Untitled
Acrylic and enamel on canvas
2006
100 x 100 cm

Safe as houses II
Scratched slide projection, glass
2009
Dimensions variable

Alexandra Valy

Drawing on the language of mythology, fairy tales, popular culture and everyday life, Alexandra
Valy contrasts realistic and symbolic references in order to construct new meaning.

Working with light, shadows, projections and a recurrent window motif, Alexandra Valy has been creating atmospheric installations reminiscent of black and white German expressionist films and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. She scratches the emulsion off used 35mm film, exposing the transparent film which she then projects, creating ‘light line drawings’ with visible scratch marks. Through this process she is playing with meditative and evocative effects, attempting to create a state of mind – or a ‘mind space’.

Since graduating in Fine Art in 2001 Alexandra Valy has had numerous exhibitions, most notably the Liverpool Biennial, Depford X and, last year, Affluenza. She won the first prize of the Apthorp Fund for Young Artists in 2003 and her work has been receiving favourable reviews, being named twice ‘best in show’ last year. Alexandra is currently studying at Postgraduate level at the Univeristy of the Arts. She lives and works in London.

hello@alexandravaly.com
www.alexandravaly.com

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Isleworth
Oil on canvas
2010
46” x 46”

Anthony Priddle

Anthony Priddle’s work principally draws from the natural world in the form of seascapes, landscapes and the human form. His recent work explores the selective focus of the observer and the shadows left by the artist’s brush. He is also currently working on an installation entitled ‘Lifetimes work’ which refers to the ‘shadows’ left by every human at the end of their working life.

In the painting 'Isleworth', as light goes the observer struggles to focus on points of interest in the landscape.

Anthony Priddle is an Architect. He practiced in London, Boston USA and Bristol and then founded a successful architectural practice in Gloucestershire. His passion for painting, which was predominant in his pre-university days, has lain semi-dormant for many years, when his artistic expression was principally directed to his architecture. Recently he has revitalised the desire to paint and has attended summer schools at the Slade School of Art. He is currently undertaking a full time Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at Central St Martins (Byam Shaw) in London. He had a two-man exhibition in Hereford in 2008 and recently exhibited at the No:Id Gallery in Whitechapel.

tonypriddle@aol.com
www.anthonypriddleartist.com

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The tower block
Mixed media: gouache, acrylic, pencil, ink, acetate, copper on paper
2010
35 x 36 cm

Eleanor Wemyss

Eleanor Wemyss’ practice has revolved around the surfaces that she paints on, whether it be enamel or household paints on glass, her work as always been figurative until this year where she has been influenced greatly by her surroundings and has switched to the rich architecture of London. Looking at London architecture has prompted Eleanor to start using drawing as a medium.

The Tower Block under construction can be quite a meaningless space, however it is the geometric lines and the idea that within this metal and concrete there will eventually be people that prompted this piece. Eleanor Wemyss’s work revolves around the materials she uses, and in using these mediums she has focused on the darkness of The Tower Block. However when photographing it she noticed someone on the very top. To signify the life on the top of the block she has put a copper strip in the aim that next to the dullness of the piece it might reflect the light and catch the viewer’s eye.

Eleanor Wemyss, originally from London, studied for her BA Fine Art in Leeds where she took part in her first show, ‘Situation Leeds’ in 2006. In 2008 she curated and exhibited in “The Fringe” as part of the Leeds Contemporary art fair. She then moved back to London to study at Byam Shaw where she curated and exhibited in 'Oil Run' in the summer of 2009. Her recent show 'New Art' was to raise money for Haiti.

elwemyss@hotmail.com
www.eleanorwemyss.com

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BlackLifeMaschine(Lungs)
Motoroil, Flour, Wood on Stretched Canvas
2009
6’ x 4’

Gwen Bajon

Gwen Bajon works in an experimental painting method that leads beyond the traditional two-dimensional canvas. She often uses both sides of an image to create outsize image-installations, which explore subjective realities in the physical space. Through incorporating organic and man-made objects and materials in tableaux, she enhances the physical nature of her work and produces confrontational viewing experiences.

