Opening Night: Friday 5th September, 5–9pm
Exhibition continues: 6th–21st September | Wednesday–Sunday, 12–4pm
Artist Talk: Sunday 7th September, 2–4pm
With contributions from other local artists
Please note for the exhibition: Parental Advisory - Explicit Content
What does it mean to be an Alpha Female in 2025?
Artist Cat. A invites audiences into her loud, funny, and deeply personal world with Alpha Females - a bold new exhibition opening this September at Art Space Portsmouth, alongside a smattering of work from other local artists.
The exhibition showcases Cat’s text-based artworks created over the last two years — a mash-up of hand-painted slogans, overheard conversations, and private feelings blasted onto public objects. Whether it’s a cardboard pyramid critiquing Reform UK while celebrating Shania Twain, or a flag confronting an ex’s racist family members, Cat’s work is deeply personal, sharply political, and disarmingly funny.
Using discarded materials, charity shop finds, and whatever’s hiding in someone’s cupboard, Cat transforms everyday objects into protest banners, t-shirts, and emotional outbursts. Her pieces are painted in a distinct freeform capital-letter style using acrylics and Posca pens - raw, urgent, and unmistakably her own.
Highlights include:
• “Reasons Not to Call Him” — an artist’s book of illustrated dating reflections, shown alongside 24 prints from its pages
• Personal banners like “Hannah Smith Is My Religion”
• Rants in paint about ex-boyfriends, the fear of scented candles, and Jacob Rees-Mogg
• Bunting and flags reimagined as miniature protest sites
While often humorous, the work digs deeper - exploring modern dating, identity, social justice, and the fine line between public performance and private catharsis. “My work is my therapy,” Cat says. “But I hope people laugh. Or at least feel seen.”
Join us for a no-filter artist’s talk on Sunday 7th September, where Cat A will speak about her process, personal inspirations, and the sometimes absurd relationship between art, activism, and exes.
Large Portrait drawings in the age of Ai
October 6th - 17th: 11am-3pm
PV – Wednesday 8th October 6 - 9pm. All welcome.
Artist talk and discussion: 11th October 11am-1pm.
Meet the artist: 11th October 1pm-3pm.
BIG HEADS is an exhibition of large drawings using black pan pastel, charcoal and a bevelled sponge on Fabriano paper. The work is inspired by several contexts – drawing as process, physical presence of the work in contrast to digital and virtualenvironments, and image as expressions of selfhood. Having spent many years looking at and creating in the realm of digital culture, these works return to a basic need by Trudy to work on visceral drawings in real time with emotive connection to the sitter of the portrait. Being chosen as the subject for a portrait is an intimate process for both the artist and the subject, and this work hopes to express that.
Consequently, BIG HEADS is about the nature of large portraits and their interaction with the sitter, and also about identity and selfhood in relation to lived experience. Some of the portraits are of people who are literally ‘Heads’ of their field – such as Kate Devlin who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Society at Kings College London for example. There are a variety of faces in the exhibition that affirm and celebrate notions of selfhood through a visual construction of identity, displaying a narrative of the self.
Particularly in the current age of artificial intelligence, where creative arts are being data scraped and re-defined in the digital realm, and discretely removed from curriculum developments, this exhibition aims to bring personal, physical and intimate context to how we see in contrast to the mirror of the digital screen. The work is also a celebration of simply drawing and engaging with people who are happy to be drawn and to be part of this amazing creative process.