Am pleased to say that I have got a place on the artists’ mentoring programme with Conditions, based in Croydon South London. I’ve been following the alternative art education scene for some time, it is a vital resource when conventional art education is becoming so expensive in the UK, and also a key site where art education and practice is being rethought. The course is mainly online but includes artist talks at their shopfront space in the Whitgift Centre. Which is doubly resonant to me - like coming back around a circle - as it was where we used to hang out as young teenagers when just built - one of the first (and pretty unsuccessful) shopping malls.
Studio!
So pleased to have found a studio under the railway arches in Beck Road, Hackney, London. As my work develops, extra space (and storage) becomes essential. Also great to have the company of other artists and some exhibition/photography space.
Chronos, Stockholm
It’s been a fabulous few months visiting galleries internationally that are working with disabled and non-normative artists to explore how we might occupy the world differently. At the Tensta konsthall in Stockholm Chronos: health access and intimacy, co-curated by Olivia Plender and Cecilia Widenheim which runs until the beginning of September 2024.
It asks ‘Whose body standards have shaped the society in which we live? And what can we learn from the disability rights struggles that demand access to the city and the built environment?' The exhibition takes its point of departure in the architectural practice of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative in 1980s and 90s London—of which I was a co-founder— to ask questions about bodies, minds, health and space. I was there to give a talk about The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, and to see the work, so many overlaps with my own concerms.
Showing in Sheffield
Pleased to have a piece accepted at the wonderful Cupola Gallery in Sheffield, for their open exhibition entitled Undercurrents. The show takes it’s theme from synonyms of undercurrent:
1: a current below the upper currents or surface
2: a hidden opinion, feeling, or tendency often contrary to the one publicly shown
There are forces that flow underneath all our lives, shaping how we live and changing nature itself.
There are 44 artists represented, with wide ranging work across Painting, Printmaking, Ceramics, Photography, Textiles. I am showing Made Up.
Undercurrents runs from 13th July to 17th August 2024.
The Pleasures We Choose
It was a great pleasure to go to the opening of The Pleasures We Choose - the exhibition in the Pavilion of Finland at the Venice Biennale this year. Curated by Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela, it features artists Pia Lindmann, Vidhya Saumya and Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen, which as the associated publication says "‘weaves together the work of three artists whose practices are acutely informed by their embodied experiences of structural, environmental and social imbalances in the world’’. The pavilion aims to be transformed into a space ‘in which audiences are exposed to different “occupancies” - entangled relationships between people, buildings, objects and spaces - and are invited to re-adjust and (re-) consider how different bodies are expected to look and behave according to social norms’.
I was invited to the private view because I wrote something for The Pleasures We Choose publication entitled Disrupting the Gallery. This was a fantastic opportunity to work with such thoughtful and social committed curators - helping me think critically about the nature of “spectatorship” as a form of problematic embodiment; and how we might re-imagine artistic content, encounters with the work and the spaces of the gallery itself, by starting with non-normative bodies and minds.