2nd -11th December 2021
PV: 1st December 2021: 6.30-8.30pm with drinks kindly sponsored by Something & Nothing
Featuring: Julia Bennett, Lee Cameron, Shaoyu Chen, Selby H.I, Zayn Qahtani, Gherdai Hassell, Tracey Slater and Salomé Wu.
She Curates, CloverMill Artist Residency and Wilder Gallery are delighted to present an eight-artist exhibition, featuring selected artists from their collaborative international Open Call.
The dynamic showcase is grounded in the collective’s commitment to openness, accessibility, engagement and a true championing of artists. The collaborative project sought to invite a diverse range of artists from around the world to present a selection of works at Wilder Gallery. Two exhibiting artists will be further offered the opportunity to take up residence at Clovermill in 2022.
A broad variety of themes run throughout the curation, from Slater and Hassell’s bold exploration and centring of the female body, the humour of Cameron’s works, and the otherworldliness, mythic and distortion of Qahtani, Chen and Wu’s practice.
From over 200 applications, this Open Call exhibition demonstrates a snapshot of the exciting talent contemporary working today, crossing mediums, themes and continents. The selection celebrates the range and depth of the collaboration’s collective interests.
- Wilder Gallery is an independent gallery in the heart of Kensal Rise showcasing emerging and contemporary art.
- CloverMill Artist Residency is an independent artist driven initiative and artist focused Residency launched in 2021.
- She Curates is a platform Founded by Independent Curator Mollie E Barnes, to help facilitate her practice and provided a directory for women and queer artists. Mollie works to champion equality in the art world.
Participating artists:
Zayn Qahtani
Zayn Qahtani (b.1997) is a painter, drawer and sculptor based between Bahrain and London. Her work is a dance between what is seen and what is felt, compiling a personal mythology along the way. Drawing on ancient cultures and nature’s diverse ecosystems, Zayn forms visual stories which seem to exist in the twilight zone – too distorted to be real, too familiar to be a dream. Her figures seem to be suspended in a space of no-time, navigating a world which harkens to the post-human society of today. In this altered state, a sense of safety is offered, allowing the creatures within the walls of her works to explore life’s more tender, nostalgic, and often painful feelings. Working on recycled materials, and hand making her own paints and tools from plants and minerals, Zayn allows the works to take on a life of their own, truly vibrating with the energy of the land itself.
Julia Bennett
Julia Bennett (b.1995, California, USA) is an American artist based in London. She holds a BA in Film/Photography and is currently attending the Royal College of Art.
Julia’s work explores disorder, collective mourning, as well as the paradox of ongoingness and futurelessness. This body of work recognizes the inherited, biological, and violent nature that humans possess, seeking acknowledgement in order to pull apart. Emotional in form, reflective in composition – lived experience, research, and fictitious futures accumulate onto the “rag on the wall” in repetitive, instinctual movements. The continuous creation/erasure/recreation of her practice reveals the convergence and collapse of life in the Capitalocene. Her work has become a reflection of our entangling with an Earth that has been colonized, commodified and ultimately consumed without ceasing.
Lee Cameron
Lee Cameron was born and grew up in the Scottish Highlands in the fishing village Mellon Charles. Relocating to London at age 18, he went on to establish himself as a celebrated hairdressers.
Over the years Lee has successfully pursued many different types of projects. He founded creative agency New Breed, independent print only magazine Collection of Documentaries (a photographic journal and British culture magazine showcasing UK youth culture and beyond) and the award-winning bar Wolfie’s Hackney, in East London.
Boredom during the first lockdown encouraged Lee to pick up a paintbrush for the first time, and that turned into a daily meditative act and his new and most exciting creative project to date. Lee paints everyday in his Berlin studio where he has now relocated, and is pursuing and focusing all his energy into that.
His work is a representation of him. His paintings are exactly what it says on the tin and combine his sense of humor and attitude to life.
