To The Studio

Jessie Makinson's work is darkly erotic and draws from influences including Ursula Le Guin, British folklore, stories of travelers, myths of pre-agricultural societies, 17th and 18th-century erotica, Flemish kitchen scenes, science fiction, and early Renaissance altarpieces. Makinson readdresses a patriarchal past from a female perspective. Plucking themes and narratives from historical precedent, she creates a bold new context for the motifs she selects. Vivid colors describe tense, erotic scenes in which women are dangerous active participants, not passive permission givers. Makinson’s characters practice rituals, they embrace, plot, and conspire. They hold sexual power and disrupt expectations, inhabiting a universe that surprises, delights, and tests its audience.

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Ben Edmunds is a London-based painter, whose deconstructionist approach takes him into sculpture, branding, useful objects and wearable equipment. He is best known for his large scale paintings that combine tropes of modernist abstraction with stylised accents of extreme sports. Drawing on his background in sailing, windsurfing and cycling, his work explores the transcendental possibilities of painting as well as these outdoor leisure pursuits, all the time questioning the assumed anti-utilitarianism of painting and asking “what can an artwork do?”.

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Underwritten into his dyed canvases, handmade carbon fibre components and short incidents of text is the sense that we are unsatisfied, in a perpetual state of wanting and desire. We live in a world of seductive adverts, property ladders, job promotions and romantics affairs, all the while searching in the dark as the clock is ticking. His paintings evoke a distant horizon, something you can never reach or obtain, framed by the equipment you might need for the journey.

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Alongside his painting practice, in 2019 Ben set up Aspirational Equipment. A pseudo sports and lifestyle brand for romantics, it provides tools for explorers and dreamers. It recognises the act of searching as a fundamental human driving force, and the state of being on the way somewhere as a part of the human condition..

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Tamu Nkiwane is a London-based artist whose work examines his surrounding environment and considers the way value – as a fiscal and cultural consideration – is accumulated and transferred within it.

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John Strutton is an artist, musician and academic based in London. John’s work ranges across painting, drawing, installation, moving image, sound and performance. The work often uses the strategy of accrual to deal with a visual form of veneration and cultural reclamation. The resulting installations of paintings, drawings and objects become a kind of makeshift memorial, an ex–voto offering where nostalgia becomes a form of revenge. The sedimentary process creates a convoluted cosmos of effigies, mandalas, portraits and trophies, a graveyard whose architecture is sustained by anxiety. Sometimes brutal, often absurd, his approach to figuration is fractured, automatic and schizophrenic.

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Karolina Albricht (b. 1983 in Krakow) is a London based artist and curator. Karolina graduated with an MA from The Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow in 2008. Prior to that she completed Socrates-Erasmus at ArtEZ Institute of Fine Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands in 2007. Karolina Albricht thinks of painting as an opening, a stretching beyond dimensionality and optical perception. Its process is driven by curiosity, a desire to see what is possible by negotiating new configurations of form, colour and surface. It is her attempt to generate an active space, an environment which can be perceived and responded to through our intellectual and physical faculties. It is rich, paradoxical, and flexible, embracing a reality in all its multiplicity, its continuous mutation- a state of becoming and a state of exchange. Albricht is interested in the relationship of the body and the space; the way a body corresponds to the space it occupies, how it recalibrates as it moves through it. What she is searching for in painting is a kind of a gap, a dislocation- a glimpse of a possibility.

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Scott McCracken (b. 1987 in Falkirk) is a painter and occasional writer and curator living and working in London. Scott’s recent paintings bring together modelled, volumetric forms - spheres, cones, and cylinders are assembled into a configuration that points towards a type of imaginary still life. The geometric substructure within these paintings exists as a binding, yet elastic force, where elements are held in position, suspended in a field of shallow depth. The motifs are pushed together, juxtaposed and conjoined, fluctuating between the diagrammatic and the corporeal, never fully settling as either.

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Mark Selby’s practice mainly revolves around sculpture, installation and film, using an engineering approach to materials, computation and mechanics in order to explore how images, objects and human agency are affected by technological rationality. Creating and collaborating with machines to develop often complex and elongated processes of making, his work asks questions of access to information from both their aesthetics and function; asking what the potential and limits of programming, rules and instructions can offer.

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Jordan Baseman’s work is best described as a synthesis of reportage, portraiture, documentary, creative non-fiction, narrative practices, that are combined with experimental filmmaking techniques.

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We were invited to Jordans Studio for our chat, which is based in East London. Our chat travels through stories of destroyed self portraits, working in a Emergency Psychiatric Unit, the intimacy of computers, putting screwdrivers through paintings and allowing space for hard work.

