‘Clem’ by Lewis EM (2025)

Multimedia artworks move between mythology and lived reality, echoing voices from the edges—thresholds where the known world begins to fray. The exhibition traces what is often hidden in plain sight—the junction of wildness and home, exclusion and belonging, what seems and what is. Here, where the fabric of order thins, reality itself begins to unweave.

6 - 9 November 2025 @ Swiss Church London. Find out more about Portal Project.

Artists: JOHN J SHEEHY, JOHNNY B, LEWIS EM, LORRAINE, LUI SAATCHI, MARY VALLELY, MATT, PETE, PETER, RICASO, RICHARD

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

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

Location: The Swiss Church in London, 79 Endell Street, London WC2H 9DY

Free admission (RSVP)

Following the artists’ experiences, the works explore wide-ranging entanglements with myth and storytelling. They knot together folklore and infrastructure, graffiti and scripture, bodies and ecologies. These artists find portals into inspiration where others might not look—in the underground arteries of transport, the shadows beneath flyovers or the glimpses from a night bus. Within this web of exchange—consumption, waste, beauty, charity, and violence—reality slips into the fantastical. Other worlds open up, offering new ways of seeing.

Broken systems leave people living on thresholds, tracing unseen pathways through cities mapped differently. Doorways, stations and buses become temporary sanctuaries. Though shaped by hardship, such routes also open into deeper wisdoms. Here, resilience is not mere endurance within fixed systems, but survival through cycles, shapeshifting and radical adaptability to change.

Ancient stories still weave through contemporary lives, reminding us that existence unfolds in cycles. Our lives are not single, linear narratives but polyphonies entangled with other species, myths, and unseen forces. What is dismissed as broken may hold the seed of renewal. These stories reveal that our bond with the wild—and with each other—is closer than we imagine and within that closeness lies shared healing.

The Green Man is an ancient figure who has reappeared across the world, foliage spilling from his mouth and often carved into architecture of sacred spaces as a witness. He stands at the edges of civilization—a portal between wildness and order. In our streets, where people sleep, he lingers still. Homelessness is not an individual failure but a collective forgetting that mercy is essential, and that our walls are thin against the wilderness we all share. His leaves whisper of endurance and renewal.

'Stories of the Seams' reminds us that myths were always meant to hold both light and shadow. At the edges of the unbearable, art becomes an act of remembrance—a stitching together of what has come apart, a movement toward compassion, renewal and repair.

The artworks in this exhibition have been made during weekly workshops at partner venues the Swiss Church London and the Actors’ Church. They have also been made with support from partners the London Graphic Centre and Rochester Square.

The ‘Stories of the Seams’ exhibition features a bronze ‘Green Man’ plaque that has been collaboratively made by Portal Project artists. It will later act as a public artwork, featuring a QR code linking to resources and helpful tips for those rough sleeping. The first plaque will be installed outside the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden this year, a location where rough sleepers find sanctuary.

The Big Issue, will present an accompanying Portal Project artwork in their 17 November 2025 magazine edition. Here, further stories, artworks and perspectives from the artists can be accessed through QR code ‘portals’.