‘CHEAP LABOUR’ was shaped by a recent trip to Argentina which illustrated the realities of life within a country experiencing an annual inflation rate rise that has hit it’s highest level since 1991, stoking a painful cost-of living crisis and pushing poverty levels past 40% in the South American County.

This is by no means limited to Argentina with cost-of- living crisis’s affecting the U.K, energy and food price hikes across Europe and high profile labour disputes in both England and America, thus seemingly pointing to an inflection point in terms of labour and wealth distribution and a societal questioning of systems of hierarchy.

‘CHEAP LABOUR’ features works economically produced with found or waste materials, works that have an inherent collapse or instability built into them and works that challenge embedded value systems or ways of production.

The exhibition will also act as a cultural exchange, with curator Leo Babsky bringing the work of five Argentinian artists to London (Guillermina Baiguera, Santiago Delfino, Sofía Donovan, Iván Enquin and Luciana Rondolini) to exhibit alongside Paul Emmanuel (UK), Jessie Henson (USA), Holly Hooper (UK) and James Lomax (UK).

Artists:

Guillermina Baiguera (Argentina), Santiago Delfino (Argentina), Sofía Donovan (Argentina), Paul Emmanuel (UK), Iván Enquin (Argentina), Jessie Henson (USA), Holly Hooper (UK), James Lomax (UK) & Luciana Rondolini (Argentina)

Private View; 14th March 6 - 8pm.

Exhibition runs until April 6th.

Opening hours; Wed - Friday 11 - 6pm, Sat 12 - 5pm.

STRUCTURAL DAMAGE

Structural Damage is an architectural terminology to indicate a flaw in the integrity of a building, caused by weather, poor planning, lack of maintenance, or deliberate action.

Works in this exhibition adopt the above expression to indicate their response to these fractures in the material structures and immaterial systems we interact with on a daily basis.

Artists in Structural Damage seek to find agency in exploiting the fissures that they confront in their experience, either interrogating, exploding, inhabiting or exposing these faults.

Artists:

ZOMMER

I’m for truth, no matter who told it. I’m for justice, no matter who promoted it. I’m an anarchist, any type of anarchist. I spent 3 years making a lot of work in response to a protest that happened 12 years ago, when people in China took to the streets against the expansion of a large local refinery. Archives, publications, moving images, sculptures, maps... I've done everything I can do to make the protest visible. Now I've got all these documents on one website. It's more like a journey. Unfortunately, nothing has changed because of my work.

GIULIA FASSONE

In the era of Techno-feudalism, what is being harvested and who gets to consume it? A peek into Giulia Fassone’s tools cabinet reveals a bizarre collection of loaded objects: a hammer, a sickle, a scythe, a dildo – among others. These ceramic ‘tools’ draw a historical and conceptual parallel between the proto-capitalism of the Middle Ages and the contemporary idea of Techno-feudalism.

What are the current trajectories and intersections between labour, leisure, luxury and pleasure? What is their currency? Through the restitution of materiality to an increasingly abstract and immaterial world, these Tools pose a need to bring agency back in everyone’s hands.

LOUIS O’CONNOR

Tied to the land, the farmer and the farmed play out the cyclical monotony of the harvest. Lives entwine through the twist of barbed wire and the bramble of hedgerow.

This painting presented by Louis O’Connor explores the relational oddities of agricultural life, assessing the assumed dynamics of labour and control.

XIQI ZHU

Inspired by a childhood immersed in science fiction novels, Xiqi Zhu developed a keen interest in science fiction elements such as cyborgs.

Sound, light and interactive installations often enhance the sensory experience. The artist believes that using these elements can enhance the audience's experience and make the work more contemporary. By fusing installation art, soundscapes and dynamic light displays, Xiqi Zhu weaves a subtle narrative of human-machine fusion.

VIRAJ ANAND

Perfectly symmetrical in its construction, 6 sides, 12 edges, and 8 vertices: a single unit of inhabitation, endlessly tessellated and infinitely elastic. A 2 dimensional landscape. An invisible mould, sculpted by light creeping through its apertures. Exterior, night; interior, light.These paintings and relief prints explore the philosophical implications of designing urban life, tethering between geometric languages and organic bloom. Through these contorted perspectives and an obsession with mathematical repeatability, Viraj Anand suggests that there is a potential to locate a liminal space in the units of contemporary houses which can be stretched towards different forms of inhabitation.

ERIN GALLAGHER

Emergency blankets are first aid devices that offer warmth to bodies in trauma. Beyond survival, trauma lives on in the body of those who experienced it. Its ramifications ripple throughout life, like the fragile fabric of this installation ripples when bodies move across it. This work brings attention to the repercussions of trauma on those who are most vulnerable, particularly children. Our world is in a state of emergency, the fractures felt and expanding.

WAN-TING HSU

How does it feel to be in a crowded urban environment?

The artist Wan-Ting Hsu intends to construct an imaginary world from personal experiences while living in a foreign urban city through large-scale drawings, recorded sounds, and videos.

SAMMY TSENG

Sammy Tseng’s exhibition carves out a space in the larger exhibition of Structural Damage, to explore the complex power dynamics in the interactions and conflicts of East Asian couples in a family matrix. Through artistic works, the exhibition examines the issues surrounding different family roles in East Asia and investigates the impact of gender roles and societal expectations on family relationships. This exhibition asks; how is mental, emotional and physical labor designated in East Asian households?

Expanded Bodies

“If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom. In our bodies that we accept or end our slavery.” Ursula Le Guin (Four Ways to Forgiveness, 1995) Outer space, Earth, land, home, body.

Expanded Bodies explores corporeality and its relation to the environments we inhabit, through play, posthuman worldbuilding, relationships to home, land, pain and freedom.

It constructs a material landscape of ceramics, sound, painting, installation, and video, producing alternative encounters with the environment to suggest a different relationship to our bodies, and the notion of the self.

BIOS

*Maia Lonergan*

Maia is exploring the profound impact of toys and play on the socialisation of children through animation and sculpture. She wants to dissect societal biases and challenge these preconceived notions, particularly within the realm of ADHD. I want to unravel the boxes imposed on individuals with different brain types, offering a unique perspective on the intersection of neurodiversity, and the power of play that places a child in a role as creator. Drawing inspiration from dreams and nightmares, as well as from children’s toys and stories. Pondering on the climate crisis and the need for neurodiverse ways of thinking and empathy when uniting in the face of planetary destruction.

Instagram @maimaielyy

*Anna Usadi*

Through imaginings of speculative futures, Anna Usadi’s work aims to prompt reflection on our reality. Deeply concerned with human-induced ecological and geological trauma, her practice interrogates ideas such as units of time, progress and gender as social constructs, and explores their effects on people and the planet. In this exhibition, Usadi employs sculpture, moving image and sound to imagine how a decentralised and disembodied artificial intelligence might question notions of the body and the individual.

Instagram - @annausadi

*Ana Carolina Vidal Alves *

Anna is a Brazilian visual artist, educator and researcher whose central axes are race and gender, Afro-Atlantic connections and Brazilian popular cultures. She mostly works in oil paint, ceramics and installation constructing a language that orbits on female regeneration, identity, dysmorphia, violence, trauma and demarcations of the body’s limits. In the present work, Vidalinvestigates identity and seeks to record and create links between collective, family and individual memories on spiritual heritage, legacy and fertility.

*Gabriela Lehmann Rodriguez*

Through animation, comics, manga, and other forms of narrative art, Gabriela Lehmann Rodriguez explores the formulation of identity and memory through satirical, comedic, and provocative approaches. Utilizing illustration and video in this exhibition, she seeks to critique marketing and social bias, visibility, memory, and identity construction through visual storytelling, character creation, and merchandising.

