This November, artist Katherine Hughes unveils her latest exhibition, Coral, Kelp & Creatures: Whispers from a Vanishing World, in partnership with the Royal African Society at The Acre in Covent Garden, London. Running from 14 November to 12 December 2025, the exhibition invites audiences to reflect on the vitality and vulnerability of marine ecosystems and the human stories entwined within them.
Through a carefully curated collection of oil paintings and sculptures, Hughes explores the intricate relationships that sustain ocean life. Her signature palette knife technique transforms the canvas into a field of motion and memory, where pigment becomes emotion and texture becomes rhythm. Each work bears the traces of both observation and intuition, the visual and the visceral. A sea turtle’s journey across currents, the graceful stillness of a shark, and the lyrical unity of orcas and penguins each becomes a fragment of a collective oceanic memory.
“The ocean has always spoken to me, not in words, but in rhythm and colour,” Hughes explains. “My work is an attempt to translate that language before it is lost.” Her words underscore the urgency that underpins the exhibition: the accelerating decline of marine biodiversity caused by warming seas, pollution, and overexploitation.
Set within The Acre, Covent Garden’s sustainable redevelopment of a Brutalist landmark, the exhibition finds a venue that mirrors its environmental philosophy. The Acre, once an emblem of modernist rigidity, now stands as a model of adaptive reuse and green design. It is an architectural conversation between the past and the future, one that honours the principle that renewal need not erase memory. This dialogue between art and space creates an immersive experience where form and purpose converge, both calling attention to the necessity of reimagining human interaction with the planet.
The collaboration with the Royal African Society expands the exhibition beyond aesthetic contemplation into cultural dialogue. It positions oceanic conservation not as a Western environmentalist pursuit but as a shared global imperative, deeply connected to African ecological and cultural histories. From the coral reefs of Mozambique and Tanzania to South Africa’s kelp forests and the Seychelles’ marine sanctuaries, African waters are repositories of biodiversity and memory. They hold ancestral relationships between coastal communities and the sea, relationships built on sustenance, spirituality, and stewardship.
This perspective challenges dominant conservation narratives that often marginalise African knowledge systems. In this sense, Coral, Kelp & Creatures functions as both an artistic and intellectual bridge, a meeting of creative and scientific languages. It reminds audiences that conservation is not merely the preservation of species but the preservation of interconnected worlds: of livelihoods, traditions, and natural rhythms that sustain collective life.
The ocean, in Hughes’s interpretation, is not a backdrop for human drama but a protagonist, alive, responsive, and expressive. Her art refuses sentimentality, opting instead for a quiet urgency. The colours are rich but restrained, evoking both abundance and fragility. The viewer is left to contemplate the delicate balance between beauty and disappearance, creation and decay.
At the private view on 13 November, guests will be hosted with wines from Visio Vintners, a Black owned South African winery founded in 2018 in Stellenbosch. The winery’s We the People Pinot Grigio and Cape Blend red embody the same values of sustainability and social equity that animate the exhibition. Visio Vintners has established itself as a brand committed to responsible farming, ecological balance, and the transfer of agricultural and marketing skills to ensure long term inclusivity within South Africa’s wine industry. Their involvement extends the exhibition’s ethos, reinforcing how creativity, sustainability, and empowerment intersect across sectors and geographies.
This collaboration between a British artist, an African institution, and a Black owned South African brand exemplifies the kind of cross continental partnerships that can redefine cultural production. It challenges linear narratives of North South exchange, instead framing the conversation around reciprocity and shared stewardship. Such partnerships humanise conservation by acknowledging that ecological awareness grows from interconnected experiences rather than imposed hierarchies.
Hughes’s artistic inquiry resonates with a broader African centred understanding of environment, one rooted in coexistence rather than domination. Across the continent, from coastal fishing communities in Ghana to marine researchers in Kenya, the message is consistent: conservation is relational. It depends on recognising that humans are part of, not separate from, the ecosystems they inhabit. This philosophy, deeply embedded in many African cosmologies, provides a necessary counterbalance to more technocratic or extractive models of environmental management.
By situating Coral, Kelp & Creatures within this broader intellectual and ecological framework, The Acre and the Royal African Society create a platform for nuanced engagement, one that moves beyond spectacle toward reflection and shared learning. The exhibition does not prescribe solutions, but it does provoke questions: What does it mean to protect the ocean when its decline is tied to histories of exploitation and inequality? How might art help us reimagine conservation not as an emergency response, but as a continuous act of respect and reciprocity?
Hughes’s work suggests that art can reawaken empathy, not as sentiment but as awareness. Her canvases remind us that the ocean’s stories are also our own, that its fading colours echo a collective vulnerability. As global environmental challenges intensify, such artistic interventions become essential spaces for dialogue, connecting aesthetic experience with ethical responsibility.
Coral, Kelp & Creatures: Whispers from a Vanishing World ultimately stands as an act of translation, between human and oceanic language, between continents and cultures, between remembrance and renewal. It calls for a reimagined understanding of conservation, one that restores dignity, equity, and imagination to how we engage with the planet.
