Conor Ackhurst
Tayo Adekunle
Nikolaos Akritidis
Shadi Al-Atallah
Elli Antoniou
Hannah Archambault
Ellen Barratt
Ece Bayram
Alma Berrow
Stolen Besos
Johannes Bosisio
Malcolm Bradley
Kate Burling
Helen Carr
Matthew Clifton
Hoa Dung Clerget
Anaïs Comer
Frederika Dalwood
Derrelle Elijah
Jack Evans
Lucia Farrow
Simon Job
Luke Jordan
Ali Glover
Lucy Gregory
Maees Hadi
Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton
Camille Hanney
Richard Dean Hughes
Soa J. Hwang
Sophie Lourdes Knight
RedBlack D. Lawrence
Eloise Lawson
Emily Lazerwitz
Gal Leshem
Hannah Lim & Hugo Harris
Darren Lynde Mann
Catinca Malaimare
Nicholas Marschner
Giorgio van Meerwijk
Emma Louise Moore
Lucy Neish
Louise Oates
Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia
Louis Blue Newby & Laila Majid
Samuel Padfield
Anya Palamartschuk
Max Petts
Salvatore Pione
Léa Porré
Elsa Rouy
Mila Rowyszyn
Ilê Sartuzi
Chessa Subbiondo
Liberty Quinn
Fa Razavi
Conor Ackhurst works predominantly in sculpture and installation as well as video, print and performance. Ackhurst creates installations that feature assemblages of found materials framed by structures. These structures frame spaces that are typically considered 'safe' for humans, yet they have been condensed in a way that evokes a sense of tension or danger, such as the crushed interior of a car, a passageway transformed into an impossible collision of doors, or a cave narrowed to claustrophobic proportions. This simulated world-building acts as a confrontation with potential violence, presenting it as a boundary experience.
Tayo Adekunle is a British Nigerian photographer based in London. Working a lot with self-portraiture, she uses her work to explore issues surrounding race, gender and sexuality as well as racial and colonial history. Her work is centred around the reworking of historical tropes relating to the black female body, taking from contexts that include art historical paintings and sculptures as well as 19th century colonial photography. By placing historical imagery in a contemporary context, the relationship between the treatment of the black female body in the past and its treatment in the present day is explored.
Nikolaos Akritidis is a curator, artist, and geographer living and working in Brussels. His work documents urban contexts, the cultural memory carried by their inhabitants, and the histories found between layers of the built environment. With a focus on urban ecology, care, and experience of migration, Akritidis traces the coexistence of human and more-than-human lives that give breath to the city’s constant state of becoming.
Shadi Al-Atallah creates large-scale figurative paintings: the dark and dynamic figures depicted in their mixed-media work are distorted self-portraits of the artist that capture the absurdity of conflicting emotional states. Their work explores the performativity of cathartic spiritual practice by drawing connections between the Queer ballroom scene and folkloric dance traditions from African diasporic communities in the Arabian Peninsula.
Working in rapid motions and strokes, Shadi works fast to avoid their thoughts slipping, contending with their own cognition and memory. Each painting documents a single hazy moment in time, examining the space between the mundane and the spiritual.
Shadi makes use of paint to escape from the constraints of language. Painting allows them to invent genderless figures, ones that embody an ambiguity that language rarely grants. This ambiguity is used to question Shadi’s own ideas on gender and sexuality. Obscurity also allows breathing room for the viewer to connect with the artwork.
Working in rapid motions and strokes, Shadi works fast to avoid their thoughts slipping, contending with their own cognition and memory. Each painting documents a single hazy moment in time, examining the space between the mundane and the spiritual.
Shadi makes use of paint to escape from the constraints of language. Painting allows them to invent genderless figures, ones that embody an ambiguity that language rarely grants. This ambiguity is used to question Shadi’s own ideas on gender and sexuality. Obscurity also allows breathing room for the viewer to connect with the artwork.
Elli Antoniou is a London-based artist, who creates ‘metallic drawings’. Antoniou has devised a hybrid technique combining gestural drawing and industrial processes. She uses a range of abrasive tools to subtly alter the metallic surface, transforming its reflective and refractive properties to create metallic panels with ethereal imagery. This technique proposes scaleless fluid cosmoi in perpetual motion, where these ‘metallic drawings’ are activated by the environmental light.
Her practice is a meditation on screens, delving into their profound influence on our perception of time and space. She explores the vanishing present and its nature as a moment of indefinite metamorphosis. Antoniou’s narratives mirror her view on the current digital age marked by semiotic inflation; when information and images melt into pure movement, morphing into a choreography of synthesis. As her sculptures continuously regenerate under the play of light, they become fictional screens for an unfolding parallel reality, whose world she is gradually shaping.