Instagram - @aximilya

*Evolene Xiaohua*

Evolene is a middle-aged artist and a wanderer who has uprooted herself twice: first from China, then from the USA to the UK. As a life-long outsider, her work looks at human otherness, alienation and the possibility of integration to a unified Bio-universe. Her works are marked by an ambiguous, dichotomous and poetic style as a result of being sensitive and curious to the materials she engages with. She works with oil, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, leather, steel, printmaking and words. Her art practice involved an interplay between sculpture and painting. She introduces abstract and expressive elements into sculpture and then transforms structural elements into painting. She is developing her own metaphysical symbols and text to shed light on the postmodern concern and challeng: ‘the unrepresentable.”

Instagram: evolene9

*Yujin Ha*

Yujin aims to liberate women's bodies from the patriarchal gaze through a feminist lens, navigating between subject and object, passivity and activity, in the realms of space and body. Her work continuously questions how women, living as 'housewives' within the domestic space, experience oppression and liberation, drawing from her upbringing in Korean society and research on her family and mother. Through the integration of Eastern philosophy and Korean shamanistic elements, Yujin represents the overlapping realities and memories of herself and her mother, creating fictional events in physical spaces using installation, sculpture, photography, digital collage, and sound.

Instagram- @uyzynh

* Kristianna Betta*

Kristianna is interested in the liberation of the female form. Her paintings explores female nudity paying attention to themes of beauty, desire and essence. Beta’s art provides a critique of female objectification in art. Her paintings make commentary (sometimes through sarcasm) on notions of the male gaze, putting into questions ideals of beauty.

Instagram: @Kris_Betta_

*Leena Al-Nasser*

Leena’s art is about awakening the lost Queendom of her planet and rewatering it anew. She is interested in excavating sacred lost and buried material and bringing it to life. Her work plays with what is hidden and what is revealed and can involve participatory elements that require both time and vulnerability from the viewer. Some layers are available to all viewers, but other layers are only available to ones who are willing to give back. She uses writing, painting, collage, installation, and performance.

@Mnzlee

*Louisa*

Louisa is an intermodal artist who uses performative sound assemblages, in real time, as a response to an increasingly digital world. Vibration, Sound and Voice are set alongside home-made, organic, repurposed materials and unique substrates to create immersive cave like soundscapes and echo chambers. These ephemeral spaces are inhabited by incorporeal beings and colourful rhizomatic creatures. Her current work titled “The Ocarina of Thyme/Tears of the Kingdom,” is a graphic score guiding the viewer-avatar through sound, language and story to a fictional biosphere where hidden and displaced voices will ultimately be revealed.

Abstract

A threshold is the strip of stones that forms the bottom of a doorway. It is the space that demarcates a transition between inside and outside. Poised on this threshold you are situated in the liminal space of potential, of becoming.

A threshold is the string to a kite. It is the tension between the imagined or perceived freedom when it flies in the sky, and the actual constraints placed by its holder.

Artists in Threshold explore the transitory spaces between physical and imagined, body and society, psyche and landscape.

Enhe Zhu

Enhe Zhu's practise explores the threshold between the worlds of the dead and the living by presenting Chinese traditional ceremony scenes. This installation references “祭祖”, which is a ceremony to welcome ancestors through food offerings and burning ingots, candles and incense. Green is a symbolic color in Chinese horror movies and suggests a liminal or surreal space between imagination, the present and the past. Zhu works with a variety of materials and methods, from casting to wax working. Wax is understood by Zhu as a plastic material that acts as a medium between the worlds of life and death.

Mia Grassie-Clarke

Mia is exploring the bounds of the canvas as well as the action of painting as a way to re-frame expressions of the female body. The use of unconventional stretching methods along with expressive painting and sculpture elements show the ways in which both the artist and the viewer can embody a painting in multiple dimensions. Looking outwards to a door frame and inwards to the bones you can see layers of critical thinking about the space and mark making. Through a varied use of material she is exploring the viscerality of the every day from a feminine gaze.

Freesia Tianyue Pi

At the centre of my work lies an examination on various materials and media to embody spatial and cultural experiences through rebuilding fragmented memories. By combining painting, ceramic and textile, I condense the sensory experiences into new narratives. My installations collapse and reform domestic objects and imagery into an exhibition space, where I dissolve the threshold between art and domestic ornament.

Jingxi Yang

No matter where I am, no matter how far away from home, I am always a kite blowing in the wind. Tethered to my distant home by its string, the kite is always leading my thoughts back home. Red boats act as my diary, keeping the days I am away from China. This timekeeping is assembled into a red river and encapsulates a longing lonely mood, as these boats face towards my hometown. Constructed out of rice paper, bamboo, string and oil paint, my kite is a homing pigeon which echoes the delicate emotion of reminiscing about my hometown and a desire to return to childhood.

Cecily Lasnet

Cecily Lasnet’s practice is developing as one of close reading, listening and looking where she records the spaces of her own lyrical subjectivity. Dealing with the pain of moving through time and further from something loved and lost, her practice incorporates drawing, writing and bookmaking as mediums for recording moments in time, and time passing between moments. Cecily is showing a publication displayed as a series of prints whose genesis is in writing. Each print, built of layers of colour and translucency maps out a passing room of emotion.

Pengyi Li

Pengyi Li is a curator and writer whose practice focuses on the cross-contextual presentation of historical artifacts, video archives and geopolitics, to address the complex issues of displacement and identity. In curating this exhibition within an exhibition, Flesh and Blood: The Texture of Culture, Li explores the perspectives of artists Michalis Karaiskos, Ellie Pearch, and Fi Isidore. Through this process, he pays particular attention to the close connection between individual identity and collective memory. He aims to reveal the multiple dimensions of the body as a bearer of cultural and personal meaning, as well as its complexity in the context of post-colonialism and globalization.

Xin Huang

In Chongqing, a city in southwest China, people repurpose and navigate the negative spaces produced by urban infrastructures. Lingering in the air above and beneath their feet is a mist imbued with the scents of mountains and rivers. My work is concerned with the aesthetics of urban human lives and the buildings that they inhabit, grounded in the intersection of infrastructure and nature. Through sculptural forms, I recombine building and industrially processed materials to present a sense of abandoned urban environments and the instability of the humans that inhabit them.

Ella Deregowska

Pushing beyond the spatial constraints of the sketchbook: the pencil translates the artist’s body, the gallery walls and floor, the page. Through intuitive use of crayons, tape and charcoal, the ‘gallery as sketchbook’ is mapped. Activated to resolve the feeling of overwhelm as a result of sensory overstimulation and the conflicting information that dictates contemporary life, the artist pushes movement and drawing as acts of self care. What remains is a performative recording, a three-dimensional drawing that documents a psychogeography of this cognitive dissonance.

Sonographies 
2-4 & 9-11 February 2024
12-5pm  

Concealed in near silence, the sound installation Sonographies explores hidden and intimate spaces of experience. An eight-channel composition sounds physically in the gallery space but above the range of human hearing. Unstable and sensitive to movements of the body, an alternate acoustic landscape is revealed to individual listeners wearing wireless headphones created specially for the work. Sonographies is an invitation to dwell in sound, to probe space with your listening, and to notice how your body meets with sound and space. The composition slowly unfolds as though a journey through imagined, interconnected rooms. Drawing on themes of interior and domestic space, miniature and barely audible sounds of the home expand into the gallery space as immersive, sonic landscapes comprising field recordings, instrumental tones, and synthesised layers.

Sonographies is the culmination of a creative residency at no format gallery and is inextricably site-specific, incorporating the acoustic and architectural features of the space. The installation has been developed in different iterative versions as part of PhD research examining the experience of listening to spatial sound art. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to participate in the research by completing a short online survey following their encounter with the work.

Sonographies is created by Nicole Robson with curatorial support from Eva Martinez and is supervised by Prof. Andrew McPherson and Prof. Nick Bryan-Kinns. The work is supported by the EPSRC grant EP/L01632X/1 (Centre for Doctoral Training in Media and Arts Technology at Queen Mary University of London) and by the Royal Academy of Engineering under the Research Chairs and Senior Research Fellowships scheme.