The ‘BlackLifeMaschinen’ diptych exhibited here, deals with implications of ever-changing reality. The works are of an amorphous nature where the surface is not fully set to a final image. ‘In Memory of Light’ immediately relates to the alternating black, oily surface of the ‘BlackLifeMaschinen’ and their changing reflection of actual light in the physical space.

Gwen Bajon was born in Germany in 1982 and lives and works in London. She is currently a post-graduate student of Fine Art at Central St. Martins / The Byam Shaw School of Art.

www.gwenbajon.com
gwen@gwenbajon.com

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Manhattan interior
Oil on board
2009
20 x 25 cm

I K Reid

Much of the painting of I K Reid has historically focused on the tempered abstraction of natural and manmade forms interrupted by the elements. She is interested in the interaction of man and environment and in producing aesthetically engaging form that intrigues, and recasts perceptions. From a desire to make a social commentary twinned with a painterly approach, the artist echoes the realist tradition of painting. Her current work uses discarded slides of social events. From these she develops small intricate panels that honour the familiar and socially awkward nature of human interactions.

'Manhattan Interior' is the first in series of new realist works. Completed in two sessions, the artist works minimally to reveal the light from the primed surface. There is a brooding presence in the vacant frame suggested by the siloutted table and chair. The absence of detail here evokes a timeless quality that is intended to trigger individual memories of childhood and containment.

'Reflections on The light of the world’ responds to the theme through several black and white photographs that take religious imagery or places in London. The piece reconsiders the response of the church to contemporary urban life.

I K Reid completed an Art Foundation at Oldham College in 1996. During her advertising and policy making career the artist continued to develop her skills (drawing, painting, printmaking and figurative sculpture) at the Art Academy (including with Tom Coates RWS RBSA), Morley College, and the Slade Art Schools. She returned to painting full-time in 2005, producing an extensive body of abstract and figurative work in her Brighton studio for national exhibitions and private collections. She lives and works in London.

mail@imogenreid.co.uk
www.imogenreid.co.uk

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Untitled
Cut paper, charcoal and ink
2009
70 x 70 cm

Jessica York

Jessica York’s works on large-scale drawings in a variety of media usually on paper, but she has also been drawing and painting directly on to a studio wall for the last few months, changing the image weekly and sometimes daily. The work usually involves figures, sometimes with art historical or mythical narrative overtones. Last year, the work she showed at City Lit experimented with different media around the theme of running figures, working sometimes in watercolour or ink on calico and sometimes life-size on paper. She also showed a series of abstract coloured drawings. She has recently been experimenting with cut paper reliefs.

The Photograms shown in the exhibition use light as the medium for drawing, so the works themselves become the trace of where light has been – fixed by the photographic process. By making the objects that the light records, I hope to personalise the process and play with translucence and tone, as well as linearity.

Jessica York lives and works in London. She has a degree in the history of art and was a senior lecturer at St Martins School of Art and an honorary fellow of The Northern Media School of Sheffield Hallam University. As a member of Steel Bank Film Co-operative she directed documentary films for Channel 4 television. Jessica did a foundation course at Middlesex University, was on the Communication Arts Course at Sheffield Hallam University and has completed the City Lit Fine Art Course. She has shown her work at Birmingham City University Gallery, Sheffield Women’s Art Exhibition and at The City Lit. She was also commissioned with Hattie Coppard and Tim Coppard to make the Summer Visitor, a public art-work for the high street in Maidstone, Kent – an 18 foot high sheep covered in flowers!

jessicyork@yahoo.co.uk

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Untitled
Vinyl lettering on acetate
2009
Dimensions variable

John Richert

John Richert works with text using short stories, dialogues or statements to investigate anomalies in the written word. He uses both comedy and pathos, attempting to reach a position that can accommodate both at the same time.

