Maureen Gamble (Heaney-Sykes) is a Worcestershire-based visual artist who has lived and worked in Bristol and London. Her work explores climate change and the transformative influence of the physical world on people, places and culture. At the heart of her practice is the question: "How can I make artwork informed by a shared understanding of a place at a particular moment in time?"
Gamble’s practice encompasses proposition, drawing, printing, collecting and consultation. Her work invites collaboration and public participation through instructions, kits, exchanges and offerings, placing shared experience and a strong sense of place at its centre.
Gamble’s work has been selected for international conferences and exhibitions and is recognised for its participatory approach. Participants are often invited to help create and own the work, turning the relationship between artwork and audience into a reciprocal exchange in which viewers become part of the exhibition.
Shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the artist book ‘Where are you?’ invited 100 people to answer the same question at the same moment, with their responses held in a wall-mounted card-index file. Although the participants did not know one another, unexpected connections emerged, revealing varied locations and distinctions between physical presence and personal understandings of place. The work asks whether “where” refers to space, feeling or time, suggesting that place is inherently relational.
The artwork ‘The Year that Summer didn’t come’ re-presents tree ring growth and climate data collected from records from 1950-1994 and stories about the effect of this on individual people living during this time.
Maureen’s piece, "Flow Line’s" draws the viewer in to explore the finely handwritten dates and water marks, halting tides to a time, a year, offering audiences a personal reflection on their own life markers along with the rivers. linking to the river through age and event.
From one Household’ was part of Common Good, a series of small works made in response to Bristol’s former Soapworks building. The work developed from visits to the factory, where I began collecting used soap bars during the Covid period, when handwashing and staying within household groups became part of daily life. Bringing together individual and collective stories shaped by that time, the work reflected the experiences that connected us.
The project was developed through Space Place Practice’s contribution to a collaboration with Centre of Gravity and property developer Firstbase. A digital catalogue is available through space place practice • resources.
Installed as part of Space Place Practice’s ‘Library of Pilgrimages’ exhibition at Trowbridge Art Centre, the boxwork contained three sets of instructions for work that had previously been made at different locations, inviting participants to choose and respond to that place.
‘Word of Mouth’: Boca a Boca’ was selected for exhibition at the Impact10 international Print Exhibition, Santander, Spain. The work invited participants to participate with the work following a set of instructions written in both Spanish and English. The subsequent installation of breath-filled paper bags with words inside represented the collective experience of individuals in that place together at that moment in time.
‘From the Secret Garden’ is an imaginary map drawing made as Gamble walked a rectangular route through an overgrown garden with Sellotape attached to the soles of her shoes, collecting tiny traces of debris and foliage from beneath her feet.
The work developed from Proposition No. 7 in Gamble’s artist book Instructions for an Art Walk: “Go into a garden and, with Sellotape on your shoes, gather the litter beneath your feet.”