CHIMERA – new work by IAN RAWLINSON
4th – 31st October 2025
Open Mon – Sat 09.00 16.00
Ian Rawlinson’s Chimera series is inspired by a black-and-white film clip of the last Thylacine in captivity pacing around its cage in Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. The film and what it symbolised prompted Rawlinson to create images which deal with ideas of a vanished past: transformation and memory.
The work combines part of the now extinct Thylacine with places in Cambridge from Rawlinson’s past, primarily Arbury and King’s Hedges. These places have a nostalgic feeling and are reminders of a childhood spent in and around the newly created housing, the nearby farmland and derelict army base. In recent years, he has returned to the area to make a short film and other artwork, which is now part of a large body of Cambridge-inspired work. The idea that the Thylacine is gone reflects his feelings about childhood, coupled with an intense longing to see the past once again, this time from the vantage point of the present.
Ian Rawlinson is an interdisciplinary artist and a writer. Born in Cambridge, he grew up in the city during the 1960s and 1970s. He studied art at Cambridge College of Art & Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University) and left Cambridge in 1982 to further his studies at Winchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Since 1985 he has lived and worked in London. Rawlinson’s work has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally, and has been recognised with several awards. His work is held in public and private collections in the UK, Europe, Japan and the USA. In 2024 he was elected an associate member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.
Facilities
- Disabled Accessibility
- Outside Seating
- Restaurant
- wheelchair accessible
- WIFI
