Tristan Hoare Gallery is pleased to present Invisible Landscapes. Curated by Omar Mazhar, this off-site exhibition features new works by Lucille Lewin and Romilly Saumarez Smith.
Set within an early Victorian school on Chiltern Street in Marylebone, the exhibition coincides with London Gallery Weekend, and offers a unique opportunity to experience intricately imagined worlds made in clay, metal, sea wrack, fossils, antique objects, and precious stones.
#7, 78 Chiltern Street, London, W1U 5AE
Opening hours: 4 - 7 June, 11am - 6pm Sunday 8 June, 12 - 5pm
Taking inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the exhibition explores imagined and unseen worlds. Calvino’s vision of cities as “a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms” finds resonance in both artists’ practices. Lewin and Saumarez Smith conjure miniature worlds from materials dug from the ground or found on its surface: from clay, metal, and sea wrack, to fossils, antique objects, and precious stones.
While landscapes such as Anglesey, Newfoundland, and the South African coastline inform their practices, it is the invisible, the subterranean, and the cosmic that animate their imaginations. Their sculptures suggest fantastical topographies: underwater realms, fossil records, and celestial maps.
Working by accretion, both artists build up vocabularies of form and material. Lewin’s spiralled tubes of clay, electroformed copper, and glass evoke organic life forms but remain abstract, suggesting a world forming from chaos. Saumarez Smith, who works with a team that she calls her ‘translators’, transforms found objects into enigmatic, poetic assemblages; antique knife handles become trees, coral limbs emerge from thimbles, ammonites grow surreal crystalline forms.
Though neither artist seeks to literally replicate the natural world, everything they create is a metaphor. The works gleam and glitter, luring the viewer into worlds that feel ancient, future-bound, and mythic all at once.
For both Lewin and Saumarez Smith, art-making is an act of compulsion – a drive to communicate through form. The resulting sculptures speak in an original and deeply intuitive language, offering maps of thought, memory, and imagination.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Using the vocabulary of porcelain glass and metal, Lucille Lewins work explores the collision between nature and humanity. Never literal, yet highly evocative her organic sculptures are made of porcelain modelled dipped slipped cast thrown pressed and extruded fired then broken and reassembled over months of hand making. She was the Founder and Creative Director of the Fashion Brand Whistles and Creative director of Liberty and left retail to study Art. She graduated from the Royal College in 2019 where she won the Young Masters Art Prize. She has since shown in the V&A, Messums, Connolly, The Harley Gallery, Dover Street Market.
Romilly Saumarez Smith (b. 1954) is a British artist whose intricate, sculptural pieces transform found and excavated objects, such as cutlery handles, metal detected finds, ammonites and fossils into otherworldly forms. Originally trained as a bookbinder she made contemporary bindings for 25 years. In 2004. She was diagnosed with a rare form of MS and is now paralysed from the neck down and makes through her assistants, who she calls her “translators”. She never doubts that the work is her own, they have become her hands. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at the Sainsbury Centre and Make Hauser & Wirth, and is held in public collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of London. She was awarded an OBE for services to the arts in 2025.