Summer 2024

Ranny MacDonald, MARIA, Ji Xia Li, Georiga Semple, Maddalena Zadra, Saba Giani

Ranny MacDonald

Ranny Macdonald is a painter and musician based in London. His work considers the conceptual lines drawn between human culture and what we call ‘Nature’ or the more-than-human world. As part of this consideration, he has incorporated up-cycled found materials including pigments made from discarded metal-oxides, crushed bricks, and earths, as well as found-wood into his work. Since his recent graduation from the Royal Drawing School’s post-graduate programme Ranny has exhibited nationally, including group shows with Marlborough Gallery and South Parade. In 2023 he was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, which showed at Camden Art Centre, London and Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool.

MARIA

I am a high femme Latine/American writer, performer, and artist who can usually be found at my local karaoke bar or giving hot takes on pop culture. Based in London, I make sculptural installations, performances, video and sound that eviscerate and reassemble the intersections of chronic illness, race, and notions of community by using myself/body as a conduit and muse. I combine natural and digital materials to engineer environments that create radical bodily connections between cyber and organic networks.

Through the excavation of my personal history and exploring the politicized intersections of my being, I create installations and objects that evoke speculative realities while also speaking frankly about my lived experiences. I use 3D printing and combine it with differing materials such as metal, wood, rose petals and gold leaf to create deity-esque high-femme sculptures that hover between states of magical transformation. Each figure is ill and adapting to their landscapes with varying forms of defenses or weaponizations. Through the use of sound I create sonic storytelling pieces that are autobiographical and set in alternate universes to allow the audience space to question their reality and conception of what is possible for the past, present and future. Each experience relates unique moments of illness, recovery, and how it is inseparable from larger experiences of racial marginalization while also being rooted in daily life. As someone heavily invested in QPOC disability issues, my goal is for people to find connections and question their reality and explore different

groundings for transformation and transmutation of the bodymind into an equitable and liberated future

Ji Xia Li

Jia Xi Li [镓汐] is a Chinese Canadian artist based in London. She makes sculptures, wall pieces, and installations in knitted textile. She holds a Textile Design MA from the Royal College of Art and a BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York. She is inspired by her urban "nomadic" experiences. Her art focus on the individuality of the human experience, striving to erase the labels that segregate us into categories. Through her work, she aims to capture the ephemeral 'identity' of the modern urban nomad and their involuntary memory in the form of an odyssey. she investigates the ways in which people engage with objects that reflect snippets of their existence, humanity, history, and interpersonal connections, highlighting that these objects are not isolated items but complex assemblages of time's marks and life's narratives. Each piece of her work encapsulates an archived period and memory, which can be triggered through emotional and sensory stimulation. Knot by knot, Jia Xi knits the woven carcass.

Georiga Semple

Georgia’s work centres on fascinations with the duality of perception and reality. Exploring themes of identity and connection; her paintings depict imagined scenes of black communities inspired by misunderstood personal experiences. Her practice emerged from exploration of her Guyanese heritage, studying the ancient rock carvings impact on black and indigenous values. They were abstract symbols used on textiles, ceramics & wood carvings which are referenced in the subjects and distortions in her paintings. Its why objects feel collaged or carved into canvas and patterns on clothing are embroidered. Digital collaging and sketching underpin an iterative process, pulling references from memory, imagination and personal photographs. From there, she layers oils thinly over acrylic underpaintings in contrasting styles, often masking out shapes to play on the conflict of reality and fiction. Calico canvases enhance diffusion of paint strokes, creating high shine airbrush-like finishes to contrast soft embroidered threads and textiles. Georgia’s work reflects on unmindful openness to stimuli diluting convictions and identity. Interested in how we dress scenes in our life with our perspectives even in unassuming places; home becomes a safe stage to unravel and express the chaos in vulnerability, warping context and scale in surreal domestic spaces to symbolise delusions from attachment to personal ideology. Her work often conceals easter eggs amongst the busy imagery, akin to a ‘Where’s Wally’ illusion. Certain subjects adopt satirical characteristics, stretched to exaggerated caricature. Here she seeks to capture the role of continual self-contextualization through reflections in everyday household objects, portraying the fluid nature of self-perception through strange yet familiar imagery.

Maddalena Zadra

I work across painting, drawing, printmaking, and textile based installations. I am interested in the tactile element of the work and my process manipulates the canvas on various levels. I often integrate different ways of mark making, exploring the limits of collage, drawing and print, their relationships with surface, and inviting audiences to explore their own understanding around the flexibility of painting and the possibilities of craftsmanship. My work touches upon aspects of the tactile and the sensual whilst remaining playful by subtly contrasting vulnerability and eroticism. Referencing a variety of cultures and historical aesthetics, I explore symbolic meaning and storytelling in the practice, creating multi-layered, open scenarios. I search for the simplicity of shapes and figurations, adjusting elements and balancing forms. I seek for connection of cultures, from past objects to contemporary symbols. My interest is in the poetic way of reading the work, personal to me but open for different interpretation from each individual. I search for emotions and harmony of colours and forms that can’t be described by words.

Saba Giani

I am a visual artist; my work is concerned with the fantasy of space in relation to experiences of loss, diaspora, and geographical displacement. Research into personal narratives and history of place is an integral aspect of my creative process, assisting me in the development of new work. Influenced by the experience of living and growing up in Iran before having to flee from my homeland due to political unrest, my work explores the nature of personal bond to places and objects. Taking fragments from my memories, I combine them to create a new narrative which others can engage with. In my work I often combine imagined characters and motifs in settings where the perspective is deliberately altered to create a sense of placelessness. In the past I have worked and exhibited in Canada, Europe and U.K. and my work has been purchased by public and commercial galleries such as The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and GNYP. While completing my studies in the Bachelor of fine art program at OCAD University in 2015, I was selected as one of the participants to spend a one-year residency in Florence, Italy as part of the competitive Florence Off-Campus Program. Wishing to further my research and artistic practice, I enrolled in the MFA in Fine Art program at Goldsmiths University and was awarded the Alfred T. Vivash Bursary for Graduate Studies in 2017.

In 2019 I graduated from Goldsmiths University and since then I have been working as a freelance artist.