Location: Alma House, Jersey
Date: 02.12.2025
Sia and Michael Benest FRSA
The inaugural exhibition at Alma House brought together artists whose works explore memory, form, and the spaces between truth and illusion.
The intimate evening marked the beginning of the Alma House series — a dialogue between art, architecture, and atmosphere.
An intimate affair
The works in this room operate at close range. Detail accumulates deliberately - the kind of attention that rewards stillness and resisted the glance. These are pieces that disclose themselves slowly, in the manner of all things worth returning to.
Alma House is arranged as a home first and a gallery second - a distinction that shapes everything about how the work sits within it. Paintings hang where paintings might always have hung. Sculpture occupies the surfaces of daily life. Nothing announces itself. Everything is simply present.
The inaugural exhibition at Alma House asked a simple question: what does it mean to live with art rather than display it? The answer was not an argument. It was an atmosphere - one that persisted long after the final guests had departed.
Each exhibition within the Atelier & Grove programme occupies a space shaped by its subject. Works are selected not for spectacle, but for the questions they quietly refuse to answer. Authorship, memory, belief, and the nature of value — these are the recurring preoccupations. The setting is always chosen with intent.