Her practice is a meditation on screens, delving into their profound influence on our perception of time and space. She explores the vanishing present and its nature as a moment of indefinite metamorphosis. Antoniou’s narratives mirror her view on the current digital age marked by semiotic inflation; when information and images melt into pure movement, morphing into a choreography of synthesis. As her sculptures continuously regenerate under the play of light, they become fictional screens for an unfolding parallel reality, whose world she is gradually shaping.
Hannah Archambault’s installations investigate the elements lying with the invisible and the unsaid. Can sound be an ‘alluring revealer’? Intimacy, ambiguity and different systems of beliefs shape her practice. Archambault uses symbols, such as salt and hibiscus, as markers of our societies that carry personal and collective stories.
Composing environments that disturb our senses and spatial awareness, Archambault invites the viewer to trust and rely on the body's adaptation to the space. As a result, the installations build welcome both contemplation and reflection. Pursuing this quest where the personal is interwoven with the collective, her practice exists in the grey area where politics insidiously emerge from the intimate.
Composing environments that disturb our senses and spatial awareness, Archambault invites the viewer to trust and rely on the body's adaptation to the space. As a result, the installations build welcome both contemplation and reflection. Pursuing this quest where the personal is interwoven with the collective, her practice exists in the grey area where politics insidiously emerge from the intimate.
Ellen Barratt is an artist who experiments with light through photographic processes and installation. Her work explores the interplay between light, space, and perception. Through a multidisaplinary and multi-sensory body of work, she creates immersive installations that challenge viewers' perceptions of reality and conceptual prints.
Within Ece Bayram’s sculptures, the objects which have been transformed into materials have their initial meaning and purpose disrupted with subtle manipulations, which open them up to speculative narratives. The practicality of the objects being stripped off highlights their agency and their potentials. Objects that are functional are rendered unusable, thus having their initial purpose disrupted to explore their materiality and possible narratives. This disruption of constructs creates unfamiliar scenarios with familiar objects, which is followed by a new assertive reconstruction of the meaning. These scenarios and narratives can be ambiguous, free from one subjectivity and can be imposed onto the sculptures. Architectural elements and familiar objects such as shoes, tiles and parquet flooring come together to create fictive spaces, in which they humorously play with push and pull of desire, the interchange of real images and constructed images, the pristine and the abject.
Ceramist Alma Berrow is known for transforming everyday disposable items, like cigarette butts and fruit peels, into intricately detailed sculptural works. With a background as a pastry chef, Berrow applies her culinary precision to her art, crafting pieces that capture the ephemeral nature of daily life and human sentiment. Her work is noted for its playful yet poignant commentary on consumption and waste.
Stolen Besos is a photographer based in Los Angeles and New York. Through her work, she creates an elusive, seductive world in which she romanticises the landscapes of her upbringing. In it, the girls are rough, soft, and untouchable and post-irony femininity rules.
In his paintings, Johannes Bosisio explores the relationships between mankind and machine and the transgressions of dualism such as the separation of: figure and ground, body and mind, material and Immaterial, organic and inorganic, animals and machines. His work celebrates transformation, freedom, desire, and hybridization by depicting organic bodies fused with technological prostheses. Through his use of once smooth and shiny chrome surfaces that are now scratched, rough, and alive, Bosisio reconsiders our relationship with technology and its impact on our lives and identities. His approach is informed by the work of authors Donna Haraway and Andy Clark, and his art challenges traditional boundaries and creates new possibilities by merging organic and technological forms.
In his practice Bradley uses photography, video, text and installation to create mixed media collages. He uses collage as a form of visual note taking to blend research and autobiographical material. The diaristic elements in his work acknowledge the inconsistencies of his own position and aim to create a vocabulary for the wordless parts of lived experience.
Kate Burling is an artist from south-east London, whose devotional paintings dissolve the self into its fluid surroundings. Where hands melt into furniture and swaddled torsos float like apparitions, Burling’s phantasmagoria of fleshy forms unfold, weaving and gliding.
Burling describes her approach to materiality as bodily. In recent work, the artist applies paint with her fingers and the palms of her hands. She uses the texture of woven canvas to rub pigment beneath the surface, bringing her subjects out of focus. Where edges soften, the artist reveals luminous under-paintings which form hazy halos around her central subjects. The results are paintings with unmistakeable presence, vibrating with heated tension and dissipating explosive energy from their core.
