Footnotes (Private View)

Footnotes
CBS Gallery and Studios 

7th to 27th June 2025

Footnotes brings together works by current CBS studio members as they articulate their sensitivities towards knowledge, perception and collaboration. The exhibition maps correspondences between methods of research gathering and sharing, embracing research as a communicative tool. Rejecting resolution, these works foreground processes of exchange and provisionality as critical possibilities.

Paula Kolar
Valentina Passerini
KOZ
Joseph Hulme
Gregory Herbert
JC Leisure
Emma Deaton
Jo Mo
Keziah Thomas-Mellor

Curated by Isobel Cawley

Isobel Cawley is a Morecambe-based curator working across multiple curatorial initiatives in the North West. She is developing a research-led curatorial practice that brings critical discourse into dialogue with contemporary art, with a focus on expanding research capacity within exhibition-making practices attuned to the environment and the choreographic.

Private View 7th June
6pm til late
then, by appointment.

@cbsgallery for updates & opening times

Closing Party with performances Thursday 26th June 6pm 

63 Blundell Street, Liverpool, L1 0AJ

ARTIST BIOS

Emma Deaton is a Liverpool based artist working across painting and sculpture. Her work explores liminal spaces between presence and absence, reality and abstraction and 2D/3D. Through this interplay, her work delves into themes of identity, perception, and the performative aspects of human experience.

Gregory Herbert works across film and installation, exploring collaboration, co-existence, and the complex entanglements between more-than-human beings and their environments. Herbert also collaborates with Niamh Riordan on the At The Library project Chopping Club, which explores research around reciprocity, sustainability, and the ways in which food shapes our landscapes and communities.

Joseph Hulme is an artist, musician and co-founder of CBS Gallery. His practice spans all mediums but is grounded in drawing, writing and photography. He explores how ideas form, falter or evolve, resulting in ambiguous, overlapping works driven by a restless, personal narrative. A constant stream of thought that the viewer is constantly running to keep up with.

Paula Kolar is a Liverpool-based artist working in sound, installation, performance, writing, photography and drawing. Her past work has explored moments of collective (in)action whether in relation to migration, ecological change or historic events.
 Currently, she is working on short-form speculative fiction.

Jude Porter Chambers, KOZ (King of Freedom World Champion) presents new sculptural works exploring intimacy and the human form through increasingly abstract, raw and regal gestures. This exhibition marks the debut of KOZ’s new name, reflecting a sculptural practice rooted in tension, balance, and the physicality of transformation.

JC Leisure exists between two suspended points titled genesis and participation. It’s a conical to A and B, sometimes both, most times neither. He is a 40 year old occasional smoker. He has a stray cat.

JoMo is a multidisciplinary visual artist working within illustration, publishing, video, and XR, often exploring themes around place, identity and migration to re/connect her dual heritage identity. She is interested in our perception of real and imagined memories within urban environments, as they alter through time, place and movement.

Valentina Passerini is an artist, lecturer, and creative producer based in Liverpool. Her practice explores photography as object-making and independent publishing as an expanded exhibition space with collaborative and research potential. Most recently, she designed CBS’s new logo, drawing on the relationship between digital and physical objects and the rendering of 3D forms as surfaces in digital space.

Keziah Thomas-Mellor is a multidisciplinary artist, working across drawing and performance. Rooted in personal experiences of walking and climbing through the UK landscape, her process is bodily, meditative and research based, with equal emphasis placed on making and outcome. Her work reveals themes of land ownership, romanticism and loss–particularly in the context of ecological crisis and neoliberal pressures–by bringing the outside indoors.

CBS is a gallery and workspace established in Liverpool  by Joseph Hulme, Liam Peacock & Theo Vass in 2015. The studios were initially set up on Victoria Street with an aim to provide affordable space in the city centre for emerging artists. Now in its second location it comprises of studios, a gallery space &  workshop.

Our public programme is a result of ongoing conversations between the founders, studio members, collaborators and a wider artist-led community in Liverpool and further afield.