LCN Artists’ Profiles #2

April 2017

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The following artists have been selected as part of the second round of London Creative Network at SPACE.

The second edition of the SPACE / LCN Showcase opens Thu 15 June, 6 – 9pm. 

Alexa Wright uses a wide range of media, including photography, video, sound, interactive installation, performance and book works to explore narratives of otherness through the personal stories of people whose life experiences place them at the boundary of what is acceptably human. Working at the intersection of art and medical science, Alexa’s works explore human inter-subjectivity through qualities like vulnerability and empathy.

Alexis Zelda Stevens uses tactile materials and large-scale digital images to explore ideas around materiality and artifice. Her works come about through hands-on improvisation with materials to find forms that are ‘of the body’ and make visible the physicality that runs continuously and often undetected in the background of our daily experiences.

Antonio Marguet has a fascination for a world dominated by hybrid objects or quasi-objects that present themselves with human like qualities. Central to his work is the idea of animated materiality as a cultural product as well as the way materiality relates to an immaterial visual culture. He holds on the modern cult of the primitive man as a mythmaker and produces new imaginaries pending between abstraction and the concrete.

Ben Nathan’s pictorial practice responds to changes in the urban landscape across London and the UK. His observational material such as sketches and photographs are recorded during his study trips, and later used to prepare new compositions and viewpoints of existing urban spaces. The works attempt to ameliorate their subject, to offer an alternative way of looking at the infrastructure of the city.

Brigitte Parusel experiments with abstract and reductive frameworks to create three-dimensional forms. By repeating and studying the restrictions of geometrical systems, she is able to rebuild and stretch the system beyond imagination.  From paper sculptures to metal or wood, each material has its own set of strengths and weaknesses and the challenge is to negotiate these qualities to allow the form reach its full potential.

Cecilia Sjoholm’s practice considers concepts such as structure, scale and spatiality. Central to the work is an ongoing exploration into the notion of perception. It attempts to blur the distinction between drawing, painting and sculpture, with focus on ambiguity between two and three dimensional readings, volume and flatness. Site-specific works respond to context; either by giving potentially unseen particulars that make up “place” a way of encouraging attention, or where methods of measuring space on an abstract level is investigated.”

Cleo Broda has a particular interest in public space, boundaries and how people interact with and make their mark on the spaces they use or inhabit. She researches and gathers anecdotal information to observe how places are used as starting points for her projects. Her most recent work has been a collection of wearable pieces or ‘kits’, which enable a particular action in one location. These costumes bring attention to barriers to particular activities or uses of public space.

Eva Lis is an installation artist who creates site-specific work that interacts with  and comments on existing spaces. Existentialism, non-linear story telling, hypnotic and non-logical states of mind are the fundaments of her work, whose aim is to provoke while exploring ideas of ritual, symbol and ceremony.

Guy Oliver’s work explores notions of masculinity, identity, comedy and tragedy embracing a methodology that is both personal but irreverent. The act of appropriation is central to his interdisciplinary practice. Working with found footage, sampled imagery and sourced fragments of recent history, he is interested by incongruous examples of when these subjects intersect and collide with one another and how a sense of identity is created by the cultural input we choose to possess.

Helen Dixon’s extended notion of drawing practice employs key aspects of drawing, photography and print. Pen on paper drawings and screen prints on plastic act as the photographic negative and are printed using the cyanotype photographic process. While maps have clear practical applications, the data provided do not offer a true sense of the thing: she is interested in breaking down and finding beauty in scientific information usually addressed to individuals with specialist subject knowledge. Currently she’s using weather data from the MetOffice to create something beautiful and tactile.

Holly Gramazio (Matheson Marcault) works in collaboration with Sophie Sampson, focusing on how game design, physicality and carefully developed rules can be used to create new interactions between players, spaces and materials. By creating things that people want to touch or interact with, they are interested in interaction, pattern, embodied play, and games which allow players to think and connect in new ways by creating things that people want to touch or interact with. They are currently developing game structures which allow people to create a physical artwork over the course of play.

JMC Hayes’ multifarious work is dominated by one figure: the Fat Man. She is interested in understanding the complexities and multitudinous manifestations of this one figure. Playing out an awkward contemporary relationship with fatness and embracing Fat Man as an ambiguous and ambivalent carnival figure, the main character becomes a hybrid portrait of humanity unified in the creation of community celebration.

Katia Potapova is a documentary photographer whose focus is architecture and the city. With an eye for the way people engage and connect to the built environment around them, she has previously focused on cities such as Tbilisi, in Georgia. She is currently working on a similar series that focuses on the city of London.