Burling describes her approach to materiality as bodily. In recent work, the artist applies paint with her fingers and the palms of her hands. She uses the texture of woven canvas to rub pigment beneath the surface, bringing her subjects out of focus. Where edges soften, the artist reveals luminous under-paintings which form hazy halos around her central subjects. The results are paintings with unmistakeable presence, vibrating with heated tension and dissipating explosive energy from their core.
Helen Carr explores concepts of social class, diet and superstition. As a working-class artist, she celebrates her heritage with work inspired by folk art and her family. The stimulus for a lot of Carr’s work is the highly decorative 17thC Lambeth Delftware posset pot used to administer the tonic posset in times of plague (familiar?!) and Delftware political and domestic ware. Posset was also prescribed by local women thought to have magical abilities and as a remedy for flagging libidos and ageing. In these uncertain, contemporary times Carr too is drawn to Internet driven ‘well-being’ cures, fortune telling and portents. To achieve the detailed surfaces on her sculptures, she repurpose ubiquitous ceramic objects, such as handles, spouts and knobs. They have intrinsic comedy appeal and highlight her love of a pun and sexual innuendo.
Matthew Clifton is an artist based between Leeds and London whose drawing
and painting practice combines contemporary imagery and historical motifs.
Whether painting, craft, installation or performance, each work reflects a transformation of the objects of Hoa Dung Clerget’s French-Vietnamese heritage. It allows her to take on a narrative dimension on the themes of the domestic and displacement. Clerget’s works affirm their materiality through gestures borrowed from everyday life, the ones of the women in her family and community.
Each installation/performance aims to create with the public an instantaneous community allowing to reverse some situation of displacement encountered by the immigrants. All these mundane objects or everyday gestures Clergent uses in her practice are linked to the concept of Home and create a bridge between the different places (Vietnam, France and the exhibition space in London) and the different people (the Vietnamese community, the artist and the viewer) giving substance to the stories.
Each installation/performance aims to create with the public an instantaneous community allowing to reverse some situation of displacement encountered by the immigrants. All these mundane objects or everyday gestures Clergent uses in her practice are linked to the concept of Home and create a bridge between the different places (Vietnam, France and the exhibition space in London) and the different people (the Vietnamese community, the artist and the viewer) giving substance to the stories.
Anaïs Comer is a London-based artist spanning sculpture, installation and
painting, thematically situated between nature and culture, public and private, tradition and
experiment.
Frederika Dalwood lives and works in London. With her practice dedicated to
video and digital-based media, her works echo tropes of internet culture and evoke 21st
century humour and satire. Blending virtual with real, Dalwood plays with the possibilities of
manipulating digital images. Dalwood’s practice compiles of ultimately over-stimulating synthesisations which suggest the atmosphere of an absurd and weird realm that borders on the irrational and surreal.
Derrelle Elija’s work illuminates the grey areas of vasts amounts of information, as he overlaps gestural and mechanical processes. By developing works that transcend mediums, and re-contextualises how information is communicated. Starting with a function free mentality, an intrinsic overlay of research into early civilisations,
universal language, traditional/forgotten processes, art history and contemporary news allows his work to start with an investment into investigation and ideation.
universal language, traditional/forgotten processes, art history and contemporary news allows his work to start with an investment into investigation and ideation.
Jack Evans is interested in ideas of aspiration and masculinity, drawing motifs from the aesthetic ideas of ‘luxury’, and the people (men) who reinforce it. Through recreation and imitation, his work draws from the semiotics of architecture and taste, ranging through classicism, brutalism and minimalism, through to the more obscure symbols of aspiration revived from his Nineties childhood in the midlands, Evans’ work questions and examines the ideas of form and beauty, especially in regard to the places we occupy and inhabit, whilst alluding to what may be the banal and farcical nature of it all.
Lucia Farrow’s practice relies on intuition and sorcery within the precarious ceramic process. Lucia views each firing as a rebirth, in which she and the ceramics are metamorphosed in the unpredictable alchemical process through a form of animism. Lucia is involved with creating ‘fossils’ of photographic images through ceramics, alluding to a personal archeology similar to a blog or diary entry.
Working with various combinations of materials and techniques such as painting, photography and installation, Simon intends to subvert the mediums he uses and put into question the validity of those practices whilst exploring the boundaries of their conventional usage. His subjects range from environmental studies to more direct investigations into materiality and media.
