Charleston presents The Window Set, the first UK institutional solo exhibition by Koak.
The first institutional solo exhibition of Koak’s work in the UK, featuring a newly commissioned body of work for Charleston’s town centre space in Lewes. Bringing together new paintings, drawings, sculpture, and site-specific installation, the exhibition considers the act of dreaming—not as an escape, but as an expansion of self, a quiet resistance, a threshold between interior and exterior worlds.
Opening concurrently with Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour, Koak’s exhibition considers the ways in which interior spaces have long been used as places of retreat and self-definition—particularly for women. The show is in dialogue with Charleston’s history as both a home and a creative refuge, where Bell and her Bloomsbury contemporaries blurred the boundaries between art and life. Similarly, Koak’s works dissolve the edges between interior and exterior, self and environment, reflecting the way Bloomsbury artists transformed their home into an extension of their internal lives—where personal expression and domestic space became inseparable, merging art and lived experience.
Windows are a central motif in Koak’s work, symbolising both boundaries and points of passage. In The Window Set, the window—and everything that frames it—acts as a threshold between worlds, a veil where thought dissolves into fantasy. Figures often appear with their eyes closed, absorbed in inward reflection, retreating from direct gaze into private, dreamlike states. Dreaming, in this context, becomes both a refuge and an act of quiet resistance—an assertion of agency over one’s own narrative.
Koak’s practice is defined by a sensitivity to line, form, and emotion, moving fluidly between painting, drawing, and sculpture. Her work challenges historical portrayals of femininity, using figures that navigate the complexities of identity and personal agency. Her expressive and complex figures range from bold to vulnerable, resisting fixed definitions and embracing emotional depth. Spanning figurative work, still life, and landscape, Koak treats each as a form of portraiture, suggesting a metamorphic state—a dream of becoming something beyond the self, a body becoming a lake, a flower, or a landscape. In this way, painting becomes an act of defiance, a feminist gesture that resists enclosure, imagining identity as something fluid, unbound, and in motion.
26 March–21 September 2025
Charleston in Lewes, BN7 1FB
Wednesday–Sunday/Bank Holiday Monday: 10am–5pm
Booking: Choose Date
Further Information: Charleston — Koak: The Window Set