Exhibitions

MA Fine Art Summer Show 3 - 8th July 23

Echoes

8-11th June 2023. 11 Avenue Studios, South Kensington

Echoes presents the work of three London-based artists working with family archives to launch enquiries into memory, belonging and forgotten histories. Engaging with personal photographs and inherited objects, their painting practices explore how dialogues with the past locate the artist in a space of shared cultural memory.

Painting items discovered in her family basement, Maggie Shafran projects a desire for familial connection onto the inanimate, inventing a world where the lines between inheritance and appropriation are blurred. StevieRay Latham’s haunted images explore the disjuncture between memory & and history by using painting as an interface where photography and oral histories can coalesce. Jane Hughes’ work evokes Freudian concepts of the uncanny as the artist excavates a collection of photographs and films which had been hidden from her family for many years.

Biographies:

Maggie Shafran is an American artist residing in London completing her MA in painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. Maggie’s practice examines her collection of thrifted and inherited items through an embodied approach to painting. Maggie received her BA in Fine Art from Pitzer College and a Graduate Diploma from RCA. Her artwork resides in prestigious collections throughout the US and in the UK and is represented by Gail Severn Gallery.

Jane Hughes is a London-based contemporary artist. She is currently enrolled on an MA in Painting at Camberwell College of Art having graduated from Chelsea College of Art in 2022. In her painting, Jane utilises her family photographic archive to interrogate the power that exists within the family dynamic and the authorship of memory. She has exhibited widely in the UK and her work is located in various private collections.

StevieRay Latham is a South London-based artist and musician, currently studying for an MA in Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. StevieRay’s paintings combine family photographs and folkloric imagery to explore ideas of memory and remembrance. Since graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University in 2014, he has performed and exhibited around the world and his works hang in private and public collections across the UK.

Convergence

17-20th October 2023. A-B Galleries, Camberwell Art College

Artists Showing

Alexandra Diana Costea

Emotion Etched: The Feel of Nature 2023 - Digital print on wallpaper and print-screen

Alexandra is interested in creating artwork by combining photographs of natural scenery and printmaking to alleviate her anxious mind. She believes that nature has a therapeutic effect on the human brain. The artist uses natural landscapes to heal her mind and, in the process, to help others the same way it has helped her. Alexandra discovered the potential of healing through nature while dealing with her trauma and anxiety from when she was a sick child. Through drawing and printmaking, she wants to create compositions that can help people remember nature's potential for a stressed mind and body. At the same time, Alexandra hopes that her art immerses people in the same journey as her, the journey to heal and enjoy nature's beauty.

Sofia Alrich Veytia

Untitled 2023 - Hydro-coat etching on Hahnemühle paper 53 x 78c

Sofia Alrich Veytia is a visual artist born in Mexico City, currently based in London. Her visual and theoretical research investigates the correspondence between spirituality, the natural realm, humanity, and the cosmos. She attempts to make substance of something that in its essence is transient, fleeting, or intangible, through amorphous figures that resemble the microcosm and macrocosm simultaneously. She is currently working mainly with intaglio printmaking, photography, and video as a means of thinking through an image in various steps, digitally manipulating the source material, dissecting it, and transforming it, wherein each mark diverges from the original source and intertwines with another.

Jane Hughes

No Man’s Land 2023 - 7 paintings, acrylic on gesso board - Virginia, Sylvia, Patricia, Mileva, Elsa, Catherine, Una

Jane’s practice explores ‘authority’, secrets and the obscured within the home through the mediums of paintings, film and installation. ‘No Man's Land’ is her series of portraits of some of history's forgotten wives. Women who, though married to renowned figures in the world of art, politics and science, have been anonymised, abandoned or erased from history. Psychologically powerful, these small-scale paintings force us to meet these women's intense and unflinching gaze and not turn away. By telling their stories Jane hopes to begin to open up the discourse on power as measured through absence and silence and make way for alternative histories to be told.

Eleanor Street

untitled 2023 - photo-emulsion on porcelain 5x7 cm

Eleanor uses images of landscape to explore memory and the grief arising from the loss of both parents. Her work considers ways of navigating and containing unruly emotions and of attempting to capture and preserve particular moments spent in the landscape, in the face of fallible, fragile memory.

Eleanor uses the idea of transitional objects to create tiny things which evoke or encapsulate something much larger; and describe intimate, personal emotions that also have universal salience. These two pieces use photographs taken by her father in Scotland nearly 30 years ago.

Joy Stokes & Eleanor Street

Dialectics of the Skin 2023

Fluid Dynamic 2023

Although Joy and Eleanor’s work differs conceptually, visually and methodologically, they have found a connection that has meant their interests and something have evolved in parallel, over the course of the MA.

Dialectics of the Skin considers the paradox of the skin’s fragility in the context of lymphodema – needing regular heavy moisturisation with thick, greasy creams to prevent cracking and tearing – with its function as barrier between the body and world.

Fluid Dynamics references the importance of water to our physical selves, as well as to our emotional being.

Song Yuhuan

Red 2023 - etchings on Somerset Satin paper

Yuhuan uses abstraction to explore landscape as a metaphor for the female body. In her work, she reflects on her own experience and emotional expression as a woman. The red flowers and the ink-like horizon attempt to express the symbols of life force as women understand it and the personal experience of women’s existence.

Joy Stokes

etchings on Somerset Satin paper

Carmen Van Huistedde

porcelain

Te Palandjian

Garden Bed 2023 - Ink on starched paper

Te Palandjian sculpts using the mark-making movements of digging. Her work, being as much about process as it is about materiality, attempts to transform naturally-sourced and man-made mediums—casting with them, compressing them, or revealing features of them—to uncover the critical role that materiality plays in the context of archaeology, landscape art, and the politics of the garden. By re-processing her materials over and over, from the primary holes she digs, to the tertiary, texturized and compressed paper cast of a plaster cast of that hole, the audience is pressed to analyse her initial digging action. Palandjian asks, what does it mean to study a dug artifact, as an archaeologist does, when the artifact is the hole itself? And thus, what happens when the phenomenology of hole-digging and the maker of the hole are the focus of analysis and critique?