The work is simultaneously characterised by both an intuitive handling of materials and what could be described as a hands-off approach that employs the use of found elements and systematic working methods that allow for a certain level of chance and detachment from the artistic process. However, the artists hand is never entirely absent and its often when these two approaches converge, the systematic and the intuitive, that the work becomes active
The work is simultaneously characterised by both an intuitive handling of materials and what could be described as a hands-off approach that employs the use of found elements and systematic working methods that allow for a certain level of chance and detachment from the artistic process. However, the artists hand is never entirely absent and its often when these two approaches converge, the systematic and the intuitive, that the work becomes active
Luke Jordan speculates upon the ontological relationship between the human and non-human, materialist and non-materialist metaphysics and beyond, through the psycho-physical process of creation, immersion, and fatal meetings between objects / entities, approaching ontological destabilisation and disintegration. He conducts direct experiments, merging art forms within sites of performance and installation, which are conceived as laboratories, testing grounds for the poetic inter-relationship of entities, and their spectres; be they, a human, dirt, words, a mattress, a sculpture, a room, a sound etc.
Ali Glover is a London-based artist whose site-based interventions consider how architectural infrastructures can shift aspects of behaviour and psychological patterns. His installation acts as an intermediary or side space, like that of a page margin, where idle thoughts get passed from the periphery into the main. He is interested in how forms of language (architectural, image or sonic) used in those in-between moments can lead to something from being overlooked to visible.
Glover makes reference to particular aspects of the space by borrowing familiar or institutional elements such as the floor tiles, security lights and exposed stud walls. Articulated through field recordings of hauntings in urban environments, he collapses moments from these actualities into cerebral spaces or daydreams.
Glover makes reference to particular aspects of the space by borrowing familiar or institutional elements such as the floor tiles, security lights and exposed stud walls. Articulated through field recordings of hauntings in urban environments, he collapses moments from these actualities into cerebral spaces or daydreams.
Lucy Gregory is a British artist based in London and Buckinghamshire. Working in sculpture, photography and drawing, she creates immersive, large-scale, kinetic systems of objects or environments that play with themes of agency and materiality and flatness. Fractured sets or props are activated: the inhuman and the human intertwined in a bizarre and comic realisation. Images are extruded and re-contextualised back into uncanny objects from the flatness of the screen, creating surreal collages that complicate a relation between materiality and virtuality.
Maees Hadi is an architectural designer, researcher and a filmmaker. She has a multidisciplinary practice and engages in research topics such as political identity, representation and the migrant subject which has developed from her own studies and experiences. Maees was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1993, however grew up in Sweden and later moved to London where she started her academic studies and later work.
With an emphasis on the transformative and alchemical properties of materials, Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton's practice is grounded in a queer feminist critique of land ownership, bodies, and desires. Through the lens of non-linear and intergenerational time, loops and cycles find their way into Halliwell-Sutton's work, dissolving its meaning within process, and seeing how sculpture can embody and invoke feeling.
Working through ceramics, sculpture and installation Camilla’s practice explores themes of time, sexuality, cultural identity and the corporeal, often referencing the body in both humorous and challenging ways.By subverting traditional, genteel crafts she attempts to transgress and contemplate conventional modes of femininity, deconstructing archaic identities and rebuilding new figures from the detritus of the past. By materializing the familiar in an unfamiliar context Camilla stimulates our ability to rethink our relationship towards objects, threatening the natural order and toying with the tensions that lie between beauty and repulsion, curiosity and discomfort, desire and disgust.
For the last two years, Hugo Harris’ practice has involved a continual exploration into the ways of depicting the weight of the human body. In particular, how the subtle alteration of pose and position can manipulate and displace parts of our muscle and flesh. Focusing on parts of the body that display this pressure or movement of mass has resulted in a series of fragmented figures. These fragments record an action, a physical modification that is accentuated by the figure’s incomplete form. Isolating these elements draws attention to the way living flesh reacts when interacting with a solid object. The body’s form is forced to give, and it is this activity and surface tension that Harris wishes to exhibit in his work.
Richard Dean Hughes is an artist based in Manchester, known for his exploration of the slippery relationship between reality and the realm of the hypothetical. Hughes often revisits and describes a personal and internal space, taking artifacts, feelings and ‘visuals’ from imagined scenarios, bringing them into real time through the manipulation of material and collisional objects. His sculptures question the idea of plausibility, they question their own existence, acting as a representational display of the space in which Hughes is trying to describe.
Suggestion and the idea of plausibility is central to Hughes’s practice, repeated motifs and a collisional approach create unordinary but persuasive coalescence. He theoretically and conceptually slices up the time-based elements of an object, then hypothetically stitches them back together; treating the concept and history of an object as something that can be manipulated to create a new scenario, extract meaning and tell a new story.
Hughes incorporates a wide range of traditional processes alongside new technologies, and an ever-growing array of materials from resin, metal and paint to dust and newspaper. Using small tools to carve certain works, then stereo-lithography to produce others; like his work, Hughes shifts and morphs, reacting to the concept, and the language of generated ideas. Hughes is able to draw from his material repertoire to continue an exploration of duality, the materiality and concepts of his work belong in two places at one time, can be 2 things at the same time; both hot and cold, utilitarian and absurd.
