Place of Anchors

Place of Anchors

5 to 27 September 2025

Opening event  Saturday 6 September 2025, 2-4 pm

Virginia Hilyard and Fiona Kemp took up a month-long artist residency on Kotlin Island, an historic Russian island fortress in the Gulf of Finland, off the coast of St Petersburg.

Based in the naval city of Kronstadt, the artists undertook field trips to sites on the island including relics of eighteenth-century naval infrastructure, coastal beaches, a foreshore wildlife refuge, the Russian Orthodox Naval Cathedral, Soviet housing and city environments.

Hilyard and Kemp create psychological and physical geographies, of the interior and exterior terrain drawn from Kotlin Island, with the aim to create an interchange with the viewer, as transitory and fluid experiences of place and time.

A Place to Anchor offers a different kind of experience – valuable in humanising and informing through the artist’s experience – from which to approach the unknown.