Nicole Robson (b. 1987) is a sound artist and PhD researcher in Media and Arts Technology at Queen Mary University of London. Her work, presented internationally, includes installation art, musical composition, performance, and academic publications. She is interested in the performative and relational character of listening, how sound is co-produced by our bodily and perceptual activities, and research methods for describing lived experience. Nicole’s practice includes public art commissions (NHS, Mayor of London, Museum of London), which draw together oral histories and site-specific, community-led musical composition; harnessing sounding and listening as a means of social action. As a classically trained cellist and multi-instrumentalist, Nicole is an experienced performer and has played at concert halls and music festivals around the world, on television programmes such as Later... with Jools Holland, and live for BBC Radio 1, 2, 3, and 6 Music.

nicolerobson.com. 

"Shaping: Metalsmiths Dual Dialogue" unites two artists inspired by Deptford's metalworking heritage, crafting captivating narratives through metal and found objects. Huang, influenced by Taoist philosophy, molds metal into varied forms, evoking the essence of time. Xu delves into metal's emotional resonance, capturing scars and marks symbolizing conflicts. Transcending time, their artworks invite reflection on metal's profound significance and intertwine local heritage with contemporary expression. Join this harmonious yet contrasting artistic dialogue, exploring the multifaceted nature of metal.

About the Artists:

Xuemei Huang (b.1984, China) conveys her understanding of life, her interpretation of philosophy from life experience in her art works using unlimited materials. She got her B. Engineering degree in Food Science and Engineering from China Agricultural University in 2005 and worked as a Customs officer after graduation until 2021 when she enrolled in the Graduate Diploma in Art programme in Goldsmiths. In her recent study in MFA in Fine Art, Goldsmiths, she primarily explores her engagement with Taoist philosophy through painting and metal sculpture, delving into concepts such as the formless nature of the Tao, the contrasting elements of material emptiness and substance, and the concept of usefulness in uselessness.

Dengqian Xu (b.1998, China) graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2022. He is currently studying at Goldsmiths MFA fine art programme. Xu's work encompasses a wide range of forms, with performance, installation and sculpture as the main means of expressing his inner feelings. Violence is one of the main elements in his work, and his performances are explosive and dangerous, resisting the absurdity of the world through some of the more absurd performances.

For millennia the circle was taken as the primary symbol of perfection; the signifier of eternal and unchanging order - with the Sky as its natural abode; where its inhabitants the Sun, the Moon and the Planets, were all believed to be eternally moving on circular orbits. Historically, it took enormous courage to conceptually Break the Circle by trusting the observations that showed all such presumed circles in the Sky to be in fact ellipses. This was specially brave given that such orbits often deviate from circularity almost imperceptibly.

This project explores the metaphor of Breaking the Circle aesthetically and conceptually, with the help of graphics, videos, sculptural pieces and texts.

About the Artist: Reza Tavakol is professor emeritus of mathematics and astronomy, and a member of the poetry group, at Queen Mary University of London. His current interests include art, philosophy and cosmology. His art practice is concerned with the aesthetic and conceptual explorations of the real, employing writing, as well various visual art forms including photography, graphics, moving image and installations.  

Tues-Sun 8-18 August 2023. Opening times: Tues 8 - Sun 13 2-7pm, Tues 15 - Fri 18 2-6pm

Private View, Tues 8 August 6-9pm

Who We Really A.R. 

An Augmented Reality Art Exhibition about P.D.A.

1st - 6th August 2023 

Free entry. Open 13:00-19:00 daily.

Private view: Thursday 3rd August, 6-9pm (limited tickets) Book via Eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/who-we-really-ar-augmented-reality-art-exhibition-tickets-672967512947

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” - Maya Angelou (American poet)

The expression of love has been stated by poets, songwriters and countless other artists, to be of utmost importance to us as human beings. There are those of us who feel fine expressing our affections publicly, as well as those of us who prefer to keep it private, depending on the culture, context or even our personal safety.

Who We Really A.R. is a series of augmented reality (AR) artworks, illustrating the real life diversity, complexity and simplicity of our relationships through P.D.A. (public displays of affection). #WWRAR #PDA

Using a mix of comic book illustration, animation and AR technology, the artist explores the real life world of PDA, the perceptions of what relationships look like, and highlights the role of the observer. Ultimately, it hopes to illustrate the joy and fun of love, and how it very much “recognises no barriers”, including LGBTQ+, interracial, extramarital, cultural and religious themes.

About the Artist: voxie is an illustrator & animator born in South London. She is British Filipina, identifies as queer (she/they) and loves art and digital technology. She created this augmented reality project as part of MA Illustration (online) at the University of Hertfordshire. After working most of her life as a graphic designer, almost 20 years later, she returns to the art world through this MA. This would be her first solo exhibition. Her art is inspired by a combination of comics, manga, vintage graphics and 80s cartoons. Artist website: www.voxie.art or @voxieart on social media.

In 1997 Psychotherapist and author of the book 'Trauma and Recovery' Judith Herman described Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) as nothing but a "sophisticated insult" from psychiatry towards people who have experienced trauma. Almost 30 years later despite decades of survivor led activism and countless research papers showing that a diagnosis of personality disorder results in stigma, discrimination and poor treatment, the diagnosis is still hotly debated by psychiatry but with no real systemic change.

Sophisticated Insult is an exhibition which centres the experiences of people who have been given a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder either as a current or past diagnosis, who reject the personality disorder construct.

While we recognise some people may find a BPD diagnosis helpful, there are many of us who have been harmed by the diagnosis. Our exhibition is a creative space to explore and celebrate survival, inner fires, love, rage, solidarity and defiance against the pathologisation of trauma. We are not anti-diagnosis but believe people should not be labelled with diagnoses that don’t fit their experience, are not helpful or cause harm, which a personality disorder diagnosis often does.

Throughout the exhibition we’ll be running workshops and events including a discussion space followed by a paper making workshop. Come and shred your psych notes up with us. Alchemise them into wild blooming seed/ paper bookmarks. We are also running seed bomb making, fabric/ textile/ patch making, zine making and collage workshops during the exhibition. See https://twitter.com/home for more info.

Artists: Nicole Lacey, Rachel Rowan Olive, Nell Hardy, Bekah Harris, Emma Rose, G, Robyn Timoclea, B.Lain and Bekki.

Opening night: Tuesday 18th July 6-8pm. All welcome.

Opening times

Wednesday 19th July – 11am – 4pm

Thursday 20th July – 2.30 – 8pm

Friday 21tst, Saturday 22nd, Sunday 23rd, Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th – 12 - 6pm

Wednesday 26th July – 11am – 4pm

Thursday 27th July – 2.30pm – 8pm

Friday 28th and Saturday 29th July – 12 – 6pm.

Group Exhibition

Artists: David Barron, Annie Berriman, Caroline Burgess, Lucy Crouch, Laura Fox, Peter Gates, Sandra Partington, Jenny Purrett, Joanna Rucklidge, Fran Woolf

Open: 13-16 July 2023, 12:00-18:00

Private View: 13 July, 18:00-20:00

Nature as Witness is a collective of ten artists from across the UK and Ireland who came together as a group in 2022 during a six-week program run by @drawing_correspondence. We use drawing to explore our relationship with nature and nature’s relationship with us. We celebrate nature’s beauty, but also reflect on what we can learn from it and how we are despoiling it. In many of our works, nature isn’t just the subject, it is a collaborator. Air, earth, fire and water—the elemental constituents of the Universe—leave their trace in the works on show. Drawing is a way of dissolving the distinction between the artist and their subject: nature is our witness.

The exhibition comprises drawings by the individuals in the collective, using a wide range of media, some traditional, some less so. The largest work in the show is a 7m long collaborative drawing of a tree canopy made in Northumberland woodland using feathers, sticks, ink, and rain. It perfectly exemplifies the group’s approach to drawing Nature as Witness.