Suggestion and the idea of plausibility is central to Hughes’s practice, repeated motifs and a collisional approach create unordinary but persuasive coalescence. He theoretically and conceptually slices up the time-based elements of an object, then hypothetically stitches them back together; treating the concept and history of an object as something that can be manipulated to create a new scenario, extract meaning and tell a new story.
Hughes incorporates a wide range of traditional processes alongside new technologies, and an ever-growing array of materials from resin, metal and paint to dust and newspaper. Using small tools to carve certain works, then stereo-lithography to produce others; like his work, Hughes shifts and morphs, reacting to the concept, and the language of generated ideas. Hughes is able to draw from his material repertoire to continue an exploration of duality, the materiality and concepts of his work belong in two places at one time, can be 2 things at the same time; both hot and cold, utilitarian and absurd.
Soa J. Hwang is a British-Korean artist based in London. Her work explores our emotion, the illusion, the fallibility of images and our slippery relationship with reality, virtuality and the truth, She utilises computational technology as a hybrid tool to paint with and explores the new possibilities of painting. Extending the surface of the painting into a virtual interface, She seeks to reinvent an experience of painting beyond tradition and embracing it as an evolutionary medium.
Sophie Lourdes Knight's work attempts to disrupt the hierarchical economy of value within the world of objects. By placing overlooked, everyday items alongside spectacular things of beauty she establishes them as on a level plain; both objects are prescribed as having the same inherent value. They transcend their physical limitations and rise to become akin to religious idols or spiritual totems.
RedBlack D. Lawrence’s practice responds to a personal and ancestral history through a psychological lens. He intertwines the personal and the political, drawing on his family history such as his grandfather being a shaman from Jamaica belonging to Afro-Caribbean religion which includes movements such as Vodou, Obeah and Santeria, and Lawrence’s mental health. At the heart of his work is a questing for the demonic.
Her work has previously revolved around performance, video and sound, but drawing now forms a central part of her practice. Her practice explores the rich temporal textures and possibilities contained within states or sites of aimlessness or not-knowing, and she uses her work to reflect upon and point to the value of disorientation, indecision, and absurdity in a world whose conventional modes of communication tend to privilege positions of clarity and certitude over positions of ambivalence and doubt.
Emily Lazerwitz is an artist and mathematician. For Lazerwitz a myth is defined as a complex widely believed story that is inherently false yet explains phenomena that are inexplicable in nature. Her work tries to untangle this paradox by looking into structures that use a mythological system of logic to function. She takes complex qualitative and quantitative data from these systems and transforms it into simple infographic textile forms. She also explores the relationship between belief and truth.
Gal Leshem is a London based artist and facilitator. Her work is developed through a site specific and research-based approach, often engaging with heritage sites, objects and plants embedded in myth, memory and folklore.
Hannah Lim’s work responds to her cultural identity and experience. As a person of mixed Singaporean and British heritage both her research and practice has come to engage with the colonial connotations of the relationship between the East and the West. These connotations are most evident in themes such as Orientalism and its relationship to Chinoiserie; an 18th-century aesthetic trend in which elements of Chinese design were recreated in relation to European aesthetics and tastes. Lim attempts to re-imagine and reclaim ideas and designs associated with the Chinoiserie, which have in the past had problematic colonial undertones. Cultural designs are shared as opposed to appropriated, it is no longer about one culture being moulded to the demands of another.
Darren Lynde Mann grew up in the small village of
Monewden in Suffolk. Estranged from his adoptive
parents at an early age, a grey area in the benefits
system forced him to leave school without completing
his A-Levels. Having secured a studio space on an old
American Air Force base in Suffolk, Lynde Mann was
able to start experimenting with large canvases. Inspired
by the Renaissance painters as well as the likes of Francis
Bacon and Lucian Freud, Lynde Mann painted on
stretched calico, using charcoal and emulsion.
Performing alongside anthropomorphised technologies, Catinca Malaimare’s choreography takes the form of performance, sculpture, audio and film, revealing our intimate relationship with technological tools. Using poetic, spiritual gestures, Malaimare facilitates ephemeral, fleeting moments which acknowledges our technological co-dependence.
Nicholas Marschner lives and works in Berlin, painting enigmatic scenes
that occupy ethereal space and capture the feelings of lost and found, somewhere between
the periphery of collective memories and the uncharted territories of the night.
Giorgio Van Meerwijk’s sculptures are often made from natural materials that at times are buried and then dragged from the earth like some ancient relic. His work considers ideas of liquidity, transformation, reception and gathering.
