Event start date: 27/11/2026
Location: HOURS
This exhibition of painting, enamels and collages explores contemporary issues of viewing others – in suffering, risking their lives at sea, crossing borders, waiting for food, running for their lives and ultimately looking back at us. The work started in response to a stark photograph in 2014 used by the UN depicting hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk camp standing perfectly still, waiting for food and staring straight to camera.
Bristol hosts several of the major military aerotechnology firms responsible for devastation, forced migration and civilian death overseas. This economy underpins the city and bolsters its housing market. Bristol has also been the site of anti-immigration demonstrations, violent attacks on migrant hotels, and the display of English flags staking territory.
Through looking, being aware, witnessing and simultaneously being witnessed we are connected. We are also being called to account.
‘Our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering’ (Susan Sontag).
Bio
Jude Hutchen is a Bristol based visual artist with a long history of creative community development projects, deeply influenced by several years working in post war Bosnia. She is fully committed to art making as a means to connection, growth as well as articulating social issues, provoking discussion and campaigning for change.
She has worked in Barton Hill for over 7 years delivering creative research projects at Wellspring Settlement in partnership with the University of Bristol which amplify minoritised voices and presenting lived experience to influence decision makers.
This year she was also commissioned by the University of Bristol Theatre Collection to work with the John Fox and Sue Gill archive, co-founders of Welfare State International radical theatre company and community engagement pioneers. She delivered a creative program with a local gardening group to make a time capsule, produced an artist book documenting the project as well as an illustrated Source Guide, as a resource for those accessing the archive, presenting her practise and research.
wwwjudehutchen.co.uk insta: jude_hutchen