Gallery and Curation
Post Office Margate Gallery, 22-23 Cecil Square, Margate, CT9 1BA, Kent. UK.
Kavel Rafferty Curates @projects_kavelrafferty is based in the iconic Post Office building on the corner of Union Cresent and Cecil Square in the centre of Margate.
Kavel aims to champion the work of women, queer, outsider and self-taught artists as well as her own work at her Gallery Spaces in Margate. Kavel has a post punk DIY ethos for exhibitions and curating. Her exhibitions are unpretentious and exuberant. She is inspired by the community she lives in, her program hopes to reflects this down to earth attitude. Her shows are accessible, egalitarian and inclusive.
Please email Kavel if you are interested in hiring the space, for exhibitions, filming, photography and events.
Kavel has worked with Margate Pride, The Turner Contemporary and Power Of Women Thanet.
Photography Beth Saunders - Kavel Rafferty - Margate Post Office
‘New Relief’ and ‘Shadow Flower’ - Mahal Kita X Kavel Rafferty - December 2024.
Shadow Flower - Kavel Rafferty - December 2024.
You must be quick, to capture the fleeting shapes.
Oil paint on salvaged tracing papers. The oil seeps from the edges to create a halo, the shadows move, pattern on pattern.
Over-lapping and under-lapping of chrysanthemums, carnations, lilies and asters - studies of sad supermarket flowers and the oft derided last-minute bunch from the garage forecourt. These bouquets are far from exotic, in this series Kavel makes the common place special.
These pieces explore the ubiquitous presence of textured glass in the domestic architecture of the UK, from porches and once fashionable serving hatches to steamy bathroom windows. These pieces both reveal and conceal, offering glimpses of the images whilst obscuring what lies beneath, creating a tension between intimacy and distance.
The textured glass layers pattern and distorts the surface of the paintings. This interruption invites the viewer to look again; speaking to both nostalgia and privacy.
This series also hints at the way nature is compartmentalised and controlled within suburban life. In this work the glass becomes part of the paintings, not just as framing and a protective material, but integral to the works.
New Relief - Mahal Kita - December 2024.
Flower installation by Margate Based Art Florists.
Photography Beth Saunders
‘CAN’T SLEEP’
by Maxine Sutton
October 26th - November 17th, 2024
Artist Maxine Sutton in collaboration with Projects Kavel Rafferty, is proud to announce ‘CAN’T SLEEP’, a new series of works. Running from October 26th to November 17th, this exhibition will feature a range of textiles and works on paper, weaving together domestic materials and discarded remnants to explore the intimate yet universal experience of sleeplessness. Maxine Sutton’s process involves re-purposing everyday fabrics, such as blankets, linens, and scraps from the past, to create intricate fabric compositions that distill her own sleepless nights - those foggy hours when worries and sensations blur the line between wakefulness and dreams. This combination of materials evokes the deep connection between memory, comfort, and anxiety, reflecting moments of both ease and tension experienced in the domestic sphere. “I am old enough to remember sleeping under layers of blankets and sheets, before we had duvets,” Sutton reflects. “There is always this anxiety as well as safety in the domestic realm, where all our lives are played out. These materials, often over-looked or discarded, hold my attention, acting as soft vessels for absorbing memory and emotion.”There are references to home sewing, folk art and indigenous crafts. Alongside contemporary abstraction, Sutton’s works delve into themes of surrealism, nature, and the body’s interaction with the environment. In CAN’T SLEEP, the physicality of the body takes centre stage: the hands that create, the eyes that struggle in the dark, the ears that pick up muffled sounds. With thoughts of worry dolls and textile amulets, scraps are re-purposed as symbolic carriers of emotions, creating works that explore sustainability, leftover materials, and the subconscious mind. The work reflects on the experience of sleep, where night time sounds, light, and colour play significant roles. Felt and blankets suggesting a sense of muffled acoustics, further amplifying the sensations that come with sleeplessness. With a tactile and sensory engagement, the works are rooted in the physical experience of the body during these wakeful nights.
Maxine Sutton is a UK-based artist known for her mixed-media textile works, which merge traditional craft with contemporary concerns. Her practice is informed by memory, sustainability, and the emotional significance of everyday materials. CAN’T SLEEP is her latest exploration of the connections between the domestic, the body, and the subconscious mind.