Kristina Pulejkova is a multimedia artist who works at the intersection of art, science and technology. In her practice she builds a subjective narrative based on data and principles from the scientific disciplines of astronomy, physics, biology and ecology. Her main subjects of interest are time, ecosystems and mechanisms, looking for connections between man and machine, the organic and the mechanical.

Laura Moreton-Griffiths’ practice draws from her fascination for 21st century political narratives, their complexities and nonsenses. In an attempt to untangle them, her work delves through autobiographical and cultural memories. She has been making replicas of real objects from significant events that refer to real social constraints and is producing performance pieces using a cast of constructed characters.

Louisa Bailey is an artist, bookseller and publisher, who through an itinerant bookshop, a print on demand publishing studio and a project space, provides a platform for writers and artists to develop, produce and publish new work. Her way of working develops from a fascination with methods of research and the creative overlaps and intersections in artists’ lines of inquiry. She set up the London branch of Publication Studio, part of a network of 11 sibling studios creating, distributing and looking after the social life of freshly made paperbacks in cities around the world.

Millie Schwier’s practice investigates the spaces between people, both on an intimate level and in the wider social sense. She has recently focused on an investigation into natural cycles and processes that run on the capacity of care and reciprocal giving, in an attempt to understand the disconnect within our capitalist, consumerist society and our communal and social relations.

Pandora Vaughan’s practice focuses on designed space and the confinements inherent in regulated environments. Some of these are nostalgic and some are futuristic, some internal, some imposed. They explore sentiment and nostalgia as tools for coercion, the failure of collective memory in the public realm and the politics of land use. She uses a re-interpretation of ‘popular’ arts and texts in combination with intensive making. 

Queenie Clarke ’s practice highlights and challenges categories and conventions existent between art and architecture. She starts to work out what alterations can be made to an object by examining its element, whether it is the exterior of a space, a mechanism found in a toy or an escalator. By playing on the allusion to function, her work creates new interactions and relationships with ordinary day-to-day objects.

Rob Mullender is a multi-media artist, who works with sculpture, 2D, moving image, sounds and performance. His sounding objects take the form of sculptures, containing different analogue or acoustic sound production techniques, which are readably, and structurally part of the objects themselves. Often, a performative aspect to his practice comes to the fore; pieces may require activation, or are contextually bound by relations with bodies and places.

Rosanna Dean’s practice addresses conflicting ideologies surrounding representations of the divine. Seeking to establish connections between the ways in which societies have depicted religious belief, she combines the features of divergent practices from East to West to create work with a contemporary spiritualism. Using ecclesiastic paintings as her point of departure Dean’s work focuses on using light and patterning, and old master oil painting techniques to retell ecclesiastic narratives that encompass female and Eastern viewpoints.

Sarah Derat is interested in relationship between matter, body and space. Using minimalist-inspired aesthetic and dense narratives, her sculptures and installations are deeply rooted in current social topics and ethical concerns. Moral panics, rites, rituals and symbols are part of the lexicon she constantly try to dissect; from the vacuity of the over multiplied digital image to the virulence of violent online content. The importance of materiality – from the vibrancy of metal to the solidity of wood –  stem from the conceptual yet sensitive framing or her work.

Sineid Codd‘s work is a dialogue between the literal and the imaginative. She works with found objects, which she finds both evocative and compelling. Curiosity, intuition and combinatory play are the research tools through which she collaborates with analogue and digital processes to transform the object physically and aesthetically, to question and articulate the relationships we form with found objects, often in connection with place. In images, assemblages and installations, new possibilities are opened up and imagined narratives suggested. Space, the illusion of space, and repetition are animating elements in these works.

Soa J. Hwang’s practice asks questions about images and illusions, and the truth suggested by using painting as a communicative method. Her investigations are in relation to human’s ultimate fantasy of automation such as Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality. Computer-generated-imagery and programming language such as C# are means of her pictorial work. The audiences’ digital presence can interact with her creation, thereby reinventing painting as an evolutionary medium.

Will Thorburn’s work combines both the decorative and the anatomical to create an intermediate space in which the organic and inorganic merge. Influenced equally by the palettes of De Fauves and pop artists such as Tom Wesselmann, the works evoke sundrenched climates,  lime green contrasting with brilliant oranges and deep crimson. Forms suggesting limbs, internal organs, and plants intertwined in ambiguous combinations emerge from the canvas saturatedwith bright, clean colours.

Ute Decker makes minimalist yet bold sculptural jewellery, characterised by a distinctive method of sculpting, bending, and twisting gold and silver. Playing with volume, empty space and movement until the choreography of the architectural lines and the dynamic curvatures are distilled into an evocative construction, Ute’s jewels redefine the notion of body adornment.