(Do Not) touch was an installation of paintings and drawings by Hephzibah Rendle-Short.

How much the work was conceived for the Leper Chapel and how much the images were already in mind - and some even already painted - waiting for a space like this chapel to gather them up, is hard to unravel. The Leper Chapel, graceful in its aesthetic yet haunted by an anguished past, stands on Stourbridge Common, on the edge of the soulless wasteland of DIY shopping and light industry. It is set apart, it was built to be set apart, outside the community of the living, for the living dead.
Hung in this space designated for separation and non-touch, triggered by the death of her mother, the work refers to touch: the touch of the gaze, the touch of the hand and the touch of the lips. Underpinning this is the touch in making the work, both painting and drawing: paint on paint, the drag and extraction, the push and pull of pencil across paper.

Hephzibah Rendle-Short is a visual artist with her practice grounded in drawing and painting. She has always been interested in making representation from observation, of the ‘real world’, since the 1980’s when she first moved from Australia to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. More recently her interest has turned to question the nature of the ‘real world’ and our relation to it.
Her work has been exhibited widely in UK and abroad, in Paris and New York. It is held in numerous private collections, including Paul Smith’s collection and public ones including University College London, Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Clare Hall, Cambridge. She works in her studio in Cambridge and is a visiting lecturer at both at the School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and on the Alternative Foundation at the Slade School of Art, London

download pdf exhibition essay by Hephzibah Rendle - Short