Dates: October 25th - November 17th, 2024
Opening Hours: Friday-Sunday 12pm - 4pm or by appointment. Contact: kavel72@gmail.com
Lou Melchior and Kavel Rafferty
´A Blueprint for Living´ Rhiannon Adam
August 2023 - ´A Blueprint for Living´ Rhiannon Adam
A Blueprint for Living is a new body of work created to coincide with Margate Pride. The show explores the intersections between photographic process, colour, technology, and history to present a queer blueprint for happiness – a blueprint that has been conspicuous in its absence, with queer lives being forced into secrecy, and a generation decimated by the AIDS crisis.
As with all of Adam’s work – the choice of photographic process is symbolic. Polaroids are presented as a nod to subversive under-counter exchanges when homosexuality was still criminalized and Polaroid’s one-off untraceable nature freed their creators from culpability. Here Polaroids celebrate queer representations out in plain sight. At the back of the space, heat activated dyes are used to conceal and reveal latent images and text through physical touch and interaction, alluding to the contact and exchange between queer bodies that was once so feared. Cyanotypes – the show’s driving force – play the part of the missing blueprint, defiantly celebrating the visceral queer joy encapsulated in Adam’s archive of imagery of queer nocturnal worlds. The irregular smears of blue and irregular hang of the images alluding to the chaos and expressiveness of queer spaces.
The cyanotype process is one of the earliest photographic mediums. In the very beginning, they were used as an accessible means of categorization and documentation of nature, as seen in Anna Atkins’ work (Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843). In using this same technique, the artist creates an alternative past, where queer lives are documented, and deemed “natural”. The reproducibility of the cyanotype – also used as an early form of photocopying – serves as a protest against the historic invisibility of queer people.
In 2023, we are under threat from ever-more insidious forces, with biases reinforced through machine learning. AI systems have highlighted the hypernormalisation that forms the collective knowledge base. Within the world of AI, an image prompt for a “happy couple” includes only images of heteronormativity. In the process of preparing this show, AI image generators were prompted by the artist to create images of queer happiness – with the often-poor Bacon-esque results revealing perception gaps within the systems themselves, feeding off of negative media. Instead of enshrining this distorted vision in the show, the artist took a new approach – reimagining political and historical figures with well established anti-LGBTQ+ track records as allies, recreating history – a way of winding back the clock to imagine a world where queer freedom and equal rights could have existed.
The collected work is also a rumination on the world’s favourite colour. Here, it is an ode to Derek Jarman’s era-defining work, Blue (1993), (originally planned to be named A Blueprint for Bliss) where Jarman’s degradation of sight as a result of AIDS is framed by the colour blue. It is also a reappropriation of the colour of the conservative party – the party responsible for Section 28, the first piece of anti LGBT+ legislation this country experienced in a century, the party now responsible for blocking reforms to the gender recognition act.
This text was in part created by Chat GPT, in an effort to train and reeducate the AI system, forcing it to acknowledge and absorb the reality of queer legacies, and encourage algorithmic diversity.
@rhiannon_adam
Photography Beth Saunders
May 2023 - ´The Florist´ Kavel Rafferty
‘The Florist’
With this new installation @projects_kavelrafferty explores the democratisation of art – suggesting that art does not always have to be viewed on white walls. So the weather-beaten faded orange facade of the plumbers’ merchant on Cliff Terrace, Margate, becomes a gallery.
Art can be shown in unexpected places, at street level – in this case the traditional gallery space is usurped by a plumbing supplier, bringing to mind the well-worn trope of a weed growing from a crack in the concrete, flowers placed amongst the mundanity of trade. Passers-by, errand-runners, coffee addicts and afternoon Aldi shoppers are the audience and critic.
These original, large scale flower paintings flourish and bloom in the un-altered windows, next to the old boiler, behind the plumbing graphics, amongst piles of pipes, plastic fixings and tools.
These questions persist: where does art belong, where does it thrive, how is it seen and who sees it?
Flower paintings, acrylic paint, gloss paint, rubber paint, on found cardboard and original Margate beach hut wood.
Thanet Gas Spares, 2 Cliff Terrace, CT9 1RU, Margate. 18th April - 28th May
March 2023 - ´Fancy´ Paris Essex in Margate.
