About this Event
This event is open to all UAL postgraduates, alumni, and staff. Booking and confirmation of attendance is essential.
Soft Focus: The Art Detour is a monthly, student led art walk that encourages slow looking, informal conversation and shared discovery. Open to students from all disciplines, it offers a welcoming and low pressure way to explore art together while building community beyond the classroom. Each detour is shaped around the idea that London holds many worlds close together. Within a short walk, we can encounter different histories, beliefs and artistic languages, both local and global.
This month, under the theme the inner life, we head to North London to explore two distinct yet quietly connected exhibitions.
We begin at Camden Art Centre with The Jamaica Project by Ain Bailey. Working through sound and listening, Bailey’s practice considers how environments are shaped by presence, memory and the act of being heard. The exhibition invites us to slow down and attune ourselves to what often sits just beneath the surface, foregrounding listening as a way of understanding space and one another.
From there, we will walk to the Freud Museum London to visit Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal, a presentation of works by Leonora Carrington. Set within the former home of Sigmund Freud, the exhibition explores Carrington’s symbolic and dreamlike imagery, engaging with the unconscious, transformation and the hidden dimensions of experience.
While the two exhibitions differ in form, one grounded in sound and the other in surreal visual language, both ask us to consider what lies beneath immediate perception. Bailey’s work tunes us into the external world through careful listening, while Carrington’s invites us inward, into the subconscious and the imaginative. Together, they offer a shared enquiry into how we process, interpret and give meaning to the worlds we inhabit, both around us and within us.
As with each Soft Focus detour, the walk between the two spaces forms part of the experience. Moving together at a shared pace, there will be time to reflect, exchange thoughts and connect with others.
Meeting point: Café at Camden Art Centre
Time: 12:30pm
Departure to second venue: 1:30pm
Date: Sunday 26 April 2026
We warmly welcome anyone who feels drawn to join us for an afternoon of slow looking, gentle conversation and shared discovery.
To stay updated on the day, please join the WhatsApp group.
Accessibility information:
- Camden Art Centre
- Freud Museum London
Soft Focus is organised by UAL Post-Grad Community Ambassador Elif Cim. For more information please contact Elif via .
Image Credit: Leonora Carrington, Down Below, 1940. Private Collection, Mia Kim. Image Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Camden Art Centre Café & Garden, Arkwright Road, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