Emma Louise Moore is an Irish artist. An important method of research for Moore
is the orchestration of investigative group performances. She takes the mentality of a crowd as her point of departure. Investigating their movements, her works call for an awareness of our complacent tendency to follow others, becoming ontological refugees, distanced from our individuality. In her recent choreographed piece, participants form swarms, guided loosely by simple rules. Moore‘s
art is one of disclosure, using life events as the inspiration for works. She furthers her research through collaborations with the imperial college of science and the creation of investigative performance pieces.
Lucy Neish paints on homemade canvases constructed from remnants of past paintings, working with their previous history to coax out new artworks; a cat dead in grass; a goldfinch wrapped in kitchen towel; a twinkling disco ball. Working from found imagery - film screenshots, pictures circulated on WhatsApp groups, photos inadvertently captured and buried deep in a phone’s camera roll - she goes through a process of gathering and collating, creating cinematic collections that remove a subject from its original context and distorts their original intention. Painting these images with a monochromatic or sepia palette, they are unified by an implied gaze and evoke feelings of nostalgia. Far from rose-tinted, however, Neish’s nostalgia is murky, muddy and unsettling.
Louise Oates's research-led practice entwines industries, bodies, and planetary processes, whereby metabolisms coalesce into material narratives. Utilising aesthetics of archives, displays, and archaeological tools of measure to imbue a notion of authoritative knowledge, she continuously investigates the space between chaos and stasis, gesturing towards a reevaluation of human centrism and awaiting a reassembly in light of a new categorisation.
Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia is based in Glasgow and works with
installations of oil paintings on paper that explore the dynamic between the real and the
fiction. Onwochei-Garcia’s installations of oil paintings on paper explore how the dynamics between people are shaped by what appears to be real and the possibilities of fiction. Her interest in this disjunction is inspired by the mestiza experience. The sense of never being aligned, being confronted with an unauthorised fictional self, and those conflicting moments of an existence “in-between“ reflects the reality of being mestiza. She works to enact a form of M.Lugone’s “world-travelling” to overcome forms of arrogant perception that produce ignorance about others.
The space of seeing is a grounding principle of Onwochei-Garcia’s practice: the paper paintings extend and restrict that space. With a focus on disrupting the spectator’s privilege, embodied in the space for observing, her installation aim is to accustom its viewer to the feeling of existing in the “in-between”. By turning paintings into structures, that refuse to display themselves and frustrate the looking process as you have to twist, turn and rotate to see them, she intends to upset the privilege of spectating.
Onwochei-Garcia entangles psychological, literary and historical analysis of literature to play out refuted experiences and challenge the idea of a singular narrative. The characters in the paintings are created by collaging her drawings of art historical, film and popular images. The layers of paint and narratives intertwine myths and maybes––stories emerge and retreat.
The space of seeing is a grounding principle of Onwochei-Garcia’s practice: the paper paintings extend and restrict that space. With a focus on disrupting the spectator’s privilege, embodied in the space for observing, her installation aim is to accustom its viewer to the feeling of existing in the “in-between”. By turning paintings into structures, that refuse to display themselves and frustrate the looking process as you have to twist, turn and rotate to see them, she intends to upset the privilege of spectating.
Onwochei-Garcia entangles psychological, literary and historical analysis of literature to play out refuted experiences and challenge the idea of a singular narrative. The characters in the paintings are created by collaging her drawings of art historical, film and popular images. The layers of paint and narratives intertwine myths and maybes––stories emerge and retreat.
Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby’s collaborative practice is
influenced by their mutual interest in subcultural spaces such as science-fiction, cult
cinema, fetish and leather subcultures and pornography as well as more scientific jargon
such as zoological and marine photography.
Sameul Padfield‘s
work responds to the image, its hypnotic qualities, and its power to elicit stereotypic behaviour. Pieces playfully exist between sculpture and an expanded field of painting. His work positions itself in relation to the image as a static yet volatile state of becoming. There is an attempt to find stability within this precariousness. Through the use of textures and membranes, plays of opacities and transparencies, the work settles in the threshold. There is a mistrust of the image as presented by the screen, but there is also a fatigue from the constant withdrawal. There is banality in the digital sublime, but a banality that is at the same time irresistible and anxiety inducing. An urgency for a critique of the image presents itself within a culture of optics and performativity, and when the images' support structures are obscured or seemingly invisible.
