Deal of the Day-Alexandra Heybourne
The Art of PR returned to London’s Coningsby Gallery last month with renewed momentum and a clear purpose: to reveal the creative depth thriving within the UK public relations community. The live showcase gathered practitioners whose day jobs in communications run in parallel with an often-unseen studio practice—resulting in a dynamic mix of media, methods, and perspectives. Missed the gallery? You can still explore selected works on The Occhi Contemporary Art website until October 15th.
Among the exhibition’s compelling voices is photographer Alexandra Heybourne. With more than two decades across in-house roles and agencies—and currently a director at a major firm—Alexandra also co-founded PR Mums and serves on the Greater London CIPR committee. Her professional life is rooted in clarity, advocacy, and audience insight; her photography channels those same instincts into images that find significance in the everyday.
Alexandra’s lens is drawn to two magnetic poles: structure and connection. In one direction, she re-reads brutalist architecture—tilting the frame to discover new geometries, isolating concrete planes until they read as sculpture, letting shadow lines become compositional punctuation. In the other, she turns toward people: fleeting gestures in a crowd, the electricity of proximity, the moment just before two gazes meet. The juxtaposition is deliberate. Hard edges and human softness. Mass and movement. The city is both a grid and gathering place.
Her approach privileges perspective and patience. She waits for the angle where a façade sheds its heaviness and becomes rhythm; for the breath in a crowd when a story reveals itself in a single glance or hand on a shoulder. Colour is used sparingly—often yielding to tonal nuance—so that light and texture carry meaning. Even in her more graphic studies, there’s an undercurrent of warmth: an insistence that the built world is not a backdrop but an active participant in how we live together.
What makes Alexandra’s contribution to Art of PR resonate is the continuity between her communications practice and her art. She frames, edits, and elevates until the essential signal emerges. Her photographs ask us to look again—at buildings we pass without seeing, at moments of connection we too easily overlook—and to find, in the ordinary, the architecture of feeling.
Art of PR’s mission is to spotlight creativity within PR, and Alexandra Heybourne exemplifies that mission with quiet authority. Her work suggests a simple, generous proposition: meaning is everywhere, if we change our angle and give it time.
Visit the Occhi Contemporary Art website to see a selection of works from some of the participating artists.
https://occhicontemporary.org/online-gallery/
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