Image credit Lucy Crouch, type credit Joanna Rucklidge

More info visit: natureaswitness.cargo.site

Please Interact, Do Not Touch is an exhibition showcasing a new series of work produced by London based artists Iola Lawton and Gabe Duarte in a premiering collaboration. The title of the show lends itself to a continuous observation of customary instructions and interactions, compiled and investigated over roughly a period of 3 months.The work branches from drawing and printmaking to photography and moving image, acting as an opportunity to challenge their individual approaches to methods and materials. Currently, both are enjoying merging personal intercultural experiences.

Through a constant push and pull of initiations and responses between the duo, they seek to turn No Format Gallery into a perceivably gestural space, with pieces inviting the audience to question their position in relation to the exhibition works, and the establishment of the everyday moments discovered in their joint practice.

For Please Interact, Do Not Touch, Lawton and Duarte have explored architectural and design forms, using the human figure to create works in response to sound and imagery that can exist independently and in direct correlation to the other.

Iola Lawton is studying Fine Art Drawing at Camberwell and has an intuitive and instinctive approach to her practice, working with various materials and processes. Currently predominantly focusing on photography and moving image, she is interested in the documentation of the world around her and makes work based on observations that occur from being present in a place and in relation to psychogeography. With a background in dance, Iola is increasingly incorporating elements of movement and physicality, exploring durational elements and creating a translation between these mediums and their relationships within a space.

Gabe Duarte is interested in objects that have been missed, lost, presumed dead, and the anonymous actions that have left them wherever and in whichever state they were encountered. Lately, their work has been preoccupied with what separates the monumental from the mundane, and how the material origins of both often get to intersect. Gabe has just graduated from the Fine Art Drawing course at Camberwell College of Arts.

Private View - 4th of July, 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Please Interact, Do Not Touch is open July 5th - July 9th, 11 am - 5:30 pm

The manner of my work is in the physical shaping of it, and in it, manner-ism, a bodily shaping of visceral thought, thinking as touch, and  tactile vision. What arises as surface reveals itself as depth, and the self as a fractal thing; the look of a thing is a need in the maker.

Questions of Style and Taste, so disparaged as signs of the trivial, the superficial, go to the heart of the matter, to the self as an autonomic function.

David Minton

Foreignscape Exhibition 31st May - 10th June

Opening Event: Friday 2nd June, 6 pm - 9 pm 

'Watermelon' Performance: (Friday 2nd June) 6 pm - 7 pm

Venue: No Format Gallery, Casting House, Moulding Lane (off Arklow Road) Deptford, SE8 6BN

Foreignscape is an exhibition documenting the lives of artists HsinYing Lin and Adanma Nwankwo as they navigate the foreign landscape of London. Recently relocated from their respective hometowns (Taiwan and Nigeria), the two artists discuss the cultural similarities and differences they’ve observed using hair, location, and language as their motifs.

Group Exhibition

Artists: Jaeho Shin, Luke Bacon, Minkyeong Park, Syaura Qotrunadha, Xuemei Huang

Circle in the Square is a group exhibition of international artists, studying MFA at Goldsmiths University, reconstructs the environment and human nature, with material experiments from diverse geographical conditions and backgrounds.

These days, it is a common phenomenon for people to try and escape the boundaries of our square universe in terms of spaces, computer monitors and our own mind. This exhibition seeks to take the virtual into the digital, and the digital into the physical, extracting notions of fantasy.

Suggested in the titled Circle in the Square, this exhibition seeks to break free from boundaries associated with the physical realm, with the works escaping conventional forms to convey these ideas. The artists travel, play games, move to foreign places, and try to redefine ideal versions of life and nature. The circle becomes a metaphor in how the human mind and the subconscious is eternal and infinite; whilst the square, perhaps the white cube, constrains the infinite into the finite within material boundaries.

The international background of the artists acts as a catalyst for breaking down individualistic geographic origins, relating the works between them and offering interesting dialogues within the space. Aiming to blur the boundaries of the square entrapment modalities of life and the white cube, evolving into a larger hollow sphere of explorations.

Bios:

Jaeho Shin (b. 1988, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice extends beyond painting to include video, photography, and installation. His work is a series of attempts in order to explore identity - which includes the personal, social and cultural - through a fine art practice deviating from all the aesthetic and ethical stereotypes that work in the real world. He has been searching for new possibilities by allowing for chance and using materials that are not conventionally used in art making.

He currently attends the MFA Fine Art program at Goldsmiths, University of London in London, UK (2022 - 2024). He received his BA and MA in Journalism and Mass Communication from Dongguk University in Seoul, Korea (2014, 2016) and also studied Communication Design at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, School of Architecture and Design in Bangkok, Thailand (2009 - 2010). Representative exhibitions include “Don’t Change the Color of Your Hair”, Art Space At, Seoul, Korea (2022), “Metamorphosis”, Cyart Space, Seoul, Korea (2020), and “Hagyomány és divat”, Korean Cultural Center in Hungary, Budapest, Hungary (2019). His work is currently in Korean Cultural Center in Hungary.

Luke Anthony Bacon (b.1992, UK) is a British, London-based artist. Currently studying MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. The framework of his practice focuses on irony and sincerity. The Metamodern structure of balance, ‘ironic detachment with sincere engagement’. Both irreverence and sincerity through what is a give and take of metamodernism in the evolution of postmodernism.

Working within painting and sculpting he kills the life from the original counterpart of reference. His objects want to be more but are deficiently made, seemingly now pathetic. His current focus is the idea of extracting the virtual into the physical with specific attentionto the realm of video games.

Minky Park (b.1995, South Korea) majored in design in South Korea and is an artist who uses a wide range of media under the themes of design, technology, sound, sculpture, video, and computer-based installation work.

From the beginning of her work, she experimented in machine-based art fields such as artificial intelligence and 3D printers. Amid the blurring of the distinction between virtual and reality, she explored small groups, asked questions about the impact of technology on humans, and suggested communication and participation with the audience. Currently, she is expanding her work by connecting the impact of the two sides of the technological era with human emotions.

Syaura Qotrunadha (b.1992, Indonesia) is an Indonesian artist who likes to do experiments with various mediums including photography, interactive art, paper recycling, video art, digital archives, installations, and publication materials. Her work mostly talks about music, history, education and social issues.

Currently, Syaura is pursuing postgraduate study at MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths University of London. Her works have been exhibited at “Berdiam/Bertandang: Art for Refuge”, National Gallery of Indonesia (2018), “Cur(e)ating the Earth, Shifting the Center”, Kaya Normal Baru Online Exhibition (2020), “10x10: Me Culture/We Society”, Korea Research Fellow (2021), and “METAMORPHOSIS METAVERSE”, Elektra Virtual Museum, Montreal (2022). She is also one of the shortlisted artists for “Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize” (2020) held by Julius Baer Group and “The 4th VH Award” (2021) held by Hyundai Motor Group.

Xuemei Huang (b.1984, China) conveys her understanding of life, her interpretation of philosophy from life experience in her art works using unlimited materials. She got her B. Tech degree in Food Science and Technology from China Agricultural University in 2005 and worked as a Customs officer after graduation until 2021 when she enrolled in the Graduate Diploma in Art programme in Goldsmiths.

In Sep 2021-Jul 2022, while she was broadening her mindset about contemporary art, her essay and art works focused on the motif Uncertainty. She suggests that modernity has blinded us human beings from realising that uncertainty is the normal of the world. She supplied a little examples on how we could do to accept even embrace uncertainties through her graduation show of GDA programme What Breeze Brings.

In her recent study in MFA in Fine Art, Goldsmiths, she tries to learn from Mark Rothko, triggering spiritual emotions through her painting like his, but through depicting snow peaks. She hasn’t given up her trial in textile as well, but this time, a more ecological way, using buried calico to bring the form of meaning of degradation to her viewers.