Anya Palamartschuk is a non-binary multi-disciplinary visual artist from the UK, Spain and the Ukraine. Their practice centres on creating projection mazes that combine installation and imagery for an audience to walk within. Playing with scale and gravity, these spaces transform 2D audio-visuals into 3D labyrinths that abstract the rules of the world in order to invite new realities, championing queerness, re-wilding the body, offering spaces of healing in nature and allowing an audience to forget the world behind them. Ultimately, their goal is to create accessible art that a range of audiences can interact with; as with storytelling, the most personal experiences can also be the most universally impactful, and Palamartschuk‘s works explore this connection that we all have. At the moment, Palamartschuk is using photographs of trees to create unique embroidery designs for clothing and textiles. Palamartschuk uses coding and digital processes to think about the future of drawing and create one-of-a-kind customised pieces.
Max Petts lives and works in London. They recently graduated from the Goldsmiths MFA and from Chelsea College of Art in 2012. Their practice deals with the complexity of looking and making while seeking to examine their place in the world and the specific set of privileges and penalties they have inherited. Working across disciplines (drawing, painting, writing, finding) they focus on the interplay of images and objects and the relationships that allow meaning to develop. Relationships between bodies and materials, facts and fictions. They consider their practice as an awareness building exercise; a way to posit contradiction
Salvatore Pione creates works that contend with grotesque theatricality, camp and remembrance themes. He is strongly influenced by the customs and traditions of his land, Sicily, and often the places and experiences of his childhood serve as inspiration for the realisation of his works. Yet, a queer narrative pulsates through the stories and symbols, whereby the rampant machismo inflected within the strong Catholic culture of Italy is thwarted and disrupted by the depiction of hyper-masculine figures engaging in homoerotic scenes, with feminised features in his work.
Léa Porré’s research-led practice investigates cyclical time through the interrelations of memory, history and myth. Deep-mapping historical and sacred sites, she re-imagines them through 3D-worldbuilding, saturated with impossible encounters and transhistorical visions. Porré’s physical/in-situ works – that span across video, installation, sculpture and framed painting – take place as mnemonic installations, where her labyrinthian sets are reminiscent of video game quests, in a constant interplay of the digital and the physical realms.
Elsa Rouy is a London-based artist whose work is characterised by intense psychological depth. Describing her work as “a visual portrayal of abstruse emotions”, Rouy draws on her personal experience as a woman. Her work translates the concept of the grotesque in the visual, abject disparities of perspective within which human bodies are intertwined in contortions of pleasure and suffering.
Chessa Subbiondo is a photographer and creative director based out of Los Angeles. She focuses on the art of “amateur” image making with staged concepts of emotion and domesticity. Placing subjects in the taboo and working for Magazines such as The Face, Interview and Office, Chessa shows the beauty in normality through her editorial and personal work.
Mila Rowyszyn’s work holds up a distorted mirror to the slew of real and unreal images we are bombarded with online daily. As it becomes more disorienting to differentiate an altered image from its original file, Mila exacerbates this through purposeful deception. While her uncanny images posted online seamlessly mesh with the performance of blogging we know so well, Mila’s images command a new life in which the internet acts as a stage. Her theatre channels the very moment of a hyper-realistic dream where you realise that everything that’s occurred is in fact not real or has never happened. It’s a double entendre or just a selfie of a girl you will never meet.
To access the ungraspable expanse of Antarctica Liberty Quinn locates herself within Google Earth, only to find the imagery fractured and disrupted by the piecing together of information. A screenshot is a purely digital capture, pixels are held still like a photograph within the screen. Quinn use satellite images to investigate the breakup and disruptions in technology at the forefront of climate change
Fa Razavi lives and works in London, UK. Razavi explores themes of displacement and memory through film, performance, sculpture, and painting. Her works delve into complex concepts of freedom, loss, and belonging, evoking a profound emotional response from viewers.
Recalling early memories of finding solace in light during times of distress, Charlie Russell examines the disparities between natural and artificial illumination. Converting organic shapes into indeterminate forms she proposes alternative living spaces, where domesticity meets claustrophobia.
Ilê Sartuzi lives between London and São Paulo. Working in sculptural
objects, mapped video projections, mechatronic installations and theatrical plays, his
practice is speculative of post-anthropocenic futures. Sartuzi‘s work brings together technological apparatus – from simple motors and electronical circuits to machine learning and AI – and a theatrical atmosphere to create mechanisms that follow different internal logics. The instability and flaws in these fragile machines add some kind of personality to their performances.
Victor Seaward’s oeuvre touches on histories of medicine, trade
and industrialisation through digitally rendered objects, weaving narratives through
commonplace objects and organic forms. Seaward's work is rooted in materiality, technological manufacture, and the agency of objects. Mining a broad spectrum of material culture, Seaward juxtaposes utilitarian materials such as concrete and steel, with high-tech manufactured components and objects of historical significance, in order to investigate authorship, commodity and the fluid nature of time and permanence.
