Hunted Projects is pleased to present Between A Butcher and a Surgeon, a second solo exhibition with London-based artist Paul Housley. The exhibition brings together a new body of paintings inspired by a memory that has remained vivid for more than forty years: the sight of Psalter Lane Art College emerging through the fog on a Sheffield morning in 1985.

“There has never been, nor ever will be, a more beautiful sight to me than Psalter Lane Art College on a foggy day in 1985.”

For Housley, memory is not simply a repository of images but a means of entering another state of awareness. Returning to his formative years as a BA student in Sheffield, he draws upon remembered atmospheres, fleeting sensations and fragments of experience, allowing them to become catalysts for painting. These works are less concerned with recollection as nostalgia than with memory as a living process, one capable of collapsing distinctions between past and present.

Painting, for Housley, is a way of reaching a deeper level of concentration where the distractions of the outside world fall away. It is a process he describes as paradoxically placing him completely in the moment, a form of meditative attention in which meaning emerges gradually through the act of making. The resulting works possess a quiet intensity, balancing intimacy with ambiguity and allowing images to hover somewhere between recognition and dream.

The exhibition title, Between A Butcher and a Surgeon, suggests a territory suspended between instinct and precision, between the raw and the refined. It reflects Housley's understanding of painting as an activity that demands both surrender and control, where memory itself becomes material to be shaped, excavated and transformed.

Throughout these paintings, Housley pursues what he describes as a state of silence. “I want the work to reach a state of silence, the kind of silence you get when a record runs out of its groove and the turntable stops.” It is this sense of stillness that permeates the exhibition, inviting viewers into a contemplative space where images are stripped back to their essentials and where memory, far from being an escape into the past, becomes a way of being fully present.