Participating Artists

Andree Adley | Farrah Akbarali | Liesa Bacchus | Michelle Baharier | Matt Bannister | Rosalind Barker | David Barron | Jon Beaumont | Laura L Bell | Dominic Blower | Alexandra Blum | Su Bonfanti | Ann Bridges | Kathryn Broad | Ken Bruin | Deborah Burnstone | Pauline Burrows | Stephen Carley | Tom Cartmill | Claire Chandler | Natalie Charles | Sarah Christie | Kemi Clark | Marie Connery | Philip Copestake | Hannah Cushion | Steven Dickie | Susannah Douglas | Tracey Downing | Charlotte E Padgham | Renata Fernandez Zarauza | Robert Firzmaurice | Laura Fox | Chantal Gagnon | Andy Gashe | Nic Gear | Nick Grellier | Liz Griffiths | Janine Hall | Paul Hartley | Russell Heron | Sara Hindhaugh | Martin Hoare | Alexandra Hobson | Elisa Hudson | Sarah King | Blair Lamar | Monika Laskowska | Karen Loader | Rosie Lovell | Ashley Loxton | Jo Mason | Vanessa Matten | Heather McAteer | Sally McKay | Mick McNicholas | Shell Meggersse | Melina Merlin | Jane Merriman | Sophie Meyer | Sandra Miralles Alcazar | Nicole Mollett | Claire Mont Smith | James Robert Morrison | Aurelia Neila | Andia Coral Newton | Alison O’Neill | Emma O’Rourke | Sandra Partington | Sumi Perera | Steve Perfect | Sarah Praill | Judit Prieto | Richard Proctor | Claudia Ramirez | Phoebe Randall | Chris Ratcliffe | James Reynolds | Ruth Richmond | Simone Scafiti | Mackenzie Scott Clowes | Victoria Snazell | Sarah Spencer | Hannah Stageman | Carrie Stanley | Euan Stewart | Alison Stirling | Zhenya Stoyanova | Franny Swann | Sonia Thomas | Gwennan Thomas | Arianna Tinulla Milesi | Crimson Trebar | Kyriakos Tsirigotis | Marianne Walker | Shelia Wallis | Anna Walsh | Fania | Weatherby | Michaela Wheater | Lydia Wood | Peter Wylie.

Edited: 07/02/2023

THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

17.04 - 23.04.2023

Swanfall Gallery proudly presents ‘The Presence of Absence’, a duo show by London based artists Lucas Bullens and Fergus Channon. The exhibition brings together two bodies of work, one from each artist, each of which explores ideas of movement within emptiness. More specifically, abstracted human marks that caress a void.

Emptiness is seen by most as a space that lacks, but for the artists it is a space that holds all - present, past and future. Fossilised on the surface, the compositions carry multiplicities of the human form, ripples of movement that echo through vast nothingness; becoming Everything-ness. The cracks and smudges inhabiting each frame are surrounded by Ma (the Japanese term for negative space). The Ma surrounds the absented presence like water surrounding a discretely deserted island.

‘Celestial Saults (Divers)’, 2022

This series of prints by the Swiss born artist Lucas Bullens explores notions of the soul being the starting point of all motion in things which live. Here, the human body is rendered to a calligraphic smear. The blurry strokes separate the figures of their human form. Much like the figures of Étienne-Jules Marey and deities of Eastern theology, the multiplicity of the spirit is presented within a single frame. A frame dominated by emptiness, a sort of rectangular Śūnyatā, where the subject is connected to all and out of the void dualities arise.

‘Ghosts of a Presence’, 2022-2023

A blank empty canvas is a loaded powerful symbol of potential for a painter. Infinite possibilities mentally project onto the surface teasing, challenging, and eluding the artist. These indexical marks lock in the evidence of presence, condensing interactions into singular moments in time. Made with the purest and sparest of materials, these tattooed marks are loaded and direct. They are not a translation nor are they an interpretation; They are the marks made, obedient to the proportions and weight of the body, allowing the viewer to access the relationship between body and surface, time as a present moment and as the preservation of a moment.

Lucas Bullens

Lucas Bullens is a Swiss born artist specialising in the medium of photography. Interested in ideas of the ‘soul’, his practice revolves around exploring the transcendental. Using the camera as an instrument, he seeks to extract the immaterial buried within the material. The mostly monochromatic sequences he presents are a minimalist yet intricate reflection of the world he feels around him. Lucas works with an array of materials, however always keeping the manipulation and movement of light at the core of his practice.

Fergus Channon

Fergus Channon is a London based artist exploring ways of marking time through the medium of painting. He has developed a unique method where he manipulates the traditions of painting through the innovative application of distemper to canvas. He has discovered a method of tightening the surface of the canvas to such an extent that he can control his paintings to either change and evolve over time or be affected by interventions that reveal the indexical mark evoking a sense that the artist is present.

Rod Hunt is an award winning Illustrator with a reputation for retro tinged Illustrations and detailed character filled landscapes. He’s also the artist behind the bestselling Where's Stig? books for the BBC's hit TV show Top Gear. His latest book series Where's Your Dog/Cat? for Yappy.com are personalised search and find books where your own pet is the star! His extensive clients list includes Formula E, Guinness World Records, IKEA, Red Bull Racing, Sony Pictures, Sony Music & Toyota.

Web: rodhunt.com

Instagram: @rodhuntdraws 

SFSA have a long history of being inclusive and offering opportunity to all artists. 2022 will be the 6th year of the Painting Open, always a vibrant and celebratory exhibition and we look forward to welcoming you into the no format Gallery. #SFSAPaintingOpen

2022 participating artists

Madi Acharya-Baskerville | Farrah Akbarali | Jane Alexander | Jonathan Alibone | Jim Allchin | Min Angel | Nicholas Ashton | Lily Baker | Matt Bannister | Sarah Barker Brown | Jon Beaumont | Alison Berry | Stefania Boiano | Crimson Mary-Kate Boner | Miranda Boulton | Ann Bridges | Wendy Brooke-Smith | Stephen Buckeridge | Deborah Burnstone | Niki Campbell | Laura Carey | Fiona Chambers | Claire Chandler | George Chapman | Hannah Cushion | Tom Davies | Vera Doarme | Tracey Downing | Gabrielle Eber | Mato Enki | Chris F Clark | Pascal Fessler | Salvatore Fiorello | Robert Fitzmaurice | Shauna Fox | Diane Gerrard | Paul Hartley | Richard Heys | John Heywood-Waddington | Jane Higginbottom | Alexandra Hobson | Chris Horner | Piers Inkpen | Sarah James | Helen Jones | Jean Joseph | Eri Kikkawa | Stevie Ray Latham | James Lawson | Emma Lilly | Abigail Lipski |Katrina Lyne-Watt | Aoibhin Maguire | Enzo Marra | Fiona Masterton | Heather McAteer | Shell Meggersee | Rachel Mercer | Melina Merlin | Jane Merriman | Paula Munteanu | Elizabeth Nast | Matt Nicholls | Emma O’Rourke | Sandra Partington | Sumi Perera | Steve Perfect | Charlotte E Padgham | Mandy Prowse | James Reynolds | Paula Rivas Rodrigues | Peter Roseman | Marie-Therese Ross | Simone Scafiti | Mackenzie Scott Clowes | Gail Seres-Woolfson | Victoria Snazell | Miguel Sopena | Sarah Sparkes | Alison Stirling | Latifah Stranack | Rose Stuart-Smith | Uzma Sultan | Franny Swann | Cinnamon Tatham | Hanna ten Doornkaat | Marcia Teusink | Sarah Tew | Sonia Thomas | Hannah Thomas | Emma Tod | Derval Tubridy | Rebecca Tucker | Jacqueline Utley | Antonella Vismara | Sheila Wallis | Tamsinn Wilson | Corrie Wingate | Matthew Wood | Yuet Yean Teo.

Edited 30/09/2022

https://www.secondfloor.co.uk/painting-open

An international festival of expanded choreography initiated and curated by H2DANCE

The Continual Thread 

Tuesday 25th – Sunday 30th October 2022  

The Continual Thread is the first joint exhibition between brothers Euan and Alan Stewart since 2017.  They wanted to re-examine their work to see if their individual practices had developed commonality in the intervening years. Although there appears no outward similarity in their work, they found a parallel buried in the roots of their individual ideas.  It is here that the broader themes of identity and belonging emerged.  

