As assistant curator of The Salon, a series of private artist salons held across London, New York, and Paris, I am pleased to announce our forthcoming exhibition, To the Country, bringing together works by Emily Croteau, Phoebe Howard, Georgia Elliott, and Lucy Evans. The exhibition will be on view from November 29 through December 6, 2025.

To the Country is a show on stillness, clarity, and the intelligence of beauty, in which pieces of our heritage, birds, quiet landscapes and whispered lore blur into one another, tracing a landscape of calm and renewal.

Emily Croteau (b. 1998) raised by the coast, Emily remains inspired by nature’s charm while discovering new cosmopolitan influences in her Brooklyn, New York studio. Her oil paintings embody timeless beauty, inspired by the natural world and brought to life on canvas through vivid and authentic detail. She combines traditional art practices with innovative approaches. Intertwined forms play a central role in Emily’s work, where animals and figures merge, overlap, and dissolve into one another, blurring the boundaries of their original shape. She creates compositions where one form dissolves into another, blurring distinctions and inviting viewers to question where a subiect begins and where it ends. This fluid entanglement reflects her interest in connection, identity, and the ways beings exist in relation to one another.

Phoebe Howard uses collage as a stage for her inner world where personal myths unfold without resolution or familiar order. Her work exists in a space suspended between reality and imagination, drawing inspiration from gothic writing. Phoebe graduated from Chelsea College of Art with a specialism in embroidery. Rooted in her background in textiles, her collage process mirrors embroidery through its use of patchwork and piecing together fragments into something whole.

Georgia Elliott is a contemporary British painter whose work is an intuitive, visceral response to the natural world. Based in Buckinghamshire, she creates expressive paintings inspired by wild landscapes and established gardens, working primarily on site, en plein air. Originally trained and working as a freelance illustrator in Brighton, Georgia returned to painting after relocating to the countryside in 2018. What began as simple sketches of the land quickly evolved into a deeper exploration of place, emotion, and sensory experience. Drawing alone could not convey the energy felt outdoors, only paint had the immediacy, movement, and freedom she craved. “Paint feels like an extension of my hand, when I’m in flow, my hands move faster than my thoughts. Colours, light, shape, movement, sound, energy, everything is pulled onto the canvas, layering and shifting until the story of that moment feels heard.”

Lucy Evans is a Ukrainian-born artist from Kyiv. Fleeing to Paris in 2024 after the Russian Invasion, she paints in the countryside outside of Paris while attending Beaux Arts in Paris. There, she joined the studio of French artist Bruno Perramant. Her earlier work depicts moments of hope, inspiration, and bravery (see Brave, In Front of Mirror) while newer works delve into the subtleties of vulnerability, resilience, and inner transformation. Inspired by everyday life and nature, Evans creates works that reflect timeless dimensions of the human condition with both sensitivity and strength. Through her practice, she explores psychological states where emotion, memory, the unconscious and consciousness converge.