13/09/2026
In 'Finders Keepers', Eloise Dethier-Eaton and Charly Helyar both use found objects from inside and outside the home as integral elements of their paintings.
Eloise's 'One Man's Trash' series is an imaginative response to the boards she regularly finds in the street or in skips. She likes the way these discarded boards remain full of potential, ready to live another life with the person who chooses to pick them up and take them home. Although they're usually made from plywood or mdf ('cheap' materials from the construction industry), Eloise uses trompe-l'oeil painting techniques, learnt during her Decorative Surfaces Fellowship at City & Guilds, and paints these boards to look like other materials such as precious marble, hard wood or even plywood. In doing so, she hopes to mess with the construed notions of value that we assigned to materials. Within the gallery, Eloise then arranges the painted boards to look like they've been discarded on the side of the street once again.
Meanwhile Charly's approach is focused on the intimate space of the home. In her 'Matrices' series, Charly represents tender domestic moments like a conversation, a shared meal or a woman bathing. These scenes are captured in her signature style, between figuration and abstraction, and her compositions are influenced by the awe-inspiring religious paintings she recently studied in Italy. Charly's small paintings on copper plates are then nestled within dismantled and rearranged parts of furniture found within the home, like cupboard doors, drawers and sewing boxes. Through these acts of devotion and care, she elevates the everyday into treasured moments.
'Finders Keepers' is on until the 20th of September. It's open Friday-Sundays, between 11am and 5pm, or by appointment, at EDE Projects, 4 Cinque Ports Street, Rye TN31 7AD.
