October 17, 2026 – November 14, 2026
An exhibition of the work of Chad McCail, Martin Galton and Paul O'Donohoe
Weekdays from 1pm to 5pm,
Saturdays 10am – 5pm.
The Artists:
Chad McCail
Chad McCail was born in 1961 in Manchester and grew up in Edinburgh. He lives and works in Thankerton, South Lanarkshire. Having first read English at the University of Kent, he later graduated in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1989.
HIs work explores how our institutions, social hierarchies and economic systems condition how we relate to one another. It also examines alternative ways of organising and offers different visions of the future. Always figurative and frequently accompanied by short texts, his work uses various simple graphic styles to tell complex stories. Cartoon storyboards have explored the UK’s post-war financial development and the origins of compulsory education, a cut-away school exposed a repressive conditioning process and a sequence of gouache paintings presented an imaginary puberty rite. Posters for public display have included a series of idealistic proposals. Recently he translated a large, detailed drawing into a three-dimensional lay-out.
His work has been sustained by his activities in the village where he lives. For many years he has run art classes, producing exhibitions and staging annual street-theatre productions. In 2014 he made a mural with local people in Dagenham and returned there in 2016 to produce a pantomime. He painted a second mural for Millfield Metro Station in Sunderland in 2023.
His work has been exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad and in 2022 Distanz published Giants, a 330 page monograph about his work.
Paul O’Donohoe
Paul O’Donohoe is a visual artist based in Northern England. His practice engages with themes of social injustice, political mistrust, and the systematic erasure of working class life. Using found objects, reclaimed materials, and text, he creates installations that confront institutional power and foreground marginalised histories. Rooted in both personal experience and broader social realities, his work seeks to expose what dominant structures often suppress or ignore. Paul works in social care. He graduated with First Class Honours Fine Art in May 2025
Martin Galton
Martin is a London-based contemporary artist and poet. His work explores the space between poetry and visual art, using both disciplines to push the boundaries of expression. By pairing his original writing with painting, Martin has created a hybrid form that he calls ‘Poeting’ – neither poem nor painting.
In the 80s and 90s, Martin attended Roy Oxlade’s Summer School in Tunbridge Wells, painting alongside Rose Wylie. It was Roy who taught him that mistakes are good and in saying that changed his life. The power of someone saying, ‘wrong is right’, was totally liberating for Martin and how he has since attempted to approach all things in life. Roy Oxlade said he loathed ‘the artiness of art’ and encouraged his students to ‘unsophisticate’ themselves. Ever since, Martin has made that mantra central to his practice.
After a long and impressive career as an advertising Art Director, amassing over 120 awards, Martin has just completed 2 years at Turps Banana, the ‘alterative’ art school (for painting and sculpture), set up by Marcus Harvey in 2012. For 22 years, until the pandemic, Martin also created and ran a ground-breaking, raucous, weekly, poetry night… Bang Said The Gun, to critical acclaim. It blew away all preconceived ideas of what poetry was and could be, bringing energy and raw entertainment to a formerly polite and dreary poetry world, inspiring a new breed of poets. It was voted No.1 poetry night in the UK by the Times.
