NEW ARRIVALS:

Works on canvas by current artist-in-residence and recent Slade graduate Tom Hallimond.

Based on photographs taken by the artist’s grandfather, this new body of work is drawn from an extensive personal archive spanning the 1940s to the present day. Rather than reproducing the original images faithfully, Hallimond inhabits them - imagining themselves in the time and space his grandad once occupied. Colours are entirely invented, shaping the emotional register and atmosphere of each scene. Through this process, the paintings hold a strong sense of the artist’s own presence, bridging the the space between memory, imagination and lived experience.

Colorful painting of six people in formal attire sitting around a table with a cake, against a red curtain backdrop.

Tom Hallimond, The First Empty Chair

2025

Oil on canvas

Unframed 61 × 72.2 cm

"This painting marks the first time my grandad felt absence in a tangible way - a friend who did not return to the table, the first empty chair. At that moment, it was a quiet, almost imperceptible shift, but it carried a weight that would echo through his life. Now, at 98, he has watched absence grow, fill the spaces of those he loved. This work captures that first whisper of loss, before it became a constant presence."

Inclusive of VAT, if exempt please contact bandits@sarabandefoundation.org

Tom Hallimond, The Holiday We Pretended to Enjoy

Tom Hallimond, The Holiday We Pretended to Enjoy

2025

Oil on canvas

Unframed 61 × 72.2 cm

"This painting is drawn from a photograph of a holiday that wore the mask of joy. My grandmother was pregnant, yet beneath the surface of sunlit leisure ran a quiet tension, an undercurrent of anxiety about the future. The image captures the fragile balance between performance and reality, the way uncertainty can shadow even the brightest moments."

Inclusive of VAT, if exempt please contact bandits@sarabandefoundation.org

Tom Hallimond, Nothing Felt Real That Day

Tom Hallimond, Nothing Felt Real That Day

2025

Oil on canvas

Unframed 61 × 72.2 cm

"At this time, my grandad and grandmother were living with his mother. He was still in the job he had started at seventeen during the Second World War, and together they were saving for their first home, navigating the quiet strain of everyday survival. The painting shows them sharing a drink with friends, but beneath the surface of conversation and laughter lies a haze of worry and uncertainty. Life felt suspended, caught between hope and the weight of what was to come, as if the world had tilted just enough to make reality feel unreal."

Inclusive of VAT, if exempt please contact bandits@sarabandefoundation.org

'The seed for these paintings was planted when I sat down with my 98-year-old grandad in the early months of 2025. An avid photographer, he spent much of his life capturing moments with his friends, my grandmother, and the textures of everyday life from the 1940s to the present day.

Now, frustratingly, he can no longer take photographs, and we began instead to look back through his archive. The images were black and white, and despite having taken them himself, even he struggled to remember what was happening in many of the moments they recorded.

This gap between image and memory sparked something in me. I began to imagine the colours that were missing: the curtains, the suits, the dresses. When I returned home, I held the photographs in my hands and continued to sit with them, thinking through what they might once have contained.

I did not want to copy the photographs. I wanted to inhabit them to imagine myself into the time and space my grandad once occupied, and to live through those moments as fully as I could.

Although the paintings are based on my grandad’s photographs, they now hold a strong sense of myself within them. The colours are entirely invented, shaping the feeling and atmosphere of each scene rather than describing it faithfully.

Because I do not know many of the people in the photographs, the red hollowed face appears as a barrier a marker of uncertainty and absence. It creates a distance between myself and the figure, a sense of hollowness that separates me from the character while acknowledging the limits of memory and identification.'

About the artist