After leaving Chelsea School of Art in 1988, Richert collaborated with a number of leading UK architectural practices on public commissions, including an anamorphic sculpture for The Greater Manchester Museum of Science and Industry. He later directed his practice towards fine art and established a relationship with the Cotthem Gallery in Belgium where he held his first solo show. He has also exhibited with this gallery at Lineart Flanders Expo in Ghent and at their sister gallery in Barcelona. More recently he has exhibited with the Trailer Art group in various London locations and at the Lucy Mackintosh Gallery in Lucerne,
Switzerland.

johnrichert@talktalk.net

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Untitled
Hair painted on digital photograph on paper
2009
210 x 297 mm

Karen Garratt

Karen Garratt’s work is about the feminine experience and the energy of the female. Having come from a particular tradition of experimental theatre that emphasises ritual and process working towards unmediated experience, it has become a part of her practice to question both the nature of how she makes work, and what the unmediated feminine experience is. Karen draws from literature, mythology, folklore, fairy tales and psychoanalysis, and investigates these avenues in her work with the emphasis on the act of making.

Karen has been looking at the meanings in fairy tales, and particularly in the notion of sleep, in tales such as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, as metaphor of transformation from girl into woman. She is currently exploring this in comparison and contrast to, for example, Virginia Wolff’s Orlando, where the notion of sleep and transformation is also referenced, but in this case from man to woman.

Karen Garratt studied political science and International Relations at University of California at Berkeley, and worked within this field before a change of career to the arts. She later trained at Ecole Jacques LeCoq in Paris, the birthplace of Britain’s famous experimental company Theatre de Complicite. She has worked in Paris and New York with public performances of readapted classical texts, as well as performing in therapeutic settings, such as the Centre for Cerebral Palsy, and the Stonybrook Home for Children in New York. Karen is now a visual artist and currently lives and works in London. She is currently a post-graduate in Fine Art at Byam Shaw at Central St. Martins.

kgarratt@mac.com
web.mac.com/kgarratt

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Homeland I (Homeland series)
Oil on canvas
2009
30 x 40 cm

Louise Folliott

Louise works in a variety of media including painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture. Her work is eclectic and diverse. Naturally interested in social issues she sees art as a platform to challenge and express culture and society and a way of reaching a wider audience. The theme of ‘Love and Fear’ is recurrent in her work. At present she is working on the idea of identity, authenticity and displacement and what her identity as an African really means.

Working with her theme of identity and displacement, 'Homeland Series', are painted from memories of a remote area in South Africa that she visited as a child. For her, the light is always so distinctive and bright in Africa and she has tried to capture this in these paintings. There are three paintings in this series.

Louise Folliott was born in Cape Town, 1979. Majoring in Painting she completed a BA Degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town in 2001. 2003 saw her first solo exhibition ‘Love and Fear’ held at Rust-en-Vrede in Cape Town. In 2004 Louise moved to London and has spent time in Europe, Asia, Central and South America. She was featured in an exhibition at the Getty Images Gallery in 2008 after coming in the top 50 in the Duracell/Independent Photography Competition. Now based in London Louise continues to work as an artist partaking in open studio events in Deptford and is currently completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Byam Shaw, Central Saint Martin’s.

info@louisefolliott.com
www.louisefolliott.com

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Laura
Photograph
2009
50 x 20 cm

Luke Kemp

Luke Kemp’s work is informed by a variety of factors, but specifically it is concerned with breaking-points, limits, negative space and undefined areas. The questioning of the trust in art and the artist and how much belief should be invested is also of interest. His practice takes the form of photography, video, sculpture and installation work.

