DOMINIC SHEPHERD | THE HOLLOW HILL | GRAMERCY PARK STUDIOS | 2026

DOMINIC SHEPHERD: THE HOLLOW HILL

EXHIBITION DATES Friday 3 July–Friday 31 July 2026

EXHIBITION HOURS Monday–Friday 10am–5pm

ADDRESS Gramercy Park Studios, 25 Great Pulteney Street, Soho, London W1F 9LT

CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is pleased to present The Hollow Hill, a new exhibition of paintings by Dominic Shepherd.

After a quarter of a century inhabiting a clearing within an ancient wood, Shepherd finds himself a stranger in a strange land once again. He and his wife now live on The Hollow Hill, a place with its own histories, myths, and hidden currents. Their home sits at the original entrance to an Iron Age hill fort, built directly into the ancient ramparts high above the Dorset vales.

The hill is a place shaped by time and disappearance. Beneath its surface lies a network of hidden waters, where springs emerge around and above the summit. Once the site of a holy well, reputed to contain a golden tablet with healing powers, the hill was also home to an anchorite’s chapel. Following the Reformation, these disappeared, though pilgrimage continued with the great agricultural fair held each Autumn equinox. The site later entered literary history through Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Where a hamlet once stood on the hill, before gradually vanishing in the late twentieth century, only the house where the Shepherds now live and a derelict farm building remain.

The paintings in The Hollow Hill emerge from a sustained engagement with this place. Walking the hill fort and its environs, Shepherd follows the traces of wells, ponds, barrows, pathways and springs. These walks become a form of exchange between the external world and the inner landscape of memory, imagination, and the unconscious. In these works, landscape becomes both a psychological and symbolic terrain where memory, myth, and perception converge. The Hollow Hill is a meditation on belonging, displacement, and the deep connection between the places we inhabit, their histories, and our own internal worlds.

Dominic Shepherd graduated with an MA in Painting from Chelsea College of Art & Design, London in 1994, having completed his BA (Hons) Painting at the same college in 1988. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, and his work is held in private collections in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and the United States. Shepherd is an Associate Professor at Arts University Bournemouth, where he is Course Leader for MA Painting.

The exhibition takes place at Gramercy Park Studios, 25 Great Pulteney Street, Soho, London W1F 9LT and is available to view Monday–Friday 10am–5pm.