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Emma Talbot is an artist based in London and is winner of the 8th Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Through drawing, painted silk hangings, 3 dimensional forms, installation, sound and - most recently - animation, Emma has developed a distinct visual world.

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Her work explores personal subjectivity, which is then cast into the wider context of prevalent contemporary concerns  - such as our relationships with nature, our intimate engagement with technology, the way we communicate and power structures. Emma’s work has a hand-drawn, direct quality - using combinations of figurative imagery, painted text and flowing pattern to articulate non linear narratives.

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Recent exhibitions include GEM Kunstmuseum, The Hague, A 2019 ArtNight Commission at William Morris Gallery, London, Tate St Ives, Turner Contemporary and Arcadia Missa New York

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Emma has forthcoming solo exhibitions at Eastside Projects Birmingham, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Kunsthalle Giessen, Germany, The Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti.

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Tahmina Negmat is currently on a year-long residency at the Carpenters Wharf Studios in Hackney Wick and

making paintings about Joe Exotic from Tiger King in her quarantine flat in Moscow.

Tahmina treats her studio as a spectacle arena where she wants to throw a real

celebration for the anti-hero the Trickster ("A demonic-comic double of a

cultural hero, endowed with the features of a naughty dodger”. For her The Trickster is

the main protagonist of today and takes a lot of inspiration from cinema

and books.

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As a way into this thinking Tahmina explains that her painting ‘Endless Infatuations with Malcolm Mcdowell', which you can see over on our instagram page is a tribute towards my obsession over the portrait of the antihero. Sh says ‘I have a real antagonistic reaction to pitch-perfect moralism, as I think I see most

things that are perfect and clean-cut as a nice antisocial package where the

whole investment goes towards oneself. However the anti-heroes are raw,

and they are rare. They have this weird self conflicted duality going on.

Similarly like looking at the rock in Goya’s painting and never quite seeing

just the rock, but the tripled eyed devil, ongoing mutating faces, a depiction

of the birth of something and the whole mortality is in that rock. So I see the

same rawness and wrongness in the rounded and enlarged facial features

of Malcolm McDowell who played a lead role in Kubrick’s “Clockwork

Orange”. And Malcolm’s face is round and beautiful like it’s been sat on by

the birth of Venus.

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Gala is a London based multidisciplinary artist. Engaging with ideas of value, taste, hierarchy and absurd labour, her work is the aftermath of a reaction to substance and situation. Materials and actions become metonymic, swapping roles between quotidian interactions and traditional art processes.

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She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and City and Guilds Art School London. She has been selected for exhibitions with The Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the Great Exhibition Road Festival, The London Design Festival with Mint Gallery, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz in Berlin, and Galerie der HBKsaar in Saarsbrucken. Bell has had commissions by BBC One and Tate and Lyle for her sugar sculptures, with a piece acquired by the Tate and Lyle Museum archive in London. She has been included in publications with Dazed magazine and Art Reveal, with interviews by BBC One Tribe and The Royal Docks.

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Neena Percy and Lizzy Drury studied together on the MA Painting Programme at the RCA. Since graduating, the pair formed Hot Desque, a collaboration in which they curate theatrically presented site-specific group exhibitions, staging artworks together within a mise-en-scene. They encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations between practitioners, have written essays and hosted an artist talk as part of Art Licks Weekend, that addressed issues around ‘work culture’ and jobs alongside developing an artistic practice.

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Laurence Owen was born in Gloucester and now lives and works in London.

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He completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Royal Academy Schools, London in 2015, and holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Falmouth College of Art in Cornwall.

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I caught up with Laurence a week or so after the opening of his exhibition Gerund, where Laurence showed a completely new body of work that split across both Zublowicz Collection and Lychee One Galleries in London.

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Recent solo exhibitions include those at Galerie PCP, Paris,

And Evelyn Yard, London.

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Group exhibitions include Mushrooms: The art, design and future of fungi, Somerset House, London,

Drawing Biennial, Drawing Room, London,

Something Else, Triumph Gallery, Moscow,

Absent Bodies, OSL Contemporary, Oslo

John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

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Luca George was in Brighton in 1990, he graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2013 and the Royal College of Art in 2019. Recent exhibitions, projects and performances include, London and the Devil at Brockley Gardens, William Blake and the idea of the artist (organised by and taking place at both Paul Mellon Centre and Tate Britain), The Ghost of the Flea Under the Bridge as part of Mark Leckey's Tate Britain retrospective 'O magic power of bleakness at Tate Britian' and Sour Persimmons Chasm at Ex-Baldessarre (curated by Andy Holden).

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Luca George is the ghost of a flea, he is a leaf on a tree, he's the angel hesitating near, he's the human being full of fear, he is dread, he is anguish and he is a sandwich...

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