Euan's new linocut prints explore a crisis of collective and individual identity, picking at the fabric of individuality through experiments in form and composition to a state of anonymity. The contrast of weaving lines and negative space create an industrial rhythm and sense of movement that allows the viewer to project their own sense of self. 

Alan is a painter whose work is about belonging, particularly what it is to have a strong sense of belonging.  He paints the people who are rooted in the coastal communities of north Devon where he lives.  Observing their traditions and annual celebrations he paints the community when at its most united and fascinating. 

Alan and Euan were born in Glasgow and grew up in Prestwick on the south west coast of Scotland and both attended Edinburgh College of Art.  

Alan’s exhibitions include The Royal Scottish Academy, The Royal Academy, Waterhouse and Dodd, and Beaux Arts Bath.  He has pieces in public collections including the Ministry of Justice and Stirling Museum. 

Euan has exhibited widely from The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition to the Awagami Print Exhibition in Japan.  His work is held in collections including The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Wellcome Collection and The Fabriano Museum, Fabriano, Italy. 

Tuesday 25th – Saturday 29th October 2022.  

12-6pm daily. Other times by appointment. 

Private View Friday 28th October 6-9pm 

List Of Works

1. Euan Stewart

Dissonance I-III

Linocut

2022

21 x 30cm

£150 each

2. Euan Stewart

Autonomy I-III

Linocut

2022

21 x 30cm

£150 each

3. Euan Stewart

Fusion I-III

Linocut

2022

56 x 76cm

£450 each unframed

4. Euan Stewart

Dissociation

Linocut

2022

21 x 30cm

£150

5. Euan Stewart

Interruption

Linocut

2022

21 x 30cm

£150

6. Euan Stewart

Intrusion I-III

Linocut

2022

21 x 30cm

£150 each

7. Euan Stewart

Inquisition

Linocut

2022

21 x 30cm

£150

8. Alan Stewart

A Boy From The Unbroken Line

Oil on canvas

2022

90 x 80cm

£3500

9. Alan Stewart

Remember Me

Oil on canvas

2022

30 x 20cm

£500

10. Alan Stewart

I Hear Them Coming

Oil on canvas

2021

130 x 150cm

£6000

11. Alan Stewart

The Neighbours

Charcoal on paper

2017

14.5 x 11cm

£950

12. Alan Stewart

Berrynarbor Eldritch Chair

Assorted wood

2022

Various dimensions

NFS

13. Alan Stewart

Long Since Forgotten #31

Watercolour on paper

2021

14 x 33cm

£1100

14. Alan Stewart

Quiet Preparation

Watercolour on paper

2016

30 x 47cm

£1500

15. Euan Stewart

Fission I-IV

Linocut

2022

56 x 76cm

£450 each unframed

16. Alan Stewart

They Will Follow Us

Oil on canvas

2020

50 x 42cm

£750

17. Alan Stewart

Join Me

Oil on canvas

2020

50 x 42cm

£750

18. Alan Stewart

I Belong With Them All

Oil on canvas

2021

50 x 42cm

£750

19. Alan Stewart

Waiting For The Dance

Oil on canvas

2022

50 x 42cm

£750

20. Alan Stewart

It Is What We Do

Oil on canvas

2021

50 x 42cm

£750

21. Alan Stewart

I Belong Too

Oil on canvas

2021

50 x 42cm

£750

‘Marking Time’ continues a visual conversation between four artists Sandra Beccarelli, Miranda Boulton, Alison Critchlow and Una D'Aragona, which began in January 2020 when they gave an artist’s talk together at the University of Cambridge. Our first exhibition, ‘Beating Time’ at the ARB Building, Cambridge, considered the area shared by poet and painter. It proposed a resonance across art forms.

‘Marking Time’ delves further into this territory, deepening the discussion and allowing it to seep into the place beyond words, beyond paintings. Spaces between exhibits will be treated as ‘active gaps’, opening up pauses and rhythms-allowing boundaries to blur and bulge. We intend to prod and poke at our many ideas and thoughts, revealing and questioning the evolving conversation.

Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Markings’ has provided a frame of reference for the exhibition.

‘All things entered you

As if they were both the door and what came through it

They marked the spot, marked time and held it open’

Private View 6 - 8pm on Thursday 6th October

Artists Talk 2 - 4pm on Staurday 15th October

The result of a unique collaboration between two award-winning artists, photographer Peer Lindgreen and ice sculptor Duncan Hamilton, SHOCK OF THE FORM II will be presented at no format Gallery 16 – 25 September as part of Deptford X Festival’s Fringe 2022, London’s longest-running visual arts festival. With Lewisham being the Mayor’s London Borough of Culture 2022, and with climate change and the climate emergency at the forefront, local artists and arts organisations have an opportunity to be the trailblazers and influencers on matters of the environment. And the impermanence of ice makes it a conducive medium to communicate the notion of fragility: how something so present and so familiar can be gone in an instant.

Balanced on the very limits of fragility, Shock Of The Form II enters a transparency of thought, as naturally occurring fissures and refractions gather in response to changes in light and temperature. Ice leads the conversation, capturing the life-cycle of a moment; as a constantly shifting landscape of glacial governance plays with the way we perceive and interact with the world. A seemingly impossible lone figure seeks to examine the precarious and ephemeral interrelationship between man and nature on a critically wounded planet; passing through to share the secrets that exist only in the fleeting moments breath before they vanish, for ever.

The exhibition features large-scale photographs and a video installation by Lindgreen of Hamilton’s work with ice, alongside a specially commissioned ice sculpture which takes centre stage in the gallery. A temporary performance-like piece, this ice artwork reinforces the narrative of fragility and the precarious relationship between man and nature.

Working collaboratively, the artworks took Lindgreen and Hamilton over four years to produce, during which time they tested the limits of ice with different processes. Playing around with different exposures to explore the relationship between light and ice is what fascinated Lindgreen, who captured these formations with his camera, sometimes working in a minus-20˚C shipping container in Hamilton’s studio. Works such as BUG_P1, a 36-hour process uncovered unexpected and beautiful ways in which to manipulate this material. Flooded wedges of crystal ice with pink coloured water were allowed to fracture for the main body, while gasses bubbled in the ice to form delicate detailed frozen wings.

‘Abstract other-worldly sci-fi pieces would greet me at times and other times more earthy works, a wonderful blend of ice sculpting and ice texture or both. We did a 360-degree slow motion short film of an alien form in icy rain, a frozen sea in misty conditions. Every time I went, I just fell more and more in love with this frozen art form. During this passage of time with ice, I can conclude I have now experienced a cold love poem with all its lovely imperfections.’ Peer Lindgreen.

‘It all started 45 years ago with the discarded bits from my ice sculptures. The wasted, unwanted bits. I became fascinated with the beauty contained within each unique piece of ice: bubbles, minerals and beautiful fractures which sometimes split the spectrum to produce mini rainbows of colour. It was like looking into another world. I wanted a record of the beauty of that world, and it's this ongoing conversation that Peer has captured with his camera.’ Duncan Hamilton.

PRIVATE VIEW: Fri 16 September, 5pm – 9pm, as part of the Deptford X Festival private view.

OPENING HOURS: Exhibition open to the public 16 – 25 September (Thu & Fri 12noon – 7pm. Sat & Sun 11am – 5pm. Closed Mon – Wed). Admission free.

About the artists:

Peer Lindgreen: ‘The light and colours from my native northern European country, be it from the short winter days or the long evenings in the summer, has always influenced my way of photographing.’

Peer is a Danish photographer who, after studying photography, moved to London in 1992. His work has been shown in many group exhibitions and he has also had a solo exhibition at Denmark’s Photographic Museum. He has received numerous awards for his work, including Gold and Silver in The Association of Photographers Awards, and a D&AD pencil.

