Artists

Luke Edward Hall

Press release

The Breeder presents Dancing with Serpents, Luke Edward Hall's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Hall is a multidisciplinary artist and designer working across drawing, painting, ceramics, interiors, and fashion, blurring distinctions between fine and applied arts. His practice unfolds as a form of world-building, constructing a vivid and fluid visual language in which mythology, folklore, and everyday life converge. Across media, his work is unified by a poetic sensibility, at once intimate and expansive, where figures, landscapes, and symbols drift between the real and the imagined. Drawing on a longstanding fascination with antiquity alongside Northern European folklore and the Arthurian cycle, the body of legends surrounding King Arthur and his court, Hall brings together disparate narrative traditions into a shared, timeless space. Mythical and legendary figures are not fixed but continually reinterpreted, appearing as emotionally resonant presences rather than distant archetypes. Through this lens, Hall softens inherited narratives, revealing moments of vulnerability, sensuality, and quiet introspection. His protagonists are often male figures drawn from myth, imbued with a lyrical ambiguity that challenges traditional depictions of heroism, allowing tenderness and desire to surface. The works in this exhibition take cues from landscapes both remembered and imagined: coastal horizons, open fields, and shifting pastoral scenes. These environments function less as settings than as emotional terrains, sites of encounter and transformation. Color plays a central role; applied intuitively, it destabilizes naturalism and instead heightens atmosphere and sensation. Figures emerge and dissolve within these chromatic fields, their bodies porous and responsive to the world around them. In Dancing with Serpents, Hall extends his exploration of storytelling through paintings that draw on folklore from West Penwith in Cornwall—piskies, giants, and mermaids—alongside recurring mythological figures such as Pan, Antinous, and Dionysus. Rather than illustrating specific tales, the works trace affinities between these traditions, allowing them to coexist and transform one another. Across the exhibition, Hall proposes a shared imaginative space where mythologies overlap and evolve. This convergence unfolds through a series of encounters between figure and landscape. In The Bather and Guardian, the solitary body becomes a site of introspection, poised between exposure and withdrawal, while Guardian II extends this mood into a more luminous, suspended stillness. Elsewhere, relationships emerge more ambiguously: The Magician and The Riders suggest moments of guidance, companionship, or ritual, without resolving their narrative. In works such as In the Woods and In the Woods II, figures are absorbed into their surroundings, their identities diffused within branching, rhythmic environments. A parallel strand of the exhibition turns toward transformation and enchantment. Phantom Caer and Field Prayer (White Horse) evoke acts of invocation or quiet communion with unseen forces, while The Wanderer and Shadow Boy introduce more elusive, solitary presences—figures defined as much by atmosphere as by form. Even in ostensibly quieter works such as Foxglove, Wildflowers, or Red Stones, the landscape itself carries a latent charge, suggesting that myth resides not only in figures but within the terrain itself. Across these works, Hall constructs a world where mythology is not distant but deeply felt embedded in gestures, relationships, and atmospheres. His paintings do not narrate so much as they sustain a presence, allowing fragments of emotion, memory and place to surface and recombine. Through this approach, Dancing with Serpents proposes a re-enchanted vision of the world, grounded in fluid identities, sensuality, and an enduring sense of wonder.