Exhibition – Bold, layered works exploring memory, movement, place, and personal history through colour, structure, and observation shaped by life in North Kent and beyond.

Steven J Knowles is a multidisciplinary visual artist working across painting, drawing, and community arts, based between Gravesham, Kent and the North Devon coast. His practice holds two things in productive tension: the intimacy of the studio and the scale of the public wall; the personal and the systemic; the mark made in private and the image that belongs to a community.

Knowles grew up moving between building sites with his father — an education conducted not in classrooms but in the smell of raw timber, wet concrete, and spaces mid-becoming. These formative years instilled in him a way of reading the world through its structures: what is built, what is neglected, who decides, and what remains. Nearly thirty years working in social housing gave that instinct consequence, and it is this rarely spoken biography that runs like a current beneath the painted surface.
His mark-making is grounded in a crosshatch and grid language — less a style than a way of thinking. It speaks of accumulation, of time registered, of the act of sustained attention. Against this structural skeleton he places colour that refuses to be polite: bold, often in conflict with itself, always chosen with intent. His works are built in series, each one a chapter in a longer argument.

Knowles surfs regularly at Woolacombe in North Devon — a place he returns to not as escape but as orientation. His travel, from Sicily to Norway, Romania to Lisbon, feeds a practice sustained by the conviction that observation, accumulated slowly and honestly, is its own form of argument.