Hunted Projects is pleased to present Digging in the Dunes, a solo exhibition of new paintings by London-based artist Ross Chisholm, on view from 27 February to 29 March 2026. This exhibition marks Chisholm’s second solo exhibition with Hunted Projects.

In Digging in the Dunes, Chisholm revisits and unsettles the conventions of society portraiture, drawing on the composed theatricality and psychological distance of eighteenth-century British painting. A recurring touchstone within the artist’s practice is George Romney, and in particular his portrait of Miss Joan Knatchbull. Poised, politically inflected, and carefully staged, these historical works function as both source material and conceptual ground. Where portraiture once stabilised identity and status, the paintings instead introduce instability, loosening the authority such images traditionally assert.

Digging in the Dunes approaches painting and portraiture as sites of sustained accumulation. Surfaces are layered, scraped back, and reworked over extended periods, producing works that read less as fixed statements and more as cross-sections of time. Pigment is treated as geological matter, compressed, fractured, and gradually revealed. Several works originate from earlier stages in the artist’s practice and have been revisited repeatedly, allowing each mark to function as a deposit and each erasure as a form of excavation. Figures hover between emergence and dissolution, oscillating between likeness and erosion.

Layering operates as both method and metaphor. Cultural values, like painted surfaces, consolidate into fixed forms before fragmenting or being reshaped over time. These paintings retain traces of their previous states beneath the visible surface: gestures toward refinement, authority, or decorum that remain partially buried yet never fully erased. Ideology is approached as sedimentary, formed through pressure, repetition, and duration.

Materiality is central to this body of work. Paint is handled not as a vehicle for illusion but as a substance with density, resistance, and memory. Surfaces resist immediate resolution, encouraging sustained looking and slow visual engagement. What appears stable begins to loosen; areas of erosion gather unexpected presence. The portrait becomes terrain, and the terrain, in turn, becomes residue.

In Digging in the Dunes, painting is presented as a practice of sustained attention and continual reworking. Through cycles of layering, removal, and return, Chisholm’s works consider how images accrue meaning over time, holding, concealing, and transmitting structures of power. The exhibition invites viewers to encounter portraiture not as fixed likeness but as a shifting field, where history, material, and ideology remain visibly in motion.