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Ruskin School of Art MFA Degree Show
St. John’s College Painting Project
The Cambridge Union Murals
Bodies Past and Present - Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology
Experimental Two-Person Show
Archive
Video 1
June 2025
Saturn Devouring His Son, May 2025, 244 x 244 cm, Oil on Wood Board
Final Year Undergraduate Architecture, April 2025, 27 x 18 cm, Oil on Wood Board
First You Kiss, Then You Bite Soft, April 2025, 122 x 122 cm, Oil on Wood Board
Darwin College Cambridge Bathroom , April 2025, 21 x 30 cm, Oil on Wood Board
okay that was too much...(cont), April 2025, 8 x 6 cm, Oil on Wood Board
For his final MFA exhibition, Connor explored the act of the bite to articulate a multifaceted conceptualisation of intimacy that has been the centre of his research on the MFA programme. The bite is physical, emotional, mundane, fleshy, violent, intimate and metaphorical. It is ever occuring and both personal and universal.
The show also articulated his fascination with the process of painting itself, unravelling its stages through the painting’s installation, most notably with the blue, oil primed walls.
July - September 2025
Over the summer of 2025, Connor completed a set of paintings to be permanently installed in the central atrium of the postgraduate building inside St. John’s College, Oxford.
This was a community centred project that saw the ideation process involve the postgraduate student body. The feedback, ideas and stories relayed influenced the realisation of the paintings.
The paintings are on the edge of the mezzanine in the central atrium, wrapping around its curved surface.
This was a community centred project that saw the ideation process involve the postgraduate student body. The feedback, ideas and stories relayed influenced the realisation of the paintings.
The paintings are on the edge of the mezzanine in the central atrium, wrapping around its curved surface.
The works depict scenes and views from the St. John’s College Gardens and were ideated in collaboration with the postgraduate student body.
All the panels are 85 x 85 cm and painted in oils on primed wood boards.
July - August 2024
During the summer of 2024, Connor completed a set of murals on the walls of the Hawkins room in the historic Cambridge Union building. They have become a permanent part of the building’s fabric and the society’s history.
The mural, painted in oils on the gesso-primed wall, depicts the succession of life, from creation to existence to death. It takes place across three panels, following the traditional Renaissance triptych composition of two figures on either side, usually saints, and a scene in the middle. In the first panel, the Mesopotamian deity Lilith embodies the creator, giving her ribs to incite life upon earth. In the upper middle panel, life within the earthly realm is busy, chaotic, lustful, beautiful and ecstatic. In the third panel, life has left its material attachments and returns to a universe indifferent to the moral framework of human society.
July – September 2024
450 x 630 cm
Oil on Gesso Primed Wall
October 2023 - January 2024
Bodies Past and Present was a student exhibition by the MOCA Society in collaboration with the University of Cambridges' Museum of Classical Archaeology, co-curated and directed by Connor Phillips alongside Miriam Mitchell. It was present in the cast gallery from October 2023 to January 2024.
The exhibition utilises the historical context of the gallery to explore the representation, presentation and reception of depictions of bodies from antiquity to the modern day. Furthermore, the contemporary work is entwined within the existing collection, forming a unique opportunity for conversation between the interacting modern and ancient works.
Connor's contribution to the exhibition took the form of two large oil paintings (210 x 300 cm) that respond to the Hellenistic statue, 'The Wrestlers'. By putting his own body through the experience of wrestling, the embodied sensory and emotional information gained was used to inform the compositions, building on the photographic references. The two paintings discuss the transition from Archaic to Hellenistic forms of representation by imagining how this would come to fruition within a contemporary figurative oil painting practice.
Moreover, representing the same subject matter as 'The Wrestlers' in a new medium brings into focus Kenneth Clark's distinction between 'Nude' and 'Naked'. In a setting of realistic oil painting and the context of the gallery, the figures may become naked and sexualised, revealing the homoeroticism of the subject matter. The paintings play with this dynamic.
December 2024
As part of our MFA course, Annette Harvest and I created a two-person that transformed an area of the Ruskin School of Art.
The exhibition focused on the action of painting and it’s display, offering works displayed on the traditional white walls and ones that subverted notions of value through inverting the frame and becoming wallpaper-esque. Furthermore, we sought to experiment with the space making that surrounds painting. Filling the room with carpet, hay, dramatic lighting and music, allowing the work to span all the body’s senses. To bridge the gap between the installation and paintings, we sculpted hundred of oversized metal cigarettes that adorned the walls and floor, placed precariously in the hay. This created tension through their uncanny size, underlying danger, but most significantly representing something we have bonded over.
Connor Phillips (b.2001) is a predominantly figurative oil painter with an educational background in Architecture. Prior to his MFA, his most major projects were an exhibition he organised in collaboration with the Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology and a residency at The Cambridge Union, culminating in a series of permanent murals in the building. In the summer of 2025 he completed a new set of paintings for St. John’s College, Oxford, where they are now permantly installed. Currently, he has just moved to London and is continuing to develop his practice.
Education & Awards:
2020-21 - Foundation Diploma,
Plymouth College of Art
2021-24 - BA(Hons) Architecture,
University of Cambridge
2024-25 - Masters of Fine Art,
University of Oxford
2025 - Mapleton-Bree Prize,
(Runner-up)
2025 - Artist Collecting Society,
Studio Award (Shortlisted)
Collections Holding Work:
The Cambridge Union, Cambridge
Museum of Contemporary Art, London
St. John’s College, Oxford
The Cambridge Union, Cambridge
Museum of Contemporary Art, London
St. John’s College, Oxford
Contact Details:
Email: connorharrison@live.co.uk
Instagram: @artworkconnor