She Speaks in Colour: Past, Present, Future Ilkeston Contemporary Arts Exhibition

Showcasing Ilkons resident artists.

As the seasons turn and Ilkeston’s light softens into Autumn, Ilkeston Contemporary Arts opens its doors to She Speaks in Colour: Past, Present, Future – an exhibition that celebrates the artists who have made this space their home, their stage, and their canvas.

Drawing from inspiration from the three women saints who glow in the church-stained glass – Cecilia, Dorcas and Lydia – the exhibition reflects on creativity as devotion, care, and craft. Each artist brings her own language of colour, movement and myth to the space, showing how art can be rooted in both personal stories and communal exchange.

For Gemma Gwen Armes, creativity is survival, rebellion, and a tool for connection. Her Moonlight Musings – two paintings and a video work – emerges from her recovery journey, where light and shadow meet in colour’s emotional terrain. Her practice insists that art is not reserved for privileged but is available to anyone, anywhere, with any means. Gemma reclaims raving a sober, communal ritual, and movement as a way of listening to the body. In her time at Ilkon, she transforms the gallery into both a dancefloor and studio, a place where re creativity is for every day.

Lucy Withers takes a different turn: bold, playful ad shapeshifting, her practice leaps between painting, sculpture and installation. Her imagery – from lobsters to asparagus, trash to landscapes – is a celebration of curiosity itself or noticing the overlooked. At Ilkeston Contemporary Arts, Lucys residency blurred the boundaries between organiser and artist, weaving workshops, exhibitions, and community encounters into her practice.  Now even whilst scaling cliffs in Croatia, she carries a sketchbook filled with colour and form, proving that art can travel as lightly and freely as she does.

For Ruby Wagge Townsend, painting is ritual, stage, and love letter. Their works conjure fairytales as tools of justice and empath, rewriting mythology through lived experience of trauma and survival. At Ilkon, Ruby unearthed the voices of Ilkeston itself – the Giant, the witch Anne Wagg, the glass blower’s wife – weaving local stories into workshops and paintings that became collective acts of remembrance. Their current work, The Pixie’s Revenge, grows from an imagined fairytale book a portal to resilience and transformation. For Ruby, the church is a place where silence is broken, and vulnerability becomes radical, communal strength.

Isobel Brigham brings another kind of magic: a luminescent palette that expands memory and loss into vibrant everyday icons. Through figures drawn from family archives and fragments of daily life, Isobel paints the fragile threads of identity, girlhood, and grief. Her new series, Wildflowers, 2025-, transforms forgotten cigarette cards into monumental memento mori, turning absence into radiant colour. Her paintings, often layers with pinks, blues, and oranges, act as glowing vessels of both fragility and resilience, reminding us that even the smallest symbol can carty generations of story.

Together, these artists embody the many ways Ilkeston Contemporary Arts has been – and continues to be – a place of experimentation, tenderness, and shared imagination. She Speaks in Colour: Past, Present and Future is not only an exhibition, but an echo of what has grown ere: a chorus of voices, distinct yet untwined, honouring the past, present and future of making.