This July, the sacred stillness of Fitzrovia Chapel has become the setting for a journey into the unseen.
With Supernatural Tendencies, artist and filmmaker Charlotte Colbert transforms the historic chapel into an immersive realm where myth, memory and the subconscious converge, inviting visitors to cross the threshold between the everyday and the imagined.
Running from 1–9 July 2026, the exhibition continues Colbert’s exploration of the symbolic landscapes that shape human experience. Drawing on folklore, dreams, archetypes and collective memory, Supernatural Tendencies unfolds as a meditation on the stories that reside beneath consciousness, quietly influencing how we understand ourselves and the world around us.
For Colbert, imagination is far more than a creative tool – it is the force through which reality itself is formed.
Marta Buso
“Collective imagination is the basis of the structures we live in and we can’t let those be taken away from us. We have to imagine our own futures, not let them be imagined for us.”
This belief sits at the heart of her practice. Through sculpture, film and installation, Colbert investigates the hidden narratives that underpin contemporary life, encouraging audiences to reconsider the assumptions, myths and inherited beliefs that shape their experience of the world.
Those themes find a natural home within Fitzrovia Chapel. Rich in symbolism and history, the chapel stands as one of London’s most enchanting sacred landmarks. Adorned with marble, mosaic and gold, it remains a rare sanctuary in the heart of the city – a place where history and imagination meet, and where the boundaries between the earthly and the dreamlike gently blur.
Long associated with healing, reflection and spiritual contemplation, the chapel provides an evocative backdrop for Colbert’s exploration of liminal spaces and inner transformation. Visitors are invited to wander through a dreamscape where familiar narratives dissolve and reassemble, revealing hidden connections between the personal and the universal, the ancient and the contemporary.
Throughout the exhibition, symbols emerge and recur like fragments of a collective dream, inviting interpretation while resisting fixed meaning. This fascination with symbolism draws heavily from folklore and fairy tales, which Colbert views not as children’s stories but as repositories of cultural wisdom.
“Fairy tales feel like narratives of our universal unconscious, in a similar way to tarot, symbols and archetypes.”
The exhibition’s title, Supernatural Tendencies, hints at this intersection between the rational and the mysterious. Rather than offering an escape from reality, Colbert invites visitors to explore the invisible forces that influence it – from inherited stories and cultural myths to personal memories and subconscious desires.
A specially commissioned soundscape by musician Birdy deepens the exhibition’s immersive atmosphere. Moving between reverie and awakening, the composition creates an emotional landscape that complements the visual works and heightens the sense of entering another realm. Together, sound and sculpture create moments of stillness and reflection, encouraging visitors to slow down and engage with their own inner worlds.
While the scale and setting may differ from Colbert’s previous work, the questions at the heart of her practice remain remarkably consistent: how do stories shape reality? What hidden narratives govern our lives? And what futures become possible when we dare to imagine differently?
For Colbert, the answer begins with imagination: “What you think, what you dream, what you imagine has power to change the world.”
Marta Buso
At a time when technological, political and environmental change can make the future feel increasingly predetermined, her work argues for the importance of retaining agency over our collective imagination.
“Surrealism, especially as public art, creates a glitch in the matrix,” she says. “A moment of pause where we can re-imagine the structures and the world around us.”
For Colbert, these moments of disruption carry a profound social value.
“If public art can make us look up, celebrate chance encounters, facilitate conversations amongst strangers, that is the most wonderful and magical thing to me. For when two strangers meet, a world of possibility opens up.”
At Fitzrovia Chapel, Colbert offers no definitive conclusions. Instead, she opens a doorway. Beyond it lies a world of symbols, dreams and forgotten myths – a place where imagination becomes a form of alchemy, where stories reveal hidden truths, and where, as Colbert reminds us, the more impossible it seems to reimagine the future, the more essential it becomes.
Supernatural Tendencies runs at Fitzrovia Chapel from 1–9 July 2026. See more at charlottecolbert.com