Initially working with a quote from Vladamir Nabokov's Pale Fire, 'a flash of light between two eternities of darkness' as a description of the fragile and limited time we have in existence, Luke is showing a piece of video art that explores the ideas of temporality and memory. The piece was filmed over a period of time and uses passing car lights to illuminate an image in the darkness on an exterior wall. With each passing car the illuminated image slightly changes until a sequence is achieved. The finished film is sped up to create an illusion of the cinematic. The flashes of light from the cars highlight a selection of passing moments that are to be glanced at before being forgotten, the cinematic deals with a desire to re-live and experience the ghosts that emerge from the darkness and fight against the brief moments that are forgotten.

After completing a Foundation in Art and Design in 2003, Luke Kemp studied Modern Literature at Goldsmiths, graduating in 2008. He is currently studying for a Postgraduate Diploma at Byam Shaw School of Art. Luke has also exhibited in the Vibe Bar Gallery Brick Lane and organised and exhibited in two exhibitions with the World of Health Group involving property and residents of the Westminster Housing Co-operation.

lucaskempus@hotmail.com

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Untitled
Performance
2009

Madalina Zaharia

Shifting between real life and fiction, Madalina Zaharia’s work focuses on the absurd, the laughable, the unimportant and the fictitious of the real life. Her interest is to approach social or political aspects of our culture and turn them upside down, always focusing on the insignificant and searching for the artificial inside the issue. Being interested in the fictional and the unnatural, she always seeks the staged and the theatrical way of telling a story. It is never the narrative she’s the most preoccupied with but the powerful sense of incongruity that results from a premeditated built up situation. In order to bring herself closer to what she wants to express she works with a great variety of media, from photography to video,
performance and sound.

For the Kingsgate Gallery Madalina is presenting a performance created especially for this exhibition. The performance consists of the artists holding a speech about darkness using the light of a morse code lamp.

Madalina Zaharia was born in Romania in 1985. She studied at the National University of Arts Bucharest, graduating from Photography in 2008. Having exhibited in places such as Vienna, Belgrade and Bucharest, recent exhibitions include I Know a friend who knows a friend, Het Poortgebauw, Rotterdam. She has also participated in AIR (Archway Investigations and Responses) residencies and Real Presence, Belgrade. Currently, as a postgraduate student at Byam Shaw, Central Saint Martins, UAL, she is living and working in London.

Please check the WHEN section of this website for details of the performance programme.

aria_zah@yahoo.com

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From inside to inside (Kneeled)
Installation
2009

Marta Santuccio

Marta develops sensory installations based on texts she writes herself. Her main interest is to transform the act of reading from a passive/imaginative process into an active/sensory experience. She wants to ensure words are not simply read, but become an experience that the visitor can live on his own skin. Sensations must be perceived by an inner part of our brain, a flux that transcends barriers, conventions and cultural codes even if the mean employed is most commonly and squarely used. Harmony will only be achieved by the reader that lets himself be carried away by the rhythm of sensation.

Light defines objects, and when we are immersed in shadow light becomes a memory, the visual definition of our surroundings decreases and eventually stops, and we are forced to focus attention within ourselves to find new definitions of what is around. Marta’s installation for this exhibition is a tactile experience of shadow led by a text she wrote. Like having our mind in front of us, we are able to reach inside where our shortcomings lay and feel them, touch them, acknowledge them, it is a material encounter to touch what cannot be touched.

Marta Santuccio graduated in Law, only after that she had the chance to officialize her passion for expressing through artistic means. She had her first exhibition in May 2009. Marta is now doing a Post-Graduate Diploma at Byam Shaw and doing a residency at AIR (Archway Investigations and Responses). Marta lives and works in London.

marta17ct@hotmail.com

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Untitled
Mixed media on paper
2010
70 x 50 cm

Nicholas Euan Lawrence

An investigation of human perception and communication forms the core of Nicholas’ practice. Exploring how and why we make sense of the world around us, his work pairs the familiar with the unknown to challenge and subvert our interpretive impulses.

Nicholas’ compositions collapse elements of mass communication, personal expression and fractured narratives to produce imagery which teeters between informative diagram and formal composition, abstraction and representation, pattern and chaos.

