Autumn 2023

Kaja Stumpf, Lucy Neish, Ladina Clement, Hamed Maiye, Hazel O’Sullivan and Sophie Knight

Kaja Stumpf

Kaja Stumpf (b. 1987, Norway) lives and works in London.

My recent work examines memory, self-representation, and the mind-body connection. I explore the idea of selective memory and cognitive bias as a means of self-preservation, and through painting, I visualise the rumination of potential scenarios between past and present.

Utilising staged images and the photographic family archive, I crop the scene and alter the colours to create a sense of delayed familiarity.

Lucy Neish

I paint on canvases knobbled by remnants of past paintings, working with their history to coax out a final version.

I take screenshots of films, or find inadvertently captured images in my camera roll, poach pictures from WhatsApp groups or screen shot instagram. I paint in thin films over the thick ground beneath. A baby hare (my dad took); a foal (Kendall Jenner’s- she posted on her story a while ago); a misty view (from the Harmony Korine film- Gummo); a twinkling disco ball (found in a friend’s camera roll).

Through a process of gathering and matching, I create filmic collections that take subjects out of context and play with how they are read. This process works in opposition to the digital exchange where images are time stamped and chronicled.

Painting these images through the same sepia green lens, they become unified by an implied gaze. They are tautologous, each recasting the same feeling of nostalgia. But my nostalgia is not rose-tinted; it is murky and unsettling.

In September last year I started joking that I had ‘debilitating nostalgia’. I would say it all the time and would feel it ALL the time too. I found it funny because how could nostalgia be threatening in this way?

Thinking back to old ways of seeing is as disorientating as it is comforting. Vivian Sobchack (Carnal Thoughts, Breadcrumbs in the forest) tells us: ‘When I was a child, I thought North was the way I was facing’. Later, ‘I lost my child’s confidence that I was the compass of the world’. By revisiting her memories, Sobchack achingly reassembles lost ways of seeing.

When I was a young child my parents would watch me in the bath. I remember knowing that if my ears were under water and I spoke above the surface they couldn't hear. One day my Mum asked me who I was speaking to and the knowing was suddenly lost.

Nostalgia becomes debilitating when it engenders realising how fragile our ways of seeing are - how precariously we position ourselves in and against the world around us.

The Greeks used the word nostalgia to articulate that feeling when returning home, nostos, is tinged with algos (pain). Once the logic that housed an old self has been debunked, that self can never really be returned to.

Ladina Clement

Ladina Clément (b.1996) works and lives in London. 

​I use the medium of sculpture to create props which subvert normative environments and their systems of order. By enabling moments of theatricality, my work introduces absurdity into institutional spaces - spaces such as the gallery, supermarket and gym - rendering them surprising and anew. My sculptures become animated via audience interaction, robotics and movable components. Traditional techniques of casting and mould-making form the basis of my interdisciplinary approach, while photography, video and performance support the sculptural.

Hamed Maiye

Hamed Maiye is an interdisciplinary artist based in London. He explores themes revolving around visual archiving, surrealism & portraiture, using painting, photography, sculpture & performance as research tools.

Maiye explores cultural anthropology through the use of mythology, myth making, historical documentation & archiving which influence the production of his work. Maiye's work presents viewers with allegorical scenarios used to invoke introspection and emotional reflections.

Sophie Knight

Sophie Lourdes Knight (born 1992) explores the hierarchical value structures placed upon objects in her contemporary practice. Questioning prescribed notions of beauty and value, Knight’s large-scale works on canvas provide space for banal, everyday objects such as engines, light bulbs and architectural designs to sit alongside more traditional objects of beauty such as jewellery and chandeliers.

Knight studied at California College of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in 2014, and at the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating with an MFA in 2022. Her work has recently been shown in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and Boston, as well as group exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London, the San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Golden Foundation, New York. In both 2019 and 2020, she was the recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.

Knight lives and works in London.