LCN Artists’ Profiles #5
The following artists have been selected as part of the fifth round of London Creative Network at SPACE. The fifth edition of the SPACE / LCN Showcase opens Thu 13 Sept, 6 – 9pm, where works from the following artists will be exhibited:
Anna Lytridou’s practice is inspired by her personal experiences with the physical environment. Her artworks are an expression of her immersion within the world; taking inspiration from her travels across varied landscapes from urban to rural. The visual language layers different sources of imagery taken from the real, the perceived and the imagined. The artworks offer a multitude of interpretations to find ways to map out our sensory perceptions, through a variety of mediums and styles. They are approached from many angles that can be read as aerial, cross-sectional or multidimensional. They encourage a new narrative, asking us to consider how we view, remember and record our surrounding landscapes.
The artworks occur in a variety of forms; Lytridou works across drawing, painting and installation denying a tangible structure for her perceived spaces. She activates the in-between space by combining oil paint, ink, marker pens, thread and onto paper, fabrics, canvas, wooden boards, metal sculptural interventions; to create a jarring of material characteristics.
Becky Brewis’ work is about the layers of human experience that places accumulate over time and the images that get left behind when life moves on. She is interested in how we interpret, revise and give form to the past and to our own lives through narratives. She mainly draws, but has also worked with audio, video and writing. Through whichever medium she is working, her work always involves – and is about – a layering up of surfaces. With graphite this includes taking rubbings of actual surfaces which interact with drawn images, so that the paper becomes a repository for images, after-images and fingerprints, with the grubbiness of handling incorporated into the final image. At the moment she is particularly interested in how we make and edit the versions of past events we want to keep while, at the same time, the versions which haven’t made the final cut remain on the periphery of our vision.
Byzantia Harlow considers gaps between source and sample, re-assembling such fissures to create veneers of truth, whose effigies may become more meaningful than the original.
Alongside sculptural concerns, her participatory projects engage wide-ranging communities and professionals through collaborations, creating works which blur lines of audience / participant and artwork / prop and can include satellite elements circulated within public realms.
Harlow has recently become involved with various groups including; psychedelic societies, religious and spiritual healers and what some refer to as ‘cults’, to investigate faith, trust, coercion and genuine experience versus artificial effect, in order to create works of constructed ritual encounter.
Chloe Cooper uses performative tours, instructional videos and role play to splash about in the rocky waters of human relationships under the influence of capitalism, through the prism of sexual politics and via the authorised narratives of cultural institutions. For LCN she’s investigating the potentials of paper marbling as a visual language to express expanded representations of sexuality, gender and desire. Basing this enquiry at the London Centre for Book Arts, she’s asking questions such as, can the reciprocal fluidity of floating pools of colour articulate alternative understandings of which bodies are passive and which bodies are active during sex?
Francesca de Bassa is a London based experimental artist and film maker. She focuses on animation to narrate stories and analyse people’s behaviours and global paths of relating in between each other in a contemporary society. Her practise is eclectic: prints, tattoos, dance, music, illustration, paper cut and so much more. She’s now developing a new way of communication which tries to link together all these different mediums through animation. Experimenting and crafting are the keys of her artistic process, all coming together after a long process of research and study.
Departing from the body and the ways in which its skin is affected by its encounters with others, Gonçalo Birra’s practice unfolds into a re-writing of seemingly familiar scenarios where things (objects, bodies and others) have been actively disposed of their narratives, as if what they mean is no longer fixated onto their surfaces. Informed by a research and interest in current political, social, economical and environmental issues, the practice is preoccupied with the violent discourses directed at othered bodies, as well as authoritarian and hermetically contained conceptions of experience, home and sexuality.
Developing on proposing scenarios and lexicons of an absurd nature, the work aims to anecdotally expose the bruises that result from the violent relationships between bodies and the environments they inhabit. While introducing a glitch in meaning-making mechanisms, the work navigates through various mediums to generate a gap for something else to take place.
Jackie Chettur’s practice is underpinned by a use of narrative and by the elaborate construction of new versions of known cultural forms. Recently she has immersed herself in the world of literary fiction, reworking well-known novels with an ambition to show how a text might work through a reader. Using the techniques of conceptual writing and systems as ways to distill the text, reduced versions of novels now exist as a residue from earlier readings and simultaneously operate as strange poetic forms. Print, publishing, photography and performance are all used to make material these memories of a text.
Working primarily with foam and coloured wax, Jamie Fitzpatrick‘s practice spans sculpture, audio and drawing. His work looks at our desire to be seduced by visual forms of power and control exhibited through totemic public gestures and figurative rhetoric. Through mimicking these sculptural gestures in his own works, he is interested in the struggle and relationship to culture and conditioning, and its manifestations in tyranny, trauma or brutality. Many of his sculptures use elements of movement and spoken audio. Initially used as a way to break the expectations of permanence he has become increasingly interested in the idea of how we build both personal and national identities and the possibilities of narrative within these works.
Through humour, derision and storytelling the sculptures create a form of hyper-reality, pitting archetypal narratives against the messier realities of human drives and desires. Working towards installations of sculptural environments, new works have aimed at environments that visualise the imaginings of the parallel world inherent within the modern human psyche. To this end, through a variety of media, figurative sculptures replace human actors, becoming makeshift puppets through which he investigates, through infantile play, the subjective world within the limits of an exhibited interior world.