Shaoyu Chen
Shaoyu Chen is a visual artist from Taiwan practicing painting and embroidery. Her studies on literature and Jungian psychology for her BA degree deeply influenced her creative process, as she often approaches her subjects through psychological analysis and metaphorical representations.
In her paintings, she explores the complexity of the human psyche, taking inspiration ranging from daily interactions to other people’s dreams. The mythical figures in her paintings mirror universal archetypes that our conscious minds are often unaware of. She is fascinated by the subconscious’s ability to fictionalize the process of individuation in order to communicate with our waking minds.
Shaoyu is currently working on her master’s degree at Haute école d’art et de design – Genève, with an orientation in socially engaged art. Her studies focus on collaborative art practices regarding the ethics of care and mental wellbeing. With four other artists, they created a sound map of psychiatry in Geneva. Her ongoing thesis project is about creating conversations on period taboos and body issues through interactive drawings.
Gherdai Hassell
Gherdai Hassell is a Bermudian born, China trained, multidisciplinary contemporary artist, writer and storyteller, based in Manchester, UK. Her work investigates memory and nostalgia to create unexpected narratives surrounding identity. She uses collage to thread and weave histories, and tales of transformation passed down through family lineages.
Her work typically centers female bodies, simultaneously existing within realms of past, present, and future. Diasporic pasts become re-informed by Black futures, where the resulting present is experienced as a living “Artiffacts” and Alibii, her signature avatar. Her work is an exploration of identity as an exploration of materials, and social practice. The work suggests that identity should be self-determined and understood, and contextualized through connection with others. Her multimedia work reimagines relationships with the body as avatar, social space and the invisible world.
Her artwork is a part of public and private collections across the world and on permanent display in the Government Administration Building, Hamilton, Bermuda. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and biennials in Bermuda, USA and China. She is the host of The Art Affects Podcast, which celebrates and amplifies the voices of artists of the Caribbean Diaspora.
Selby H.I
Selby Hurst Inglefield (b.1997) is from the seaside town, Brighton. In 2015, she moved to London to start her Foundation Diploma in Fine Art at Central St Martins, University of the Arts London. After finishing her foundation, Selby continued to study BA Fine Art at Central St Martins from 2016-2019. After being awarded their Graduate Show Prize, she has shown twice with The Other Art Fair in 2019. In 2020, Selby had her first solo show with Peak Gallery and recently has been requested to show two pieces in Soho House, Shoreditch and Brighton.
Selby uses the technique of rug punching to create her textile works. This medium allows her to create a physical sense of comfort through the soft textures and the relaxing time consuming nature of the process. Rug punching also allows Selby to reflect on her practice’s wider themes of the domestic space, home and the mundane.
Salome Wu
Salomé Wu b. 1996, is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice involves oil painting, printing on silk, installations, and performance. As a teenager, Salomé admired a teacher who encouraged her to pursue training in calligraphy and painting. Her work examines otherworldliness through translations and ever-evolving reinterpretations of a personal mythology, formed from her observation of time, fragility, and the interplay between reality and the unseen.
Understanding herself primarily as a global citizen, Salomé works to keep her art devoid of contemporary models of identification and taxonomy, relying on obliquely biomorphic figures to populate her work. Across mediums, she presents a nonlinear journey, weaving together seemingly disparate moments to unveil previously concealed narratives. Salomé lives and works in London, UK.
Tracey Slater
Tracey Slater, born in 1983, lives and works in her hometown, Derby. Graduating with a First Class Degree in Illustration, she later gravitated towards contemporary drawing and painting.
Her Process is instinctive and Impulsive. Her main muse being the female nude. The faces she creates are often grotesque, humorous yet familiar. Painting the eyes green, transferring herself into the pieces, becoming the subject that has inspired it.
She gains a sense of freedom when working. Embedding the emotions into her lines and marks.
Tracey’s work has recently been displayed at: Hunted projects, Juice Gallery and Delphian Gallery open call winners 2020