13 – 17 July 2021
GALLERY 2
Curated by Kia Matanky-Becker
This exhibition explores the unraveling and reimagining of bodies, environments and ideas. These works invert the rules of the everyday and present new bodily and cognitive possibilities. Many of the artists in this show use dreamscapes as a medium for exploring the boundaries between the body and its environment. This exploration is conducted through a playful use of material whether that be painting, drawing or textiles based tuftings. The imagery is often surreal and humorous yet at the same time there is a real sensibility and intimacy about them. Like we as the viewer are being let in on a strange secret.
Catherine Lette is a contemporary visual artist living and working in London. In today’s multi-layered environment we can be simultaneously in one space and another, embodied and disembodied. Inspired by current events, Lette paints and draws figures dissembled in relation to her gaze, framed by the real and virtual spaces we occupy. Her practice questions the impact of contemporary life upon body and mind and how that might be manifested in a portrayal of the figure. Lette sees the body as a fluid entity that is both projected upon and viewed introspectively.
Elina Flyrin is originally from Stockholm (Sweden) and is now based in Brighton. She has studied at Goldsmiths University of London, Dômen Konstskola and Nyckelviksskolan. In her work Flyrin presents an abstract map of co-existing dimensions which she has imagined, categorised and named. The Physical, The Intangible and The Realities of Change, collectively referred to as The Parallel. Together they provide an alternative description of the world through these dimensions of perception. The Parallel is not an alien space, but one that is in and between.
Hermione Shaw is an artist based in London and recent graduate of Goldsmiths College. In her work, Shaw explores varying emotional states, pulling her imagery from the imaginal realm. Often delving into both the psychological and mystical, she attempts to access an instinctual and subconscious part of herself. This results in her paintings being open and ambiguous, revelling in the paradoxical clashes of different ways of perceiving the immaterial. She uses colour to signal these emotional states, and figuration as a way to embody them. She is concerned with how to apprehend these images with technique and has spent a lot of time experimenting with oil paint application.
The readability of figures as being identifiably human creates an access point that operates as logical, but the painting’s ability to defy linear time and the way they surrender to emotion and beauty, allows the viewer to enter the world of the painting without any need for anecdotal or external context, and enter in to other, less easily- accessible parts of their consciousness.
Karolina Dworska was born in Rzeszów, Poland and is currently Based in London after graduating from Goldsmith College in 2020. Dworska’s practice explores fantasy spaces and utilises the imagined ‘in-between’ as an ambiguous backdrop for her work and its surreal inhabitants. her imagery often comes from her dreams, and their strange, humorous symbolism and motifs. The meditative state of dreaming is used to examine the strangeness of inhabiting a body and acts as a new lens with which to view the everyday. Her work aims to map out the dreamscape, and blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy, using a textile based medium known as tufting to create her intricate pieces.