Kavel Rafferty brings the joyful, sassy and extraordinary work of knit and crochet artists Carolyn Clewer and Tiphaine de Lussy - founders of Paris Essex - to 231 Northdown Road, in Margate. Paris Essex are Essex girl, Carolyn Clewer and Parisienne, Tiphaine de Lussy, The result of years of creative collaboration between the two knitwear and textiles specialists, which began decades ago at the Royal College of Art. Paris Essex revisits the craft and clichés of knitting and crochet, working with combinations of hand and machine techniques. They share a visual language and are drawn to the materials, processes and pace of fashion. They work in a space where distinctions between craft, design, fine art, and low culture are blurred and of equal worth.
Recent works are a series of unashamedly joyful and exuberant woolly pieces. Scaled-up crochet techniques from 1970s craft books have been combined with recognisable 1980s domestic knitting-machine patterns. Rather than rejecting and avoiding outdated and sexist ideas of women’s crafts and home-making from their childhood, they have found themselves paying respects to all forms of domesticity and are playfully nostalgic for feminine stereotypes that they used to avoid.
Working in textiles and specifically with hand crochet and domestic knitting machines, they have been immersed in the world of hobbies and home-craft for years, whether they liked it or not. Like a scroll through lockdown social media tutorials, the imagery in their work embraces the enduring joys of flower-arranging, pottery, cat-lovers and make-up tutorials.
December 2022 -´Bunch’ Co curated with Louise Fitzjohn of Liminal Gallery. Eight women and non-binary artists show at to 231 Northdown Road, Margate, Kent UK.
A collaborative exhibition ´Bunch’, which brings together the works of Liz Crossfield, Mafalda Figueriedo, Kavel Rafferty, Cherelle Sappleton, Tracey Slater, Jeni Snell, Alexis Soul-Gray and Olivia Strange. The multimedia exhibition of eight women and non-binary artists spans drawing, collage, painting, print and sculpture. The exhibition title ‘Bunch’ refers to ‘a number of things closely grouped together’ and the two curators, Louise Fitzjohn and Kavel Rafferty, bring together a variety of contemporary artists working in surprising and nuanced ways. Binding and bridging; the works selected create connections, conversations and relationships between the artists and the curators.
August - Sept 2022 ´Les Painters’ Three queer women painters. As part of the Margate Pride Art Map Kavel Rafferty brings together three lesbian artists that use paint in their work.
Jane Dinmore uses vibrant colours and shapes to create animated compositions, which are witty narratives full of energy, momentum, concealment and possibility. Her paintings on canvas and drawings on paper use a cartoon language that favour the absurd, resulting in a mix of the comic and joyful abstraction. The work in this show focuses on people obviously hiding what we can’t ignore, so shoving it literally under the carpet. Jane is interested in hiding messy thoughts as beautiful sculptural lumps and nonsense to be misunderstood.
Mia Pollak (Signs by S&K) plays with the semiotics of type and the distant but sometimes-familiar language of Yiddish, Mia employs traditional signwriting glass techniques to present them.
Kavel Rafferty's latest work investigates the culture of toxic positivity, oppressive wellness, motivational memes and affirmation overload. Kavel questions the validity and usefulness of these banal phrases and feel good messages, by redacting found vintage posters with gloss paints. Taking a wry look at this moral messaging and pseudoscientific babble by reverse highlighting the lettering obliterating the imagery. Rafferty is not unaware of her own gullibility and attraction to quick fix cod psychology, with these works she gently laughs at her own self-help addiction...
April 2022 - May ‘Cats In Crisis’ (Two person show) to 231 Northdown Road, Margate, Kent UK.
‘I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as familiars, and have never deviated from this function’ William S. Burroughs ‘The Cat Inside’
‘Cats in Crisis’ the opening exhibition at Hotel Michele takes its title from charitable organisation that once occupied the shop opposite, and brings together new works by Kavel Rafferty and Thelma Speirs that marks a shift in direction, from commercial illustration and fashion towards making as artists for exhibition spaces.
Thelma Speirs presents us with a series of abstracted pop portraits made up of commonplace children’s stickers that convey observations she has made of the cats she has known and loved. Swapping the pencil, the brush and more recently the etching plate for these stickers, the artist seeks to capture the unruly nature of her subjects; Captain, Didi, Kelloggs, Mimi, Mouse, Skipper & Ted.
Kavel Rafferty's cat as muse.