Essence of the Primal

Location: The Rotunda at Leeds Arts University, Blenheim Walk, Leeds LS2 9AQ

This exhibition is available to view from 10:00am - 4:00pm Monday to Friday by appointment only for external visitors. Please email curatorial@leeds-art.ac.uk to make an appointment. Staff and students are not required to make an appointment.

In an increasingly over-sophisticated society that favours profit and production over experiences and living, humanity has become disconnected from our cardinal connections and behaviours. The works displayed explore the desire to belong, the intimacy shared between two forms, growing pain stories, and our relationship to the world around us. This is the 'Essence of the Primal'. 

'Essence of the Primal' is a window into the inherent raw and unfiltered interconnectedness imperative to the human condition.  Through the female artist's lens, the familiar landscape is reshaped to reveal the quiet tensions and tender absurdities that bind us to our most raw instincts, deeply rooted in worldly phenomena and unhindered by the rapid sophistication of modern man. 

Andreea Raducanu’s work dissects the human bond—its push and pull, its comfort and constraint. The body becomes both sanctuary and snare, a house of longing, control, and unresolved histories. In her hands, domesticity transforms into a site of tension, where nurture and suffocation blur. 

Rose Porritt leans into the language of materials, shaping the fragile poise of relationships. Her sculptures speak in whispers of contrast and balance, where softness meets structure, and care becomes something tactile, almost weightless. 

Holly L. Tomlinson turns to satire and surrealism, dissolving the borders between human and animal. She teases out the absurd hierarchies we impose, placing our fragile self-importance against the boundless logic of nature. Her figures dance between worlds, reminding us of our own strangeness. 

Tafsia Muzib Dana walks the shifting terrain of memory—unfixed, elusive, always on the verge of dissolving. In her paintings, fragments of home emerge and recede, urging the viewer to piece together what is lost, or what was never fully there.

Together, the artists invite the audience to peer through the window and reject man’s dominion over our base instincts as though they are an immaterial quality. To exist as the primal human is to retain a certain lucidity amongst a limbo of connection and disconnection.