Julie F Hill is a British artist who works between photography, sculpture, installation and writing to explore astronomical and cosmological representations and the technologies used to construct them. She finds inspiration in science fiction and horror to conjure imaginative environments of cosmic encounter. While at LCN she is developing new imagery for her installations by working with deep learning/neural networks trained on ‘unprocessed’ images from the Hubble Space Telescope with advice and support from the Space Telescope Science Institute (USA) and computer programmer Doug Neal. Attempting to conjure a total view of the cosmos, the work highlights connections between magical thinking, science and technology.
Kate Terry is a British artist whose work explores architectural space, geometry, balance, and colour. Working with site-specific thread installations, she draws from the rigorous regularity of Minimalism, and the basic tenets of symmographic craft constructions, her works explore the interplay of the hand crafted in relation to repetitious and serial forms and gestures. Her sculptures; using painted wood, steel, perspex and more recently, brass; consider concerns of weight and presence with direct emphasis on their physicality, with often balanced, open geometric shapes. Currently she is developing new works for sculpture gardens and the public realm.
Katrin Hanusch’s works are full of contradictions, disparate yet tied through a personal approach. The main motifs borrow from real life with a genuineness to be distorted by humour, poetics and quick gestures that create improvised situations overshadowed by an irreverent communication pin-balling between the profundity and pointlessness of it all. Currently, Katrin works with modified LED screens beside her ongoing practice in sculpture and drawing. Her work is process-orientated and driven by a genuine curiosity in making, material and the unknown. Observation, experiments and (everyday) conversations are tools and methods to investigate patterns and an aesthetic of uncertainty in a world where only humour can save us.
Lena Nix is an Irish artist and filmmaker based in London whose practice engages with documentary themes and storytelling. Through the use of video, photography and audio recordings her work explores personal and collective memories and histories. As part of the LCN programme Lena is developing a project which has evolved from 15 years of collecting and documenting objects that were sent to her as gifts from home, often objects arrived without explanation, and have become in themselves a mode of communication. The collection of over 500 objects have been photographed and categorised and will form part of a printed publication and collaborative exchange.
Lorrice Douglas uses installation, photography, sound and written texts, to engage with audiences on the historical, archival and fictional, and the way the ambiguities are experienced by the viewing subject. Lorrice is drawn to the poetic aspects of analysing matter and ways in which technology is used to quantify the past. She is currently researching the working methods of archaeologists and their relationships with fragments at the British School at Athens.
Drawing on interpretations of the spaces in which we live, Sun Ju Lee’s work tackles the way we recognise the significance of place. She collates thousands of photographs, most often of shadows of people and objects, which she compiles together and merges to create a scene. The resultant images are converted into various hues combining the linearity and materiality of drawing, printing and glass. The works compress an accumulation of experiences and notations as well as re-establish the sense of movement and duration that she explores in the works’ research and making.
Max Colson is an artist based in London, England. He uses animation to explore the construction of landscape and architectural forms. His films have been selected to screen at a number of internationally recognised film festivals including Sheffield Doc Fest (2018), Hamburg International Short Film Festival (2018) and the Bafta-recognised Aesthetica Short Film Festival (2017). He has had solo exhibitions at the Royal Institute of British Architects (2015) and arebyte (2017). He is a recipient of the Tenderflix/Tenderpixel Artist Video Award (2017) and also recently won Best Fiction Short at the Architecture Film Festival London (2017). He teaches on MA Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins.
Shai Chishty is a London based documentary photographer & visual artist exploring identity, representation and notions of ‘otherness’, particularly of Muslims in Britain. Shai uses news and mainstream media along with humour to challenge narratives which often serve to de-humanise, over simplify and reinforce a ‘them and us’ in society. Shai is currently extending her Lifting the Veil series, exploring the use of new technologies in furthering our understanding of face veiling in Britain.
Steph Parr works with moving image, drawing and writing to give meaning to non-meaning: Playing with how an audience can be drawn into a subject, not by spectacle or entertainment, but by stillness, lack of entertainment and the idea of boredom. Found banalities are framed to give significance and importance to the overlooked, whilst delivering a social comment.
Suzanne Moxhay’s practice explores the crossover between painting, photography and the cinematic through the creation of intricate photomontages, which combine many fragments of photographic and painted imagery. It involves elements of physical cut and paste, re-photographing and digitally manipulating images. The finished work presents what seems at first to be a simple space. But anomalies of texture, light, scale, movement and architecture prevent simple seeing, involving the viewer in the construction of the image. She draws inspiration from old film-making techniques, especially matte painting, the process of integrating painting on glass with live action on set to make a cinematic composite, a fictional space blending different forms of representation.
Veronika Lukasova is a Czech born, London based artist exploring the
Yukako Shibata’s work is a hybrid of painting, sculpture and installation. She explores the subliminal colours of both the natural and man-made world and question the complex interplay of light, atmosphere and the way in which we perceive these things. She finds beauty in all things mundane, with these moments of reverie embodied in the work. Colour is integral to the work. Some painted surfaces are deliberately hidden, so that what is visible is their reflection. She is intrigued by the powerful effect of latency. The reflected colours in her work are understated, quiet and yet have presence. The placement and viewing points of her work are an important consideration, with the environment in which the artwork is located feeding into the creative process. She views her artwork and the environment it is placed within as a whole. The intention is to offer a moment of clarity and serenity to the spectator. Creating is a form of meditation; an enjoyment of the slow evolution as the work comes into being.