Duncan Hamilton is a self-taught ice sculptor who started working freelance in 1975. At that stage, Duncan was the only professional ice sculptor in the UK, working from Carlo Gatti’s Ice Factory in Battersea. Duncan’s breakthrough came in 1977 when he made a large ice sculpture for the Hyde Park Hotel (now the Mandarin Oriental), for an awards event attended by Rolls Royce, Yves St Laurent and other major companies. A photograph of this ice sculpture appeared in The Observer supplement, and was later picked up by the major news channels. This led to Duncan being commissioned to make sculptures for many celebrities, from Elton John to Justin Timberlake, London's grand hotels, product launches, advertising, film premieres, and music promos.

HB Drawing

Oysterland

Artists: Su Bonfanti, Rosalind Barker, Nic Clarke, Ali Christie, Janine Hall, Ruth Richmond.

How do you travel without a destination?

You go to a London mainline station.

You get on the next departing train.

You get off after half an hour.

You are somewhere on the fringes of London, in suburbia, on the edge of Oysterland in the places no-one dreams of going. In places where the station staff say ‘the best thing to do when you get there is to get a bus somewhere else’.

The artists of HB Drawing made these journeys for nearly two years inspired by Laurie Lee’s epic trip – As I walked out one summer’s morn. The rules we followed for this project created a space between the unknown and the familiar. We didn’t know in advance where we were going or, even when we were on the train, exactly what we would find when we got there. But we knew there would be a distinctive ‘there’, a personality; and this personality would demand a response. And each of us responded in a different way. There was a magical seduction in the unknowingness of the day and what the journey would bring.

We are now walking the Capital Ring. This is in some ways precisely the opposite kind of journey: we know exactly where we are starting, what route we will take and where we will end up. But we find ourselves in the same psychological territory, between the unknown and the familiar, the everyday streets and the well-known landmarks. We are confronting again the personality of London neighbourhoods.

The work coming out of these trips reflects our intuitive, instinctive responses to the unknown and unexpected, mediated through our existing individual interests.

The work that has developed so far develops the ripple of water, reflections, light and shadow, the geometry of buildings and the anonymity of streets and everyday places, the way nature intrudes into any unkempt space, and manmade structures intrude into nature.

Website: hbdrawing.com
Instagram: @hbdrawinguk

WhatSheSays collective.

WhatSheSays is an intergenerational group of artists with diverse backgrounds developing and sharing conversations through making and exhibiting together. Our interest is the materiality of everyday life, the textures, surfaces, accumulations, sedimentations. Our practices reflect concerns around sustainability and fragility, the urban landscape and the natural world, while privileging the commonplace and the accidental.

Artists: Claire Montsmith, Kristina Page, Mathilde Lebreton, Tanaka Mazivanhanga and Ann Norfield.

Private View: Thursday 2 June 2022, 6 – 9pm

In conversation with Jon Sharples: Saturday 4th June 2022, 3pm

Open: Tuesday 31 May – Sunday 5 June 2022, 11am – 4pm

Steve Burden works most in painting to investigate dystopian themes and ideas associated with British housing estates, partly inspired by his personal experience growing up on the Pepys (a brutalist high-rise council estate in Deptford, south London). He is driven to understand what it means to be working-class in today’s society and the urban context in which he grew up which continues to influence his visual aesthetic. His current practice explores the under-representation of those from lower socio-economic backgrounds in the arts and education.

Steve graduated from Goldsmiths College, London with First Class Honours and Bath Spa University with a Masters Degree in Fine Art (distinction).

Jon Sharples is an art lawyer, curator and art collector and is a leading advocate for artists' rights. Jon is a trustee of artist-run project space, studio provider and registered charity Block 336; an advisory Board Member of Block Universe, London’s leading international performance art festival; and is a former trustee
of the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Contact: www.steveburden.co.uk

Private View 6-9 pm Friday 27th May 

Open Tuesday 24th May – Last Day Sunday 29th May

Daily 12-6 pm  

Artists: Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde, Rhiannon Hunter, Sean Mckenzie, Gabriela Pelczarska, Noelle Turner-Bridger.

Tarmac is a group exhibition by five artists using photography, sculpture and film. 

The everyday is everything - it beats to a rhythm of its own making, punctuated by the opening and closing of daylight to moonshine. It is monotonous and grounding, allowing for fanciful flights of alternative everydays in some other place to this everyday.  

It is a solo endeavour, ordering oneself to the world in one’s own pleasure of habit. But, in its ever presence, it binds all in a collective march of shared temporalities, of construed meanings and sense of self.  

The everyday is purposeful. In its gouging, lifting, moving, building, it creates cities in its wake; it moves soils, dumps boulders and buries pipes, as it moves continually from yesterday to the dream of tomorrow.  

The everyday is the vista shot through a lens of looking. And in that looking, the eye sees the familiar, spots the aloof, and seeks pleasure through the games of noticing. 

It is the deep inhale of a ripe autumn morning; the smell of rain on tarmac; the slither of legs across fresh sheets; fulfilment, passing; surfaces of a table, a lino floor, a tree, this chair, that paving stone; steadying and touching, our bodily limbs guide us through, over, onwards. And sometimes down. 

We know the everyday; we wriggle within it, climbing in to feel our way around and within it, but we cannot stop it. The metronome, a quiet tick: the everyday is everything.  

SFSA have a long history of being inclusive and offering opportunity to all artists. 2022 will be the 3rd SFSA Drawing Open, always a vibrant and celebratory exhibition and we look forward to welcoming you into the Gallery. #SFSADrawingOpen

We are delighted to announce this exhibition will also dovetail with our Spring 2022 Open Studios at the Foundry.

WOMEN AND MARGINALISED GENDERS USING ART FOR ACTIVISM

This Women’s History Month Eliza Hatch and Bee Illustrates present their debut group show, Hysterical. This charity group exhibition will celebrate women and marginalised genders whose work is centred on community, activism and uplifting voices of those around them.

Who are we? Eliza Hatch is a photographer, activist, speaker and founder of Cheer Up Luv, a photo series and platform dedicated to retelling stories of sexual harassment. Bee Illustrates is a queer, non-binary, illustrator who uses their art to educate and inform on a range of topics like feminism, mental health and queerness.

Hysterical will bring together creatives from multiple disciplines including photography, illustration, film, textiles and digital media whose work focuses on issues such as identity, race, sexual harassment, gender, politics and more. Exhibiting artists include; Alice Skinner, Tayo Adekunle, Florence Winter Hill, Alia Romagnoli, Linnet Panashe Rubaya, Iga Bielawska, Eleanor West, Samiira Garane, Beth Suzanna, Charlie J Fitz, Sara Jardine, Josie Devine, Ophelia Arc, Florence Poppy Deary, Jodie Bateman, Molly Piper Greaves, Caitlin Binks, Eliza Hatch and Bee Anderson.

The theme of the show is to subvert the notion of “attention-seeking” or “dramatic” women* and reclaim words that have historically been used to oppress people of marginalised genders when speaking out on the issues they face. By amplifying the work of artists and activists using their voices for change, Hysterical will show how young creatives are responding to the world around them and using art as a tool for advocacy.

During the one week show, Hysterical will host a panel discussion and workshop within the gallery space. The workshop will be hosted by GrrlZine Fair, and the panellists include; Gina Martin, Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin, Cathy Reay, Tori West, Maxine Williams and India Ysabel. We are proud to say that this exhibition is supporting UN Women UK and Mermaids.

PRIVATE VIEW: 24.03.2022 6-9pm

LOCATION: no format Gallery, Casting House, Moulding Lane, Deptford, SE14 6BN

PRESS KIT: Google Drive Link

CONTACT: beecheerupluv@gmail.com

Image: "Artefact #02" - Photograph by Tayo Adekunle

“...when we look at a landscape, we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there. We attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically possess – savageness, for example, or bleakness – and we value it accordingly. We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.”

- Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind

“We walk’d upon the very brink, in a literal sense, of Destruction; one Stumble, and both Life and Carcass had been at once destroy’d. The sense of all this produc’d different motions in me, viz., a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled...”

