Radical Residency® VIII 2024

We are thrilled to announce our next private view featuring 11 artists that have just completed residencies with us here in the gallery. Our 22nd Solo Resident Yang-ha has been working in the upstairs studio for 3 months producing an exciting new body of paintings and sculpture. In the gallery space, Radical Residency VIII featuring 10 artists (Ingrid Berthon -Moine, John A. Blythe, Sasha Bowles, Jo Chate, George Georgiu, Amal Khlat, Emily Stevens, Sojung Park, Sang-Mi Rha, Reed Wilson) have had time and space to experiment, collaborate and support each other whilst producing new works. This final week will be exciting to view the last days of work in progress and do not miss the exhibition opening on the April 11th 2024.

The ten artists of Radical Residency VIII;

Ingrid Berthon-Moine has an artististic practice, spanning sculpture, drawing, and video, explores the physical and cultural dimensions of the human body. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources such as language, psychoanalysis, and feminism, Berthon-Moine weaves personal narratives into her work, challenging conventional understandings of human experiences like sexuality, illness, and death. In the midst of the contemporary discourse on gender, Berthon-Moine critically examines the structure of the French language, her mother tongue, highlighting its inherent misogynistic bias. In her piece ‘Mauvaise Langue,’ she presents a tongue-shaped sculpture adorned with metal spikes. The deliberate use of lighting adds a humorous dimension, playfully revealing aspects of the male anatomy.

John A. Blythe I am an artist and educator based in Oxfordshire. I situate my practice in expanded photography, particularly the exploration of photography as a medium of material interaction. Photography is my first language, its materials and processes the tools in which I feel the most freedom to play. My practice is informed and supported through the integration of my artist-teacher identities. My teaching draws on both pedagogic and andragogic strategies to co-create the learning environment. I am committed to the value art brings to both individuals and communities, not just engagement with works of art but more so, the practice of art. I am particularly interested in the role art practice can play in developing personal confidence, analytical thinking, critical discourse, cultural and political awareness, and places of connection in the wider community.

Sasha Bowles is a London based multi-disciplinary artist, working across painting, objects, film and installation. Bowles creates artefacts and installations housed within provisional environments that are a means ofstorytelling but are not a narrative. Her practice is an evolving loop, dealing with illusion, intervention and metamorphosis; immersing herself in historical tropes encountered in houses of grandeur and often using as a jumping off point; the Baroque bravura of artifice.

Jo Chate’s practice is the exploration of space and how we experience the world we live in, our environment and surroundings. Her way of working is exploratory: surveying, looking, and transforming. Starting with photography to capture moments and phenomena from everyday life, she transforms the quotidian to create complex, enigmatic paintings.
Alongside working on paintings Chate experiments with painting on prints, found frames and her own photographs. Working with underpaintings has become part of her methodology often painting over the surface again and again. This formal process is all part of defamiliarising the familiar, absorbing and changing, until the final image evolves incorporating traces from the ones which we can no longer fully see.

George Georgiu Blurry frantic universe of personal records, a visual diary that constitutes hitherto of an artistic research. Cluttered with pictorial notes from experiences kept on paper using oil colours and at times modifying or creating three-dimensional pieces. Objects, animals, gaps and phrases that comprise metaphors of an unfulfilling ordinary life, fragments of experiences translated into colours and organized in a random way that bucks traditional painting composition.
From Leonardo da Vinci’s Sketchbooks to Keith Haring’s Journals and Frida Kahlo’s Diaries
to Vito Acconci’s Room Situation, the artists historically used to document their lives and the world around them and also to create these private spaces for nascent, sometimes unfinished thoughts to be written down or drawn, spaces filled with rough ideas rather than polished ones. However, I attempt a perilous passage from the intimacy that bears the tiny sketchbook the artists thrust in their pocket and contains all the personal notes that form their way of seeing and thinking, to enlarge and expose its raw content in the public sphere as a body of artwork itself.

Amale Freiha Khlat’s research has been looking into translating and communicating her memory of war through various forms and objects. It encompasses multiple aspects with the imperative to always use destruction and creation which work from the void.
Her installations contemplate the theatre of the world through different scenes and windows, playing with the senses and perceptions of viewers and reminding them that looking is a relational act based on selection and exclusion.

Emily Stevens “Paint is controlled spillages of emotion.  
Paint is sensuous, visceral.   Paint is pricey.Paint takes you away from your family.  Paint is sexy, paint is dirty, paint is bad for your health, addictive. Paint is a siren calling from the rocks. Paint is best done when sober, like swimming. Paint is a lover, or a mate. At times illicit, heady, not to be trusted. Or a true companion. Like a dog, and just as messy.  Paint is a distraction.  Paint is a form of self-soothing, the same as food, drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping. Paint is a hiding place. Paint breathes life into time.  I paint to still time. I paint for the sake of saying something honest and I’m interested in making something that holds me in a state of possibility.”