Once We Had Claws

Once We Had Claws is a playful and unsettling dive into the half-remembered wilderness we crawled through as children, the games that were all too real, a memorial of all the creatures we have been- and might still be.

In this exhibition of work, illustrator and artist Kemi Pennicott imagines a strange, nostalgic world teetering between imagination and ruin. Through a mix of surreal illustration, hidden manuscripts and sculptural oddities, the show explores themes of forgotten play, lost maps, tension, and the blurred line between childlike wonder and feral instinct.

With a visual language that blends colour with sugar-coated chaos and dreamlike detail with poetic absence, Kemi Athene Pennicott’s work invites you in to play… or remember.