Ellie Wang

Born in London in 1994, UK-based artist Ellie Wang works predominantly with painting alongside a more collaborative practice involving performance. Ellie explores content generated from everyday behaviours and routines. Through the repetition and categorisation of her imagery, she creates musical moments of overlap and movement.

Ellie graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in 2018. She has a Foundation Diploma from City and Guilds of London Art School. Having received training as a classical instrumentalist, she is interested in exploring the role of the performer as an artist and vice versa. Ellie's approach is highly intuitive, beginning with only the materials on hand and seeing where they take her. Figures, lines and pathways emerge as Ellie creates, mirroring a musical improv on canvas. Her atmospheric mixed-media paintings seem to swirl in and out of focus; a pirouette of colour and texture. Her works also bear clear influences from her Chinese heritage, with their East Asian colour palettes and sprinklings of traditional illustration

Rosie Gibbens

I am an artist who primarily makes performances, videos and sculptures that feature my own body in varied ways. I want to make artwork that magnifies elements of contemporary life that seem absurd to me and I often approach my work as an alien visitor attempting to participate seamlessly in contemporary life, but not quite managing. I am particularly interested in gender performativity, sexual politics, consumer desire and the slippery overlaps between these. 

When I began making performances and videos I exclusively interacted with found everyday objects and garments, purposely misusing them to create chain reactions that achieved simple or pointless tasks in overly complicated ways. For example, In ‘Auto Erotic Assimilation’  I used power tools with kitchen items to apply make-up and play out a deadpan burlesque routine. My more recent works have combined this fascination for finding alternative functions for appliances and gadgets with sewn soft-sculptures that act as avatars for my body. I am particularly drawn to items that imply a desire for self optimisation such as exercise equipment or domestic gizmos. There is also generally a sexualised element to the way objects are used (either by myself or the sculptures) and I often approach my works as perverse product demonstrations or adverts where the term ‘sex sells’ is taken excessively literally. 

In the series and exhibition ‘Soft Girls’ I developed a visual language for the sculptures which draws from anatomical models and horror films. Like most of my sculptures these could be repurposed as clothing or animated as puppets. I continue to be fascinated by grotesque depictions of the abject body and the way that remaking these in fabric changes their digestibility. I also take inspiration from toys and cartoons, combining these references with versions of sexualised parts of the body and fetish-adjacent accessories.  In general I hope that my work can swing between uncomfortable and pleasurable. My studio practice feels like a constant search for this magic balance. 

‘The New Me’ is a recent video project based around my fictional dystopian company ‘The Ilium Corporation’ that sells ‘absurd life-enhancing products’ (Charlotte Kent). Designed to represent the continual pressures to maintain our homes, bodies and relationships; the three ‘products’ are Frankensteined together from existing items and demonstrated by me in retro-futurist style adverts. I hope that this project can continue throughout my career as I invent new hybrid machines. This series also centres around my fascination with ‘cute’ aesthetics as a marketing strategy in which the consumer becomes ‘mother’ to the items they buy. 

My most recent BODY of work ‘Planned Obsolescence’ takes the domestic printer as the starting point to think about the aspirations and limits of technology. It involves a series of sculptural, digital and paper self portraits alongside a performance where I take the role of a bored office worker photocopying my body parts. I imagine myself becoming a low-tech cyborg through this process.

Anna Clegg

Anna Clegg (b.1998) completed her BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts in 2020.

Anna works between painting, drawing, photography, video and sound to build
material vocabularies for intersubjective experience. Resampling tropes and clichés  from popular film and music, as well as the online choreographies that develop around them, she builds self-reflexive systems of looking that pit the complexities of embodied life against the distilled, unidirectional experience of recorded media. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Half Truths’ at Unit 2 Cassia Building, curated by Vanessa Murrell (London, 2023), ‘Radio Silence’ at Split Gallery (London, 2023), ‘Not Before It Has Forgotten You’ at Nicoletti Contemporary (London, 2022), ‘I <3 Your Output’ at greengrassi (London, 2022), ‘The Worm At The Core’ at SET Woolwich (London, 2022) and ‘Resistance or Stultification’ at Usual Business Gallery (London,
2022).

Tommy Xiexin

Xie Xin’s (b.1998, Chaozhou, China) work revolves around Chinese queer sentiments expressed within the post-modern political and cultural climate. His paintings explore queer desires held within queer individuals in a familial context.

Isabella Benshimol

Isabella Benshimol Toro (Venezuela) is an artist currently living and working in London. She received an MFA from Goldsmiths University of London (2020) and a BA in Painting and Visual Arts (cum laude) from Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan (2016). Her most recent work has been exhibited at Timothy Taylor Gallery (New York), Galería Elba Benítez (Madrid) and CCCC Centro del Carmen de Cultura Contemporánea (Valencia). 

Benshimol’s practice arises from the navigation into interiority and intimacy. In her work, she perceives and analyses the body as a convoluted and abstract container, reconsidering the conceptual and political transcendence of our flesh’s permeability and porosity. Absorbed and driven by the invisibility of domestic daily life and the unconscious routines that hold it, she examines, recreates and edits intimate and mundane gestures, bodily autonomic actions and reactions, cohering and fixing them for their unconscious, ephemeral, liminal essence. 

At Rupert, she will be developing White laundry to feel clean Inside — a performative and digestive research project that revolves around the notions of whiteness, purity and cleanliness within domestic routines and assumed structures.

Ivy Kalungi

Ivy Kalungi is a Ugandan- born artist. Her works frequently employ the theme of collective memory, inspired by culture and tradition. Ivy Produces works that explore a variety of media including wood, metal, sound, and video projection which break the boundaries between their distinctive materiality and characteristic.

The work commonly circles the idea of fragmented narratives exploring the past and present, inspired by shared memories derived from her Ugandan and Irish cultural traditions. Ivy Kalungi is interested in people who exist in diaspora, carrying different heritages and histories simultaneously.

Being brought up by African parents and growing up in Belfast, my cultural identity has become hybrid, fusing subconscious memories of Uganda with Northern Ireland. As I get older, I have become interested in how I could make this experience visible, adding both Irish and Ugandan narratives. The complexity of cultural identity is what I aim to represent visually within my work.