OFFICIAL OPENING I SATURDAY 20th of SEPTEMBER, 6pm till 8pm
SHOWING DATES I 20th of SEPTEMBER till the 1st OCTOBER, 2025
Common Thread brings together three artists—Serena Owen, Caroline Lobsey, and Helena Newcombe—whose work is connected through a shared love of process and making. Serena creates ceramics that invite you to slow down and take in their form and surfaces; Caroline’s landscapes strip back the details to capture light, shadow, and the feeling of place; and Helena’s stitched and painted works layer thread and colour into imagined worlds. “We all work in such different ways—clay, paint, thread—but there’s this shared rhythm in how we create. It’s about patience, attention, and letting the materials guide us. That’s what ties the work together and why we wanted to call the show Common Thread.”
SERENA OWEN
Inspired by the work of her grandmother and great-aunt, Serena’s work is an expression of her love of domestic crafts like crochet, weaving and sewing. Each piece is a tangible connection to the past, to the women she inherited her obsession for making from, and an exploration of the value of the hand-made.
Serena uses glazes to suggest the softness of old crochet, or inlays and scratches patterns to explore stitching and fabrics. The abstracted marks referencing making, wear and mending imply fragile, fraying family heirlooms. The time taken making the marks also celebrates and values the hand-made.
CAROLINE LOBSEY
Caroline Lobsey, an Australian artist originally from the UK, emigrated to Australia in 1983. She studied Fine Art both in the UK and later in Newcastle, Australia. Her practice spans landscape and portrait painting, drawing and landscape photography.
Since 2007 she has exhibited regularly in both group and solo shows across Newcastle and Sydney and London. In 2025, one of her landscape paintings was selected for the Royal Academy of Art’s
‘Summer Exhibition’ in London. Lobsey’s tonal landscapes capture mood and atmosphere, often inspired by her travels to the northern hemisphere, including the Faroe Islands.
HELENA NEWCOMBE
"Helena Newcombe’s mixed-media practice explores the meeting point of embroidery and acrylic paint. By layering intricate stitching with bold, luminous colour, she creates textured surfaces that feel both intimate and expansive. Her process is at once experimental and meditative, opening space for narratives of connection, memory and emotion to emerge. Each work invites viewers to slow down, to trace the rhythm of thread and pigment, and to discover new resonances within familiar materials."