Exhibition Panel Discussion, ‘A Gap in the Clouds’

Artists have long turned to landscapes to explore the relationship between our mental states and the world around us. From real to imagined landscapes, their works invite us to notice how environments mirror and shape our inner weather. What can we learn from these artworks about navigating the shifting terrain of our own minds?

This interdisciplinary panel brings together psychology, film studies, creative writing, art, and Qi Gong traditions to respond to works from the exhibition A Gap in the Clouds. Panelists will explore what these artworks reveal about the relationship between mind and environment, what resonates with – or challenges – established ways of thinking, and what new insights we might gain.

From the calming effects of nature on our minds and the ways landscapes stir memory, imagination, and emotion, to the distresses of war and environmental destruction, landscapes shape, challenge, and unsettle our mental and emotional states. This panel combines research, creative practice, and embodied experience to investigate these effects.

Earlier in the day, a Qi Gong session – an extension of a work by Zheng Bo in the exhibition – invites participants to experience firsthand the dialogue between inner and outer landscapes through multiple senses.

Open to the public, the panel, together with the Qi Gong session, offers a unique opportunity to explore what we can learn from art and artists, and how landscapes shape and reflect the way we experience the world.

Panel participants:

• Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson
• Olga Koroleva
• Nengi Omuku
• Professor Barbara Sahakian
• Yvonne Salmon

Bonnie Lander Johnson is a Fellow and Associate Professor at Downing College, Cambridge University, where she teaches literature and the history of the early modern period. She has published several academic works on literature and plants, including Botanical Culture and Popular Belief in Shakespeare’s England and The Cambridge Handbook to Literature and Plants. Bonnie is also a fiction and nonfiction author. Her recent creative non-fiction book is Vanishing Landscapes: The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them (2025), which explores how our relationship with plants has changed over time.

Olga Koroleva is an artist working across writing, photography, moving image, and live action. She pursues her long-term inquiry into inter-species relationships through the examination of gestures, language and biology. Informed by current debates in animal studies, ethology, anthropology, and crip theory, her work addresses life and liveness of human and non-human animals, organic and inorganic matter, and their multiplicities.

Olga has trained with and is a member of the British Health Qi Gong Association. Her teaching is informed by personal experience as a disabled and neurodivergent person, Buddhist philosophy, and mind training. She is keen to make Qi Gong accessible to everyone.

Nengi Omuku is a visual artist and founder of The Art of Healing charity (TAOH) who lives and works between Lagos, Nigeria and London, United Kingdom. She completed her BA and MA at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.

Using the subject of the body to translate interior experience, Nengi Omuku’s expressive paintings portray abstracted figures among spectacular, celestial landscapes that draw evocatively from the natural world, horticulture, and creationism. Drawing inspiration from the social and psychological realities of her subjects, whom she has often photographed and painted in her studio, as well as from various sources in archival and contemporary media, she creates worlds in which the distinction between bodies and nature is often blurred, reflecting on the intricacies around navigating place and belonging.

The images are rendered in oil paint and painted on strips of Sanyan; a pre-colonial western Nigerian fabric, created from woven threads of wild moth silk and blended with industrial cotton. For the artist, the blend of oil paint and Sanyan speaks to living between cultures, yet firmly contextualising her work within her local setting of Nigeria.

Recent exhibitions include Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; Aso Oke: Prestige Cloth from Nigeria, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; A Corps Defendant: La Galerie Centre d’Art Contemporain, Paris; and a solo institutional exhibition, The Dance of People and the Natural World, Hastings Contemporary, England. Omuku was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy (April 2024), The Black Rock Senegal Residency (2023), and The World Trade Organisation Residency in Geneva (2021).

Omuku’s work can be found in international private and public collections, such as the Baltimore Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami); The Whitworth Collection, Manchester, HSBC Art Collection; The Bunker Artspace Museum; Loewe Art Collection; Monsoon Art Collection; Easton Capital Collection; Azman Museum; Dawn Art Collection; Ditau Collection; Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge; Norton Museum of Art; Government Art Collection, United Kingdom.

Professor Barbara Sahakian is Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Sahakian received the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for Services to Research in Human Cognitive Processes from His Majesty the King, Charles III, at Buckingham Palace in February 2025. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. She is a past President of the International Neuroethics Society and of the British Association for Psychopharmacology. According to Research.com she is one of the very top researchers worldwide in the fields of Neuroscience and Psychology.

Professor Sahakian has over 600 publications in scientific journals, including Science, Nature and The Lancet. She has also been a leader in Government Policy on neuroscience and mental health, including on the UK Government Foresight Project on Mental Capital and Wellbeing and has spoken in Davos at the World Economic Forum in 2014.

She has co-authored two popular science books published by Oxford University Press Bad Moves: How Decision Making Goes Wrong and the Ethics of Smart Drugs and Sex, Lies & Brain Scans, which won the British Psychological Society Popular Book Award. Her most recent co-authored book, Brain Boost: Healthy Habits for a Happier Life, published with Cambridge University Press in 2025, provides practical tips, backed by scientific evidence, on implementing lifestyle strategies to improve brain health, cognition, and wellbeing. She regularly writes for The Conversation.

Yvonne Salmon is an artist, writer, filmmaker and academic based at the University of Cambridge whose work spans law, literature and visual culture. She is Chair of the Cambridge University Counterculture Research Group and also directs The Alchemical Landscape, an ongoing research and creative project that explores the intersections of counterculture, occulture and the imaginative representations of landscape. Her writing and creative work engages with themes of psychogeography, hidden histories and the power of expression.

Elisa Schaar, DPhil, is a scholar and writer working on recent and contemporary art. Her research explores such topics as the dismantling of modernism; questions of medium, subjectivity, and perception; and issues of time, history, and memory across a wide range of artistic practices. She often works in collaboration with artists, engaging both academic and contemporary art contexts through curating exhibitions and writing for catalogues and artist monographs. She is Senior Tutor in Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

Adina Drinceanu is a curator and cultural consultant with a practice focused on social, environmental, and institutional impact. She is the founder of ERA – Eco Ricerca Arte, a non-profit promoting art as a tool for ecological responsibility, inclusion, and social transformation. Since2014 she has collaborated on major international projects, including various initiatives at the Venice Biennale. Recent curatorial projects include Lingua Ignota during the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024, and Travaglio d’Amore at Palazzo della Corgna, 2023–24. Her research focuses on Eastern European conceptualism and the cultural legacies of the Cold War.