Cathy Stanley’s work explores the expressive possibilities of paper as both material and image. Through layered fragments, colour, and tactile composition, she constructs painterly surfaces that feel both delicate and emotionally charged. Her process combines collage, drawing, and painting, allowing organic forms and colour relationships to emerge intuitively. The result is work that captures fleeting moments of feeling—where abstraction, botanical suggestion, and texture converge into quietly powerful visual narratives.

Her work was recently featured in the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, highlighting the growing recognition of her distinctive paper-based practice within the contemporary art landscape.

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“Paper becomes both surface and substance in Stanley’s work, where colour, fragment

and gesture gather into quiet yet emotionally resonant compositions.”

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“Through layered paper and intuitive mark-making, Stanley transforms delicate materials

into works that hold movement, memory and feeling.”

- House and Leisure

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IN THE SOIL - 5th March to 31st March 2026

An exhibition by mother and daughter, Elizabeth Vels and Cathy Stanley, brings together still life, ceramics, and paper paintings.

The exhibition takes soil as both material and metaphor: a generative substrate that sustains life cycles, seasonal rhythms, and ecological abundance.

Through works informed by shared bulbs, slips, and seeds drawn from domestic gardens, the artists investigate practices of wonder and delight. These gestures of cultivation become a means of tracing continuity across bloodlines, memory, and community, articulating relationships that unfold both above and beneath the soil.