Join the Circus
Summer Exhibition
6 - 19 June
Throughout April, we held an Open Call inviting artists to become the ninth member of the exclusive Circus Artist lineup. We were overwhelmed by the incredible response, receiving hundreds of applications from talented artists across the UK.
After careful consideration, we have selected five exceptional finalists whose work will be showcased in our Join the Circus Summer Exhibition. Following the exhibition, one artist will be chosen to officially join the Circus Artist roster.
The five selected artists are all independent creatives at different stages of their careers. Every artwork presented is an original, one-of-a-kind piece. By collecting work from one of these talented artists, you will be supporting their artistic journey and becoming part of an important milestone in their career.
Each piece has been professionally framed and is ready to hang. Every artwork is beautifully presented and signed by the artist, either on the front or reverse.
Below, you can explore the full collection currently on display at our Winchester pop-up showroom, along with information about each artist and their practice.
Enjoy browsing the exhibition, and please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like additional images, videos, or further information.
Sonja x
Founder & Director
Circus Gallery
Claire Hankey
Claire Hankey is a British mixed-media artist creating atmospheric, nature-inspired works that invite moments of quiet contemplation and connection.
Her practice explores the delicate structures and overlooked details found in the natural world. Using botanical references within her work, Claire draws on plants and natural forms as quiet symbols, often recalling fragments of childhood memory and early experiences of landscape.
Claire often incorporates handmade brushes, vintage papers and photographic references within her process, building subtle layers that suggest the passage of time and the quiet rhythms of nature.
She recently completed an art residency in Spain, where she trained in photopolymer etching and drypoint printmaking. These processes have expanded her practice, allowing botanical imagery to be translated into etched plates where line, light and texture become integral to the work.
Through both painting and printmaking, Claire’s work offers viewers a pause and a gentle space to look closely and see what lies beneath the surface.
Claire has degree in Art history from University College London (BA Hons) specialising in British Landscape Painting, and a PGCE in Art Education. After teaching art in schools for many years, she became a full time artist in 2024. She works from her studio, a shipping container on the banks of the Thames Estuary in Leigh on Sea, Essex.
Iryna Yermolova
Iryna Yermolova is a contemporary painter born in Ukraine and based in Dorset, UK. She moved to England in 2005, where the landscape and light of the countryside continue to inform her practice.
Iryna holds academic qualifications in both graphic design and economics. Her early creative work focused on digital and computer-based art before she turned to painting, a shift that proved transformative and marked a decisive change in her artistic direction. Her background in graphic design remains evident in her strong sense of composition and visual structure.
Her work has been widely exhibited and collected. Notably, for fourteen consecutive years, Iryna has been selected to exhibit at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters Annual Exhibition at Mall Galleries, London—an exceptional achievement that reflects the consistency and quality of her practice.
Iryna’s paintings are known for their warmth and depth, making them particularly well suited to both contemporary & heritage interiors and resonating strongly with collectors.
Genevieve Leavold
Genevieve Leavold is a British abstract painter known for her complex gestural abstract oil paintings. Blending traditional oil painting techniques and contemporary vision, her paintings take inspiration from the natural world, with a focus on movement and light.
Leavold's paintings, though inspired by nature, are not an imitation, instead, they are visual stories of the profound connection between humanity and the natural world.
Growing up surrounded by the lush landscapes of Somerset, England, Genevieve Leavold developed a profound connection to nature. She spent much of her youth exploring the fields and woods near her home, and a rich inner world connected the mythical to the real. Her paintings have a capacity to take the viewer out of the known world, into a place on the fringes, a world of energetic exchange.
Each piece begins by embracing darkness, the state from which all creation emerges. From this rich darkness, soft, spiraling forms reach out. The paintings are built up in layers of transparent glazing and opaque brushwork, giving a distinct depth to the finished pieces.
Genevieve Leavold has exhibited widely in the UK, USA and Europe and has paintings held in private and corporate collections worldwide.
Peggy Cozzi
I think of my paintings as “inscapes” in the sense of representing the inner world of emotions and responses rather than beginning with a fixed image or a single external reference. I’m interested in how the medium of paint can evoke imaginative responses, images grow out of the process and my interaction with the materials, I follow a journey with the painting to point where colour and mark begin to trigger emotive associations, where the paint appears at once tactile and
concrete yet simultaneously having the potential for illusion and capacity to draw on the unconscious.
I usually start with a vision of the palette and range of colours I want to use - this can be influenced for example by the seasons, places I’ve recently visited or artworks I’ve been looking at from historical to contemporary or simply colour combinations that are really resonating with me at that point - I think we all have particular colours and colour combinations that seem to tap into our psyche without us necessarily knowing why and this is something I’m very conscious of when painting - that colour has its own language and logic that can trigger an emotional or psychological pull through the various layers and marks of a painting.
I’ve recently moved to a studio in a more rural location sited near a wonderful Dorset woodland where I often walk and sketch, I find this has started feeding into my studio paintings but also with an awareness of the natural world’s fragile and increasingly precarious state.
Teresa Poole
Teresa Pooles distinctive blend of japonais and western influences is taken from a lifetime of random memories, dreams and thoughts, then rearranged to bring an order out of chaos rather like a museum of her mind.
She says she sometimes feel more a conductor in an orchestra of colour .. leading the paint but never completely in control of where it’s going .. but always in the hope that it leads to another magical world.
Poole’s work is a reflection of memories and emotions, of beautiful Japanese screens, places glimpsed or visited, sometimes in the flesh but often in the imagination. Producing a medley of vivid coloured but dream like ethereal images of floating running water and nature on glowing metal leaf and silks using inks, gesso and patination.
Trained by designer Thomas Messel in the 1980s as a decorative painter using traditional materials and methods on furniture and walls. She then moved to london where she worked on the Japanese screens that completely changed her view on composition and art, translating the beauty of nature in a more understandable language.
She has painted murals and interiors internationally in Italy, Amsterdam, Ibiza, on the QE2, France, extensively in the USA and in many hotels and private homes. Her work is in many private collections from Australia to France to the U.K. and in commercial hotels abroad and U.K. including Calcot Manor.
She now works from Victoria works studios in Stroud, Gloucestershire where she continues to push her work to new places.