- John Dennis, in a letter to a friend about his alpine travels in the summer of 1688

Badlands is a group exhibition that deals with themes of chaos, disorder, transformation, and the sublime in the work of four painters: Henry Tyrrell, Ollie Guyon, Emily Mary Barnett, and George Chapman. Each painter touches on their own idea of the sublime in their painting practice through the instability and unpredictability of painting. Edmund Burke first articulated the notion of the sublime in 1757 as the relationship between the feeling of terror associated with the savage landscape, and the passion that it aroused in our imagination:

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

These ideas were later taken up by the Romantic painters of the nineteenth century, who sought out the sublime in nature. Burke was writing at a time marked by a perspective shift on how bleak and inhospitable landscapes were viewed. Mountains, along with canyons, volcanos, deserts, and arctic landscapes, changed from being viewed as unpleasant or harsh to savagely beautiful environments – places that challenged classical notions of beauty, and were in themselves physically challenging for the explorers and walkers who sought out their beauty first-hand. As Robert Macfarlane phrased it, “Solitude, deathliness, sterility, barrenness, inhumanity – these were the qualities of a landscape which Romanticism had made so appealing.”

In contrast to the Romantic view of the sublime, the artists in this exhibition seek out the sublime in the form and materiality of painting. The act of painting is a difficult gamble. Given paint’s unpredictable qualities, the artist is never fully in control of the outcome. Yet the painter proceeds with their experiment in spite of the odds that they will fail, to create something that is both savage and beautiful.

Emily Mary Barnett’s paintings are concerned with expressive bodily gestures, movement, and the physical properties of paint. Barnett uses improvisation and rule-bound procedures, testing the limits and contradictions of intuition and spontaneity. Her work is driven by an urge to represent the intangible – a feeling or particular moment in time – and the viewer is invited to decipher these representations. Barnett presents a tactile and sculptural canvas imbued with energy, which provokes the viewer’s natural yet frustrated desire to reach out and touch the work: teasing our familiar primal responses. More recently, her work has explored the moving canvas: propping, tearing, draping and pinning it loosely against the wall, moving it as the paint drips, using different consistencies of paint to affect the weight, speed and accuracy as it follows the canvas’s moving contours. In a moment of orchestrated chaos, the canvas seeks to escape the wall.

Henry Tyrrell’s paintings depict dark, cryptic landscapes. By gradually building up the painted, monochromatic surface and then scraping away to reveal new textures and formations, Tyrrell has created paintings that are both fascinating and unsettling for evoking a feeling of chaos and uncertainty in the composition. Looking at his ambitious canvases, it’s difficult to grasp the plane or perspective, where odd shapes can look either like landscape formations or like spontaneous shapes emerging from the subconscious. Tyrrell’s paintings point to something fantastical or otherworldly, recalling primitive, unconscious symbolism and archetypes. At the same time the basic conventions of painting, like gesture, symbol and the substance of oil paint itself, are played with through his use of increasingly heavy duty application techniques.

Ollie Guyon’s work is rooted within the expanded field of painting. It questions the possibilities of what painting is. These paintings explore the object potential of space, colour, line and edge. Raised planes are used as a device to create tension between surface and depth. The effect of light on concave and convex surfaces extends the tonality of a given colour field. The fabric of the work explores the dichotomy between minimalist composition with historical painting methodologies: in particular, adding pigment to handmade gesso to create a tinted ground. The gesso is wet-sanded and polished to varying degrees to create different effects. The finished surface is traditionally considered as a preparatory painting ground which creates a paradox, in that these object paintings may also be considered as non-paintings.

George Chapman’s paintings deal with urban spaces that have frequently become derelict and imbued with a haunted sense of failure, emptiness, and nostalgia. Chapman uses colours that are emotive and create a subjective impression of the derelict space, as though viewing it from memory or in a dream. He treats the surfaces of his paintings according to the feeling of the space he is trying to depict: colours may be poured directly onto raw canvas or the impression of a space may be built up only to be degraded or defaced to reflect a time-worn aspect. In this sense, Chapman’s works are about blight and disintegration, but also about the fine line between the evocative nature of memory and the unsettling feeling that you are permanently estranged from home.

These themes, of the innate disorder in creating something new, of material transformation, of the search for the sublime in repellent or inhospitable surfaces, are what we look to question in this exhibition. Chances are taken and accidents embraced. It is only by accepting the odds of a chaotic outcome – of inherent instability when pushing the medium or ground to their material or chemical thresholds – that we resolve a composition, often with unexpected results.

Artist Biographies

Emily Mary Barnett, b. 1984, recently completed the Turps Banana Off-site Painting
Programme between 2020-21. She has shown in various group exhibitions in London, including at Craft Central Gallery, Unit 3 Projects Gallery, Dronica Arts Festival, Power Lunches, and Deceased17 Gallery. She has also shown at The Reading Room in Wales and East Jesus Gallery in California.

Henry Tyrrell, b. 1984, received an MA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2018 and a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2012. He has shown in group exhibitions in London including at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, Thames-side Studios Gallery, Charlton Gallery, Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop and OHSH Projects. He had a solo exhibition called Purkinje Flying at GlaxoSmithKline, Brentford in 2014. He participated in the Radical Residency at the Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop, London in 2019 and in the Fine Art Collective Griffin Gallery Residency at Col Art in London in 2017.

Ollie Guyon, b. 1994, received a BA in Fine Art from Bath School of Art in 2017. He has shown in group exhibitions at Divisible Projects in Ohio, USA, Elysium Gallery in Cardiff for the 2018 Beep Painting Prize Biennial, and shown numerous times at Centrespace Gallery in Bristol. Earlier this year he was part of a group show on expanded painting at General Practise in Lincoln, and is currently participating in A Generous Space also currently at Hastings Contemporary, as well as a prospective group show at Gallery North in Newcastle later this year.

George Chapman, b. 1988, received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2010 and recently completed the Turps Banana Off-site Painting Programme between 2020-21. He has shown in group exhibitions in South Africa, the UK, and Portugal, including at Thames-side Studios Gallery, Norval Foundation, and PADA Studios Gallery. In 2017, he held a solo exhibition at Art Hub Studios Gallery in Deptford, and in 2021 he held a joint exhibition with Will Thorburn at Space Gallery in Folkestone as part of the 2021 Folkestone Fringe programme. In 2019, he participated in the PADA Studios residency programme in Lisbon.

Listening Paintings - People in their places

Opening Dates and Times
Exhibition period 26th Jan - 6th Feb 2022
Wed - Fri 13:00 - 18:00
Sat & Sun 12:00 - 18:00
And by appointment ned@nedcampbell.co.uk

These pictures are portraits in the traditional sense – individual sitters at a moment in time; people in their places. The subjects are alone in their familiar space listening to their own private thoughts. They are aware of being looked at, but over the course of a sitting I observe them getting lost in their thoughts, communing with themselves. 

The writer Paul Beatty said that when you listen to yourself listen, it adds some layers between what you’re thinking and what you think you’re thinking. It’s what I watched my sitters do, and what I was conscious of doing myself as I painted them. Together, my pictures examine passages of inner life from a particular milieu at this particular time.

The pictures share certain other qualities that contribute to the sense of a group. They combine flat graphic shapes with splashy, loose marks and fully rendered areas. Some make explicit the underlying geometry of a composition – its artificiality – others find subtle ways to draw it out. It’s a search for a natural organisation, a ‘rightness’, in the feeling of an image. 

This formal investigation tries to make and keep an emotional connection with the subject – the rational, ordered and structured merged with the subjective and imaginative. It’s two ideas at once: knocking Neoclassicism and Romanticism together to see what comes out. 

About me 

I studied at Yale University School of Art. My early career in editorial design and publishing in the United States expanded to my role as a creative director at Wolff Olins in London, and my subsequent work as a brand consultant to arts organisations. I have always been a painter.

ned@nedcampbell.co.uk and Instagram @n_e_d_art