Returning to the Southwest after four years away, I find an incredible sense of resonance with groups like CAMP, the Contemporary Art Membership Platform, a network of artists based across Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. Their presence is a reminder that in all times and places, no matter how rural or unseen, there are creatives all around us working, collaborating, and exploring practices which help them navigate our ever-changing world. In turn, these practices may help us in finding our way forwards, too.

The exhibition which opened on 6th September at Thelma Hulbert Gallery (THG) in Honiton is titled CAMP: Where Are We Now?. As well as being a rhetorical representation of how the group has developed in a few short years, the title poses a question to the audience. Where are we now? Where is our world, our environment, our communities at this moment in time? This prompt fostered a huge range of responses and perspectives from the 40 contributing artists, with a myriad of processes and mediums. I was honoured to assist with the opening afternoon of the exhibition, having been volunteering as a visitor assistant with THG during the final months of the summer. I had also recently become a member of their Youth Network, a project which helps to connect young people with artistic skills and participate in exhibition processes, and were a crucial part of the selection process for this exhibition.

THG itself is a site of multiplicity: an award-winning public art gallery set in a beautiful Georgian house, which had once been the home and studio of the late modernist artist for whom the gallery is named. I was drawn to volunteering in this space for many reasons – the team’s reverence for the heritage of the location and for Thelma herself as an artist; the variation of artworks and artists exhibited, shifting between group and individual shows and never shying away from complex questions of expression; and the opportunities, workshops, and welcoming faces offered to young people across different age groups. THG also provides space and connectivity for me, as an early-twenties student wanting to learn and meet like-minded people. Being a part of the exhibition opening also gave me the opportunity to speak to many of the artists whose works are featured, as well as their families and contemporaries. This included current East Devon Councillor Nick Hookway, whose presence and support for the exhibition was reinforced by his own words emphasising the importance of creative expression for both communal and individual wellbeing.

The CAMP: Where Are We Now? exhibition, opened alongside a sister display for Devon Open Studios, captures an incredible spectrum of questions regarding climate chaos, migration, sustainability, alternative perspectives, rurality, and shifting from ideas towards action. However, it also marks a hugely personal turn I will be taking as a student, a creative, and as a person. I spent most of this summer at work, but whenever I had spare time I had been exploring moorlands, coastlines, galleries – walking, sketching, reading about artists and academics who had been drawn from all over the world to this place I call home. A summer spent thinking about the spiritual, political, and environmental concerns of people who walk paths which interlace with my own. Connected by this place, and yet blindsided by the volatility of its ecological issues and current state of political division in an even more widely divided world. In pursuing my MA in Curation at Exeter, I am reminded of the value of purposefully recalibrating and finding footing in this place which seems so daunting and yet so beautiful. And as a prospective curator, I naturally gravitated towards my own way of seeing in a world which is saturated with trepidation – thinking critically, listening to those around me, and finding space.

If you would like more information about volunteering with THG, upcoming exhibitions, or joining their Youth Network, you can find out more here.