The Places We Know: Selected Works from the Bethlem Gallery Art Collection
Bethlem Gallery
4 February – 11 April 2026
Open 9.30am – 5pm, Wednesday – Saturday
Opening event: Thursday 5 February, 5-7pm RSVP here
The Places We Know brings together two of Bethlem Gallery’s core elements – its recently launched permanent art collection, and the artistic community that calls the gallery home.
The exhibition has been co-curated with Bethlem artist, writer, and educator Halimah Zakiuddin. The usual gallery ‘voice’ in interpreting the exhibition will be critically interrupted through responses by Creative Future’s 2026 writer-in-residence Jess Murrain, who will act as the ‘exhibition poet’.
The exhibition’s themes, reflected in the title, centre around affinity – a sense of familiarity or kinship. Ideas around people and the places they inhabit informed the selection of works.
The Bethlem Gallery Art Collection is generously supported by the Peter Sowerby Foundation.
Full list of exhibiting artists: Antonia Attwood, Angelique Lin, Daniel Regan, George Harding, Imma, Jan Arden, Pat Mear, Peter White, Sarah Lloyd (Carpenter), Sue Morgan.
Header Image: Pat Mear, Puzzled, Safe Inside a Jigsaw Puzzle World (detail). Copyright Bethlem Gallery.
Biographies
Halimah Zakiuddin has been painting with great passion for a number of years, first as a form of therapy because it helped her relax and unwind, but now learning new techniques. She focuses on painting nature, particularly landscapes, mountains and sunsets, as well as architecture and more abstract art.
Zakiuddin also enjoys creating pottery, woodwork, jewellery and glass art. She has recently exhibited at Ceramic Show, W3 gallery, Acton, Clocktower Cafe, Croydon (2024) and at Bethlem Art Fair (2025).
Jess Murrain (she/they) is a queer, interdisciplinary creative of British-Caribbean heritage, working mainly in live art, theatre, film and poetry. She is also the co-founder/Artistic Director of Art Wife, an experimental live art company, whose latest project; NEUROQUEER, was commissioned by Bradford 2025 City of Culture. She is the winner of the Ledbury Poetry Prize (2021) and Out-Spoken Prize in Poetry and Film (2023), with poetry & essays appearing in bath magg, Callaloo, Magma and The Poetry Review. Jess is also fiercely passionate about education, inclusion and equity; oftentimes in collaboration with grassroots collectives and organising groups, challenging the gatekeepers of power who continue to uphold systemic inequality and societal injustice. She is an alumnus of Southbank New Poets Collective (21/22), and her poetry pamphlet ‘One Woman-Horse Show’ is published with Bad Betty Press.
linktr.ee/jess_murrain