WASP

About

Wasp

Rachael Allen, Andrea Arnold, Coco Bayley, Liz Berry, Sophie Collins, Emma Cousin, Stevie Dix, Marie Jacotey, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Momtaza Mehri

We are excited to present to the public Wasp, a group exhibition that brings together artists who in one way or another are close observers of life as we live it.

Real life is rich and complex: domestic and public spaces are charged with romance and violence, beautiful on the one hand, banal on the other. Quotidian life has a rhythm - the trip step of action, experience and feeling. It has intonation, is made up of highs and lows.  It is technicoloured and it is muted, tough as it is tender and with a sense of humour.

The exhibition brings together film (Andrea Arnold’s 2003 short which inspired the title of the show, starring Natalie Press as a single mother of four attempting to rekindle a relationship in an evocative portrait), poetry (five writers mining the experiences of love, self-help, shame, motherhood and more, presented here as bill stuck fly posters), painting (recent works by Emma Cousin and Stevie Dix), photography (some 168 personal pictures by Coco Bayley shot in and out of her own life over the past five years) and drawing (the pop-cultural shards of Marie Jacotey’s domestic vignettes).

Bringing together the diverse practices of 10 artists, Wasp uses a combination of autobiographical narrative and social and domestic realism to consider ways in which we face the grit and pressures of daily life head on, paying particular attention to the ever present challenges we navigate in our 21st century moment.