All Over Each Otter

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Author: All Over Each Otter

  • Quiet Company

    Artworks by Summuya Khader

    20 March – 15 May 2026

    Quiet Company is an exhibition of digital and riso printed illustrations by Liverpool based artist Sumuyya Khader. A melodic dialogue runs through the work, while repetition encourages a close, introspective reading of perceptual differences and interrelationships. 

    Khader’s illustrations explore themes of identity, place and community, focusing on Black subjects and lived experience. Capturing fleeting scenes from everyday life, she renders emotionally resonant and culturally significant moments. Lovingly observed studies of her immediate surroundings: people, interiors and streets, form the basis for compositions that blend figuration and abstraction, colour and pattern.

    Relaxed and restorative domestic interiors frequently appear. Plants, patterned fabrics and familiar household objects set spaces for comfort, music, dance, care and reflection. These environments are vital settings for human presence and in combination establish counter narratives of erasure or marginalisation. By depicting Black subjects in these calm and joyful intimate spaces Khader highlights the necessity of rest, dignity and belonging.

    Text also plays a crucial role whereby Khader combines words and images to strengthen the message of Black empowerment and to directly connect with viewers. Through illustration Khader sparks conversations, embracing the potential of non-verbal connectivity, inviting pause, within quiet company. At its core Quiet Company is about presence: the imperceptible tension between who we are, together, who we were and who we are becoming, collectively.

    Biography

    Sumuyya Khader is an artist and curator whose multifaceted practice spans illustration, painting, and printmaking. Beyond her studio practice, Sumuyya is deeply engaged in curatorial projects and collaborations with institutions, grassroots organisations, publishers, and artist-led groups. Her creative and curatorial work is grounded in community, representation, and access. In 2024, she curated Conversations at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. An ambitious exhibition featuring 41 Black British women and non-binary artists. Her first solo exhibition, Always Black, Never Blue, opened at Bluecoat, Liverpool in October 2021. She has since participated in numerous group exhibitions including Refractive Pool: Contemporary Painting (Walker Art Gallery), NAE Open 2022, Shifting Perspectives (Leeds Art Gallery), and Conversations (2024, Walker Art Gallery). Sumuyya founded Granby Press, a community print space that empowers local people to produce zines, newsletters, flyers and artworks.

  • From the Margins

    Artworks by Lela Harris

    22 January – 5 March 2026

    From the Margins combines artist Lela Harris’ portraits and landscapes for the first time.

    The title references the works in the exhibition as having originated ‘from the margins’ of Harris’ studio while showcasing her love of myriad drawing, painting and printing techniques, and subject matters.

    Harris arrives at her finished portraits through a largely speculative process, taking a sitter as the starting point for stretching her creative imagination and freedom to capture a fabulated image. A keen walker and cyclist, the landscape paintings are often drawn from her memorised relationship with the Lake District where she lives. Together, the artworks are testimonials, tracings of these emotional and physical journeys so intrinsic to Harris’ life.

    A condition of living as an African diasporic subject, the cultural theorist, sociologist and political activist Stuart Hall describes identity “as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation”. Conceptually, then, the works offer and capture a poetic response to her longing for belonging: tracing unknown familial roots and search for a shared identity located in community, mapping an enlightened territory between memory, history and imagination. The brooding, de-saturated palette of Harris’ landscapes reveal her sometimes discordant connection to places that feel familiar yet mysteriously distant, residing instead somewhere between embodied and mapped terrains. From this unique vantage, embracing an otherwise marginalised position, Harris looks within and beyond to centre a shared humanity and love of British rurality.

    Receiving nationwide recognition of her work, Harris was a finalist for the Museums Association Decolonisation Award 2023 for her ‘Black Lancastrians’ Exhibition at Judges’ Lodgings Museum in Lancaster and awarded Runner Up in the V&A Illustration Awards 2022 Book Cover Category for her work on the first illustrated edition of ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker, published by the Folio Society. Harris’ work resides in private collections around the world and has been acquired by several public collections including Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal; Judges’ Lodgings Museum, Lancaster and Lancaster University.

  • Between Passage and Place

    An exhibition of works by Mani Kambo

    Friday 21 November – Thursday 8 January 2026

    Preview: Thursday 20 November 1730 – 2000 hrs

    Sacred Symbols guide and connect us as humans with those who have been, are here, and will be. We expand and shrink back through cycles of birth, life and death, tethered together as part of a larger cosmos. Paths are cyclical in nature, symbollically connecting the human soul and it’s bond to the universe. these ethereal threads transform and transcend the fetters of our existence.

    Rhythmic processes of knotting, tying, bending, and moving fabric in and out, connects the artworks to meditative practices, a pathway toward transcendence through making. Through repetitive motion, the act of creating becomes a physical manifestation of how gesture and action hold power. This energy embeds itself within each artwork. Visuals repeat like markers, and a metaphor for the spiritual belief in reincarnation. Each stitch a passage, each symbol a threshold.

    Black and white oscillate as opposing forces: good and evil, light and dark, creation and destruction, being and non-being. Embroidery and textile relates to the caste system in India where generations of Kambo’s family are tailors, fabric printmakers and dyers. Rooted in an upbringing of superstition and protection, exploring origin myths and cosmological understanding, these works are Mani Kambo’s invocation of portals for divine protection and safe passage.

    Mani Kambo is a multidisciplinary Artist primarily working in textile, print and moving image, based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She explores the inner spirit by drawing on her own personal totemic symbols. Influenced by her upbringing in a household filled with superstition, prayer and religious ceremony . She focuses on objects, routines and rituals distilled both from the everyday and mythology . Through layering and editing images together she collages narratives and weaves dreamscapes.

    Recent exhibitions and screenings include Ax•is Mun•di, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2024-25), Harewood House Biennial: Create/Elevate (2024), Sudden Beams 2: Extraction, Platform Asia (2023) ‘Swimmers Limb’ Somerset House – Gallery 31 (2022), ‘Hinterlands’ Baltic (2022-23), ‘Jubilee’ V ane Gallery (2022) Womxn of Colour Art Award, Altitude, 198 Contemporary and Learning (2019). Kambo was recently a Arts Foundation Futures shortlisted Visual Artist (2025).