dwelling pop up emerging artists

About

Elinor Arden / Sophie Beckingham / Apolline Bökkerink / Kitty Cameron / Lue Campbell-Smith / Missy Crewe / Daniela Maria Germade / Coral Harding / Catrin R Harrison / Cecily Lasnet / Eliza Owen / Blue Pieta / Georgie Seymour / Coco Emmanuelle Wheeler

A dwelling is characterised by its intimacy for the dweller, particular in the case of domestic space, the setting for Mas presto ven, palomba (Come quicker, dove) (2022), a video and sound piece developed specifically for the exhibition by Elinor Arden and Daniela Maria Germade. It is in the safety and privacy of a dwelling in which one can be liberated, able to play freely, as well as find the sanctuary and stillness evoked in the still life watercolour paintings by Cecily Lasnet. The home can be a site for playing and dreaming, in itself a source of inspiration for a new painting produced for the exhibition by Lue Campbell-Smith, which takes fragments from the textured glass of a bathroom window as its inspiration. Human presences are evoked in interiors in the mess and disorder created from lives lived; in the messy domesticity of Sophie Beckingham’s Warm Bedroom (2022) the bed is unmade, only recent slept in.

Dwellings are constantly in flux, shaped by the movement of our bodies as we orientate ourselves within the built environment. Architecture as we experience it is not static, but in motion, as playful indicated in the painting Spinning Panes (2022) by Missy Crewe. To occupy the natural world is to be enveloped within a primal, instinctive form of dwelling, one which often eludes and intrigues through multi-sensory changes in weather, sound and temperature, made manifest in Obscured (2020) by Coral Harding. Walk through Finsbury Park (2022), a painting by Eliza Owen, evokes memories of park walks when we are absorbed in thought as we take in the changing light which new seasons bring. Gardens were once wild, unruly dwellings, since tamed by the human imagination, as evident in the geometry of Coco Emmanuelle Wheeler’s Concrete Planters (2022), reminiscent of an architectural drawing. The natural environment is anything but neutral, and can be positioned as a living archive, charged with the histories of its inhabitants, mapped in Catrin R Harrison’s Shoe-bend (2022), a new drawing produced for this exhibition.

The exhibition is an invitation to dwell not only within physical structures, but within your own soul. Some dwellings are both beyond and of this earth; in one painting by Blue Pieta, the ancestral meets the divine, suggested through the inclusion of a passage from the Quran about the earth returning to heaven, in which heaven becomes the ultimate dwelling place. Art making can be positioned as a form of prayer and catharsis in this regard, a process of creation which begins from within. In the surreal and macabre self-portrait The Kitty Maiden (2022) by Kitty Cameron, the vulnerabilities, fantasies and fears of what the true self may be are laid bare. It is when we dwell that we discover ourselves. Come and dwell with us.