Exhibition Panel Discussion, ‘A Gap in the Clouds’

Interdisciplinary panel discussion based around the themes of the current exhibition at The Heong Gallery, A Gap in the Clouds. We will hear from the exhibition curators, artists, and researchers in psychology and the humanities about their view on the following guiding questions: What can landscapes — real and imagined — reveal about our mental lives? How do landscapes shape and reflect our mental lives?

A Gap in the Clouds explores how artists use landscape to consider the connection between our inner lives and the world around us. Neither distant views nor simple reflections of the mind, the works in the exhibition treat landscape as a site of exchange where mental states and external realities meet, reflect, and reshape one another.

The exhibition emerged from a sense of urgency that both inner and outer landscapes are in crisis. Mental struggles are intensifying amid global realities such as war, climate change, urban pressures, and pervasive digital technologies. For a long time, artists have turned to landscape, broadly conceived, to explore the complex relationships between mind, emotion, and environment, offering insights that feel especially resonant in the face of today’s challenges, while also reimagining what landscape can be.

The artists in the exhibition come from varied geographies, perspectives, and moments in history, bringing together a range of experiences. Landscapes span from abstract to figurative, imagined to observed or remembered. They evoke emotional atmospheres such as introspection, distress, and a sense of possibility. Together, these works reveal how inner and outer worlds are deeply entangled and always in flux.

Landscapes, after all, are never neutral: they carry an emotional weight—histories of displacement, or environmental damage—that can press on the mind. At the same time, while nature’s positive effects on mental wellbeing are well documented, the artists in this exhibition go further. Their practices show how sustained engagement with nature can foster deeper forms of connection, resilience, and creative possibility.

Like a clearing in the sky, the title A Gap in the Clouds, borrowed from David Shrigley’s work, suggests a moment of perspective. We hope this exhibition is a place where something might be glimpsed, however briefly — not a solution, but an opening.

Artist List

Etel Adnan, Ai Weiwei, Anas Albraehe, Yto Barrada, Giorgio de Chirico, Patricia Domínguez, Latifa Echakhch, Andreas Eriksson, Rachel Howard, David Jones, Kim Bohie, Koo Jeong A, Peter Lanyon, André Masson, Edvard Munch, Paul Nash, Nengi Omuku, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, David Shrigley, Alice Visentin, Frank Walter, and Zheng Bo.

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Host or Publisher The Heong Gallery/ Cambridge Film Festival