Gillies Adamson Semple is a Scottish born, London-based artist and curator working with modes of display and apparatus to build and present visual syntax. Often isolating moments from conversation and systems of communication; phrases, images and diagrams become repositioned and re-evaluated within constructed frameworks, attempting to give a different voice for material with ‘real-world’ provenance. His work looks at repositioning histories as counter-weights to nostalgia, drawing from moments of personal encounter and broader events as material to become reframed within his own visual language.
Ding Shilun harnesses his heritage, current events and a global history of art to create large and detailed pictorial works depicting the absurdity of daily life. His unique concurrence of the mythological, the historical and the everyday allow the emergence of an imaginary world with a representation of himself within our seemingly homogenous society. Rooted in pictorial references such as Gustav Klimt or Kai Althoff intertwined with interpretations of Chinese literature - namely a collection of Chinese legends, translated as ‘In Search of the Supernatural,’ written between 220-589 AD - Shilun’s characters inhabit imaginary worlds that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion. The precision of the details is used to contrast the different textures found in the paintings, sometimes resembling watercolor, as well as playing on a combination of co-existing perspectives, which question the distinction between real and surreal.
Katrina is an Australian artist based in London. Her research fixates on questioning the representation of photography, and it’s meaning as object and collective form. She is interested in consumption, and making connections between food and images; their digestion and representation, source and distribution, and entwining as daily process. Katrina’s work manifests through her making process. Working with or without a camera, she utilises found or expired paper stocks, practices hand printing and retouching, facilitates chemigrams, works with metal and bookbinding, and builds pinhole cameras (placing them covertly in public). Found material is often her starting point, and can range from objects, X-rays, 16mm film and food waste, to discarded photographic materials and negatives found at commercial labs in London.
Virginie Tan is a French of Sino-Cambodian descent artist and designer based in London. She works across the physical and the virtual, with elements of interactivity, video, sound and poetry.Her practice is anchored within the dynamics of technology and society, between the technological sublime and the daze it puts us through. There is a certain absurdity that runs throughout her works, highlighting the functional and dysfunctional of technology’s usage. This is translated by interactive installations and videos, hijacking the known codes of digital interfaces.
Emma Tod is a London-based painter and a lecturer at Central St.
Martins, London. Tod’s work explores the remediation of paint in a period of digital image circulation, with its accelerating speeds of transmission and shared attention deficit. Works negotiate this shift through stillness and ambiguity. Peripheral events, fleeting moments, and chance encounters are brought to the centre creating new imaginary territories. Visual fragments taken from the internet, TV, and art history are playfully recombined and erased.
Unyimeabasi Udoh lives and works in London. Their work across
media—print, drawing, sculpture, and installation—centres on legibility, the void, and the
construction of meaning.
Hannah Walton is a Namibian-South African artist and researcher based in London. Through attention to form and materiality, her practice is concerned with embodiment, an experience of space and the everyday processes of meaning-making. She works across sculpture, installation, sound and performance. She hosts a monthly open mic for sound art and experimental music in South London, expanding her practice into a collective invocation of chaos and receptivity.
Maayan Sophia Weisstub is an interdisciplinary artist, graduate of the Royal College of Art. Weisstub’s practice uses various mediums, including kinetic sculpture, collage, drawing and video. Her works range from humour-inflected collages of human bodies to conceptual installations reflecting on time and mortality. Primarily self-taught, a fact reflected in the scope and diversity of her work, which evokes thoughts and feelings across different topics, ranging from collective cultural injustice to personal and intimate psychological self-reflection. Ultimately, question the feelings and ideas that constitute the human experience. Maayan primarily explores and challenges the banal with sensitivity, vulnerability, and audacity.
Emily Woolley is a London-based sculptor and installation artist. Through her practice she is developing a unique and refined material language, combining materials that can slump and hold shape simultaneously to create sculptures that resist preconceived notions of materiality – softness holds weight; hardness trembles. Human in scale, her work concerns the meeting of bodies and the exchanges that happen within that moment. Touch informs and activates her sculpture. Some work, cast flat, gains form through an intimate process of bending, often taking shapes from parts of the artist’s own anatomy – some public, some more private. At the same time, Woolley explores the effect of presence, both current and past. The proximity of an observer can induce movement. Past interactions are suggested with texture and imprint.
Scott Young is interested in the strange and uncanny relationships we project onto images and objects. His paintings are a contemporary re-envisioning of still life and vanitas, where objects and motifs with contentious social significance are carefully placed into coded dialogues.