Xin Harper-Little
Traces of Being - stories in ink and coffee
06 Feb - 01 March 9am - 5pm
Window Gallery at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton
Art Exhibitions & Workshops
Current Exhibition
Solo Exhibition:
Traces of Being - stories in ink and coffee
06 Feb - 01 March 9am - 5pm
Window Gallery at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton
Preview Evening
Thursday 5th Feb 6:00-8:00pm
Ink and Coffee Creative Workshop
Friday 27th Feb 2:30-5:30pm
40 mins each session
2:30 - 3:10 , 3:20-4:00, 4:10-4:50, 5:00-5:40
Traces of Being: Stories in Ink and Coffee explores emotion as a lived, ongoing experience, embracing human imperfection as an essential and meaningful presence. Through flowing ink lines and layered coffee washes, the works trace moments of tenderness, resilience, and quiet strength. Ink carries discipline, memory, and embodied tradition; coffee, drawn from daily ritual, introduces warmth, unpredictability, and intimacy. Together, they create surfaces where control and surrender coexist, allowing emotion to unfold through subtle gesture and accumulated marks.
In a time when speed, digital production, and perfection dominate, this practice affirms the importance of slowing down and continuing to work by hand and heart. Irregularities, stains, and pauses are not corrected but honoured, reflecting the fragile, imperfect, and deeply human nature of lived experience. The act of making becomes a form of care—an insistence on preserving tactile knowledge, presence, and what we already hold.
Newly completed horse paintings celebrate the Chinese New Year and are inspired by the spirit of the Fire Horse, symbolising energy, vitality, independence, and transformation. Expressed through dynamic mark-making and heightened gesture, these works carry momentum, courage, and intensity.
Born in the Year of the Horse, the artist approaches these paintings as both symbolic and personal. The horse emerges as a trace of identity, inner fire, resilience, and the ongoing force of becoming.
Past exhibitions
Artist Open House Winter
December 2025
Studio 2, 2 Kings Mews, Third Avenue, Hove
Full interview:
Solo Exhibition: Unforgiving Lines
Unforgiving Lines is a study of movement, vulnerability, and the human condition. In this series, Xin Harper-Little explores the body as both instrument and archive, a site where memory, emotion, and gesture intersect.
Each work unfolds through immediacy and restraint: a single brushstroke can define or dissolve, reveal or obscure. The ink’s permanence becomes a metaphor for the moments we cannot take back, the truths we carry in our muscles and breath.
Harper-Little’s figures appear caught between control and surrender, tension and release. Their fragmented forms, suspended in motion, evoke the quiet urgency of being alive, of reaching, breaking, and becoming. Through these unguarded gestures, the artist invites viewers to witness transformation not as resolution, but as process: messy, physical, and unflinchingly honest.
Unforgiving Lines is not an apology for imperfection, but an ode to it, a recognition that every mark we make, on paper or in life, is both wound and revelation.