. Fifty percent to the artist, twenty five percent to the gallery, and twenty five percent to charity.

My collection: gold, scars, and the sacred feminine

I paint the female body because I believe there is something sacred in the sensual, and something powerful in being fully yourself. That belief sits behind every figurative oil painting I make, and it's exactly what drew me to Abreast.

My contribution to the show is inspired by kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold rather than hiding the break. I lived in Japan in my early twenties and learned the practice there, and it's shaped how I think about the body ever since. A break isn't something to disguise. It's part of the story, and it can be beautiful.

For Abreast, I've used gold to trace the marks life leaves behind, visible and invisible, letting the strength held within them come through. In keeping with how I always paint, these works focus on feeling, gesture, and light. For this collection, hands and touch carry more presence than usual, fitting for a show so tied to self-examination and the body's own story.

The collection includes two large pieces, two central pieces, and a small trilogy of works with fine kintsugi detailing running through them. One speaks directly to surgical scars, and to what it means to carry them with pride rather than hide them.

Exhibition details

The Tinker Gallery, Ilkley (25 Church Street, Ilkley, LS29 9DR)

Month of October Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 10am to 4pm