Nicholas Euan Lawrence’s piece, ‘Untitled’, examines the point at which light meets shadow, positive meets negative, and past meets present. Through its exploration of reflection, repetition, signification and form, ‘Untitled’ raises questions regarding our perceptual abilities and our desire to make sense of the world we inhabit.

Nicholas graduated from Napier University’s Photography, Film and Imaging BA programme with First Class Honours in 2007. Since then, he has expanded his practice to include painting, printmaking and collage. Nicholas has exhibited in London, New York and Edinburgh and is currently undertaking a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at Byam Shaw, Central Saint Martins.

nicholas.e.lawrence@googlemail.com

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U-bahn
Photographic print
2009
A1

Sophie Hoyle

The concerns of Hoyle's work are the urban environment, physical and social. The body of work addresses how we experience, think about and represent cities- how people perceive and describe the spaces in which they live. Hoyle's working method is to go into urban 'sites' and conduct forms of 'fieldwork' to find out about their history and use through observation, immersion, participation and interventions. Multiple aspects of the city are conveyed through a number of different means and media: illustration, painting, photography and film; whichever is most appropriate to the content.

Hoyle’s photographs for the exhibition depict enclosed, underground spaces- windowless and cloistered. They are dark, murky spaces, energised only by the focal points of neon light fittings. She places these pictures in relation to the title ‘In memory of light’ as somehow indicating a passage of time spent kept apart from natural daylight and diurnal rhythms, entering into a darkened, sequestered space.

Sophie Hoyle is a Post Graduate student and artist, currently living and working in London. Hoyle trained in Geography BA (UoL), before pursuing Fine Art, which she is currently studying at Byam Shaw, St Martins, UAL. Hoyle has taken part in an AIR (Archway Investigations and Responses) residency exploring art in public space, and has exhibited as part of 'Atmosphere in the Spectrum' at The Crypt Gallery February 2010.

shoyle1@csm.arts.ac.uk
misshoyle7@yahoo.co.uk

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Zulfiya Akhmetova

Zulfiya’s interest in art dates back to her childhood and a few years spent in Afghanistan, in Kabul. An amazingly beautiful place surrounded by snowy mountains, the place was constantly bombed by Talibs – peaceful snowy mountain ranges and War. That was the time when her perception of this world began to form.

Zulfiya wants her works to be like poems, like Italian Renaissance frescoes, like Islamic Ornaments. The works of American writer J.D. Salinger were her initiation into Buddhism. She travelled to India and Tibet, visited monasteries and learnt religion and philosophy of Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs. As if the Russian traditional art and her perfect painting skills are not enough to express herself fully. God and Man with his feelings and thoughts are two constant objects of Zulfiya’s works.

Currently Zulfiya is working on the series of watercolours in which she explores humans’ relationship with nature, and life in society. Her watercolours look like stream of consciousness but suggest implication. Exhibited in In memory of ligh is one of the works from this series. The work titled ‘The Apple Gardens’ and references the Bible. It was inspired by Zulfiya's observations of London and Londoners in transport. A constant question: ‘What Man needs for happiness’ and the answer: ‘he can't gain complete happiness living in society’. But there was time when there was Eden on Earth and an apple tree is sign of it for us now.

Zulfiya was born in 1978 in Tatarstan. In the 90s she attended classes of drawing and watercolor painting at the Naberezhnye Chelny College of Arts. After obtaining a Degree in English and German Philology in 2000, she moved to Moscow, which gave her more opportunities to study art. In 2007 she graduated from the Moscow Natalya Nesterova Academy of Education and got her Diploma in Easel Painting. During her time in Moscow she worked in a stained-glass studio and took part in the Moscow Young Artist's Exhibitions. In 2008 Zulfiya had a solo show in Moscow. She is currently a Postgraduate student at Byam Shaw, University of the Arts London.

zulfiya@mail.com

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