Portal Project presents Stories at the Seams, an exhibition by 14 artists with lived experience of homelessness.

6 – 9 November 2025 @ Swiss Church London

Artists: Daiga, John, John J Sheehy, Johnny B, Lewis EM, L (el), Lui Saatchi, Mary Vallely, Matt, Peter, Peter H, Ricaso, Richard Fletcher

Opening hours: Fri 7 Nov – Sun 9 Nov, 12 – 6pm

Private view: Thurs 6 Nov, 5 – 8pm (all welcome)

Free admission (RSVP)

These artists find portals into inspiration where others might not look—in the arteries of the underground, the shadows beneath flyovers and in recollections of a night bus journey. Broken systems leave people living in the margins. Doorways, stations and buses become temporary sanctuaries, with many tracing invisible pathways through cities mapped differently. These are routines where resilience is not mere endurance, but survival through cycles and radical ability to change. Though shaped by hardship, such experiences can also open into deeper wisdoms.

Alongside individual artists’ works in the exhibition is a bronze Green Man plaque that has been collaboratively made by the Portal Project artists for Stories at the Seams. For centuries, the Green Man has reappeared across the world, symbolising the threshold between wildness and order. He is woven into aural and written tales, depicted in paintings and still carved into the architecture of sacred buildings in the city. Foliage spills from his mouth and ears, a reminder of cycles, endurance and renewal.

As a witness, the Green Man observes from the fringes of society. In our streets, where people rough sleep, he lingers still. Homelessness is not an individual failure but a collective forgetting that compassion is essential and that our walls are thin against the wilderness we all share. In

Stories at the Seams, through art making as an act of defiance and an affirmation of life, the edges of these worlds become stitched together, revealing that our bond with the wild—and with each other—is closer than we imagine.

Stemming from the artists’ own journeys, the works in Stories at the Seams explore entanglements of lived experience and mythology. Spanning drawings, paintings and ceramics, they weave together folklore and memory, cityscapes and ancient deities, bodies and plant ecologies. The exhibition maps the artists’ personal and creative accounts of living between worlds. Here, at the junction of wildness and home, exclusion and belonging, where the known world begins to fray, thresholds emerge into the fantastical.

Find out more about Portal Project.

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