7 - 21 March 2026
Gallery open 11am – 4pm every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday

Are we in control of the images in our lives, or are they in control of us?

In this exhibition, Hampshire artist Sarah Jeffries explores the icon of the bride; from exposure during childhood to her own experience post-marriage. Through the work, Sarah unveils the traditional connotations attached to weddings within Western and British culture and, in parallel, reflects on what it means to be a bride, along with a felt reality of being a wife.

In Transformative Bride, Sarah deconstructs this imagery through her studio experiments and critical analysis of bridal iconography, all of which is underpinned by theoretical concepts by philosophers and artists including André Breton, Hans Belting, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

This intimate investigation is part of Sarah’s PhD research at the University of Leeds, which has the working title Exorcising the Bridal Image; cut, paste, paint.

“Through cutting up my own wedding dress, I discovered the first cut was charged with difficult emotions. Upon taking sharp scissors to my delicate organza wedding dress, the dress seemed to have an invisible, psychological, force field around it that seemed to cry - don’t cut me up! […] Such an act felt like the spiritual cord-cutting of my childhood dream to be a bride, and a separation from the ‘happily ever after’ rhetoric that goes with it.”

Objects and painted images interrupt, and critically question, the role of normalcy and harmony attached to such images of grandeur and seductive aesthetics. These multi-layered works encapsulated within individual containers, have led to uncanny embodiments of the icon of the bride.

You, the viewer, complete each work, bringing your own opinions and ideas of the subject.