CCA Galleries International presents Please Touch, the first solo exhibition by Jersey-based artist Paige Le Geyt, winner of the Summer Prize and the RBC Emerging Artist Award at their Jersey Summer Exhibition 2024. Bold, sensory and unapologetically interactive, the exhibition invites audiences to experience art through touch. ‘You really are supposed to touch the work to get the full experience,’ she says. ‘It goes so much against the typical behaviours in a gallery setting, but that is exactly the point.’
Through tactile sculptural forms, textured surfaces and immersive installations, Le Geyt challenges the conventional rules of gallery behaviour, encouraging visitors to use their hands as well as their eyes. In doing so, she opens a more accessible and embodied encounter with art, reflecting the many ways people experience the world.
For Le Geyt, whose practice is informed by her lived experience of neurodivergence, art has become both a language and a conduit. It offers a means of expressing inner realities that can be difficult to communicate through words alone.
Her journey as an artist began to take shape during the Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at Highlands College. Early in the course, the noise and intensity of the workshop environment felt overwhelming. Yet it was there, through making, that she discovered something important. For an early project, she transformed a cube into a record player. The spinning record became a metaphor for looping thoughts, OCD patterns and number sequences – themes she had rarely spoken about. When asked to explain the piece, she realised art could become a vehicle for sharing her lived experience.
Since then, Le Geyt has developed a distinctive visual language of amorphous forms, monochrome surfaces and intricate textures. Her black-and-white palette intentionally strips away distraction, allowing texture, sensation and form to come to the foreground. Working across sculpture, relief works and installation, she uses an eclectic range of materials including wood, plaster, clay, silicone, seeds, lentils, metal, paint and found everyday objects. Carefully selected for their tactile qualities, these materials are transformed into surfaces that invite curiosity and exploration.
Repetition is central to both her process and her story. As a child, she would draw the same images again and again, only later understanding the soothing role repetition played. Today, that instinct continues through the making of her artworks – pacing,
pressing patterns, covering surfaces and building forms through sustained physical engagement. ‘When I’m fully involved in the process, it becomes a channel for thoughts and feelings,’ she explains.
Many works in the exhibition reference her personal journey. Materials such as medication packaging, pins and industrial fixings are incorporated into textured forms that express struggle, control, chaos, resilience and adaptation. Nothing is illustrative in an obvious sense; instead, each work offers clues, sensations and perspectives.
Le Geyt describes autism as the part of her mind drawn to order, logic and control, while OCD can feel intrusive, irrational and chaotic. Art is where those competing forces meet. ‘It’s where I try to figure them out,’ she says. ‘Where they both sit, and how I coexist between them.’
She hopes the exhibition will encourage people to think differently about how art is experienced, particularly for those who may engage with the world in more sensory or non-traditional ways. ‘Neurodivergence is different for everyone,’ she says. ‘There are so many unique experiences to be understood when people are listened to and given the platform to express their inner world.’
Through Please Touch, Le Geyt shares her own inner landscape through texture, repetition and material, inviting audiences to encounter a perspective that cannot be communicated through words alone. More than an autobiographical exhibition, it is also an invitation to reconsider assumptions – about art, about behaviour and about the many ways people perceive and navigate the world.
Please Touch runs at CCA Galleries International, Hill Street, St Helier until Friday 29th May. The gallery is open Monday to Friday from 12pm to 6pm.