Simon Callery
Last winter I worked outside on the banks and in the dry riverbeds of the Stura di Lanzo on the fringes of Turin in North Italy. Once I had found the right place – which was relatively secluded and had a variety of physical surfaces - I threw my lengths of loose canvas down. Crawling over the fabric I pierced and cut into it with a knife and scissors where I felt contact with the river-washed stones and sands underneath.  

I was not interested in making an image of this place. I wanted to work with it physically. The marks and cuts in the canvas register the points where I touched the landscape through the cloth and where it touched me. It felt like a collaboration.  

I took all the canvas back to the studio and I begun the process of stitching parts together, working the colour relationships, defining the dimensions and proportions and forming the internal voids and spaces. At the front of my mind throughout was the thought that I was trying to make a painting that must operate as a physical record of a place and that every action I carried out had to be evident in the finished painting. I think of these works as ‘contact paintings’. 

@ simon.callery 
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Maria de Lima
Using a visual aesthetic driven by colour within film, installation, and painting, Maria de Lima’s practice uses a feminist lens to explore the colonial imposition of language as a means to extend territory; creating complex overlays where geographies and cultures intersect, and conflicting ideas inhabit our bodies. 

De Lima's ongoing series of paintings, ‘Crop’, is based on a schematic diagram of a plant that is reconfigured over several panels to mimic written language. This link between diagrammatic simplification and the alphabet comes from her interest in the alphabet effect, a hypothesis that argues that phonetic writing, in particular alphabetic scripts, promote the cognitive skills of abstraction, coding and classification.  

Through this lens, plants become crops, become figures, abstracted within the structure of industrialised farming - yesteryear’s colonial plantation - as sources of profit divided from any sense of vital relation to ourselves. The paintings counterbalance the dissociative nature of abstraction with its potential for visual delight and sensuousness, attempting to reclaim embodied connection to our flora. 

@ m.de.lima 
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Neil McNally
Neil McNally is verminious as van Eyck, vicious as Verlaine, vespertillian as Vetriano,  vaginal as Virgil, virulent as van Dyck, voraginous as van Gogh, vespertinal as Vasari, void as Villon, vituperative as Vermeer, voluptuous as Vuillard, viscid as Vātsyāyana, vertiginous as Valadon, vermiculous as Vesalius, viparious as Valentinus,  verrucose as Vonnegut,  virose as Vlaminck, vampiric as Van Vliet, visceral as Vaucher, valedictory as Velázquez, volatious as Voltaire, vacuous as Vangelis, vile as Valery, vain as Veronese, venal as Valloton, visionary as Vaughan, verecund as Viz, vociferant as Vanini, venomous as Veit and vinegary as Van Halen. 

http://abbey.org.uk/past_awards/2016/neil-mcnally 
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John Robertston
The work begins with Fra Angelico's 'Annunciation' fresco in cell 3 of the San Marco Convent in Florence. I saw it on a trip away from Rome in 2018 and feel like I've been making work about it ever since. The tonal and chromatic proximity of the image and the wall result in an oscillation between flatness and architectural space. This may play some part in the strange hallucinatory quality it has that backs up George Williamson's claim that “Fra Angelico grasped, as but few artists have ever grasped, the quality of vision”. He's right, the work feels like a vision, it is also of a vision: The Annunciation - the Angel Gabriel telling the Virgin Mary she will bear a child - but to me what this particular annunciation announces is not the birth of Jesus but the birth of pictorial space. Almost oozing out of the wall it's the birth of itself as image, the birth that vision itself always is. 

 During the time of making the work in 'Ex Roma V' I walked up a hill in Wales called Moel Famau. It was a very misty day and visibility was very limited except for a period of a few minutes on the descent. In this brief time the mist gradually lifted and a distant landscape slowly emerged, spectral, as though projected onto the mist itself. It stayed for no more than two minutes, then, as quickly as it came, it went, closed back in on itself and the landscape was gone.  

@ john_robertson123 
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Jade Ching-yuk Ng
Jade Ching-yuk Ng is an interdisciplinary artist who is currently based in London. Her soft, intricate works emboss the fragility of a physical intimate relationship between herself and others. Jade is interested in quoting the essence of touch and separation at a moment in time. By exploring the possibilities of forms in painting, Jade conceives of her paintings as an assembly of her and others' body puzzles. Often revolving around personal travel experience, classical myth, alchemy, religious rituals and anatomy as references, Jade deconstructs their symbolism by attaching her own interpretation, and her symbols seem to depart from their literal connotations into an obscure and ambiguous fiction. The agency of framing becomes a gesture of embracing, defining actual and pictorial surrealistic space. The essence of modernist architecture influences how she constructs and adds odds to her composition in the picture. She develops them into printmaking, painting, sculptural painting and the most recent cut-outs and wood reliefs. Its theatricality encourages visitors to consider characters that are depicted in dialogue with themselves, whilst also considering the fine edge of collision in reality and imagination. 

@ jade.chingyuk.ng 
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Gabriel Hartley
Gabriel Hartley (London, UK, 1981) lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. He holds a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools, London. 

@ gabrieljhartley 
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Damien Meade
I make objects, commonly from clay, which I use as source material for paintings. The paintings divide into two distinct but complimentary bodies of work which can loosely be defined as figurative and abstract, though all the work retains an indexical reference to the body. I look to obfuscate various binaries such as high vs. low, ancient vs. modern, and subject vs. object. Clay and paint are composed of mineral bound by fluid, so in making paintings of clay, in a synthesis or compression of surface and illusion, mineral comes to signify mineral. Also of interest is the role of minerals in the genesis of life; that micro-instant in a vent at the bottom of the ocean when geo-chemistry first became bio-chemistry. This oscillation between the animate and inanimate runs throughout the work, as does a curiosity with the uneasy relationship between objects and desire. 

@ __damien_meade__ 
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Karin Ruggaber
Karin Ruggaber makes sculpture as well as producing artist’s books. Coming out of a studio-based practice, her work revolves around a physical and haptic experience with materials and architecture. Using aspects of figuration and ornamentation, she is interested in the translation of pictorial principles into sculptural form, and how gesture and the hand-made relate to architectural imagination and scale.  

@ karin.ruggaber_ 
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Dillwyn Smith
Walking & Working Roma - witnessing live colour: I walked the city, beginning a daily routine to get out and come across stuff and be stimulated. I initially avoided museums, deciding to begin by looking only at Caravaggio in the places they were painted for, returning over and over to see them in different light conditions across the three months.  

But it was from the new (old) colours made by light ricocheting between buildings and creating new frequencies in colours that I learnt so much. It was so exciting to witness it happening live in the streets at different times of day from dawn to dusk. The light contained in the air is very particular to Rome, especially in those early months of the year when the sun is low and rakes across the buildings.  

In Rome I saw the phosphorescing lime washes of ochres, siennas, pinks and new ambers made by fading sunlight on cypress tree greens and a startling range of blues. These colours and the light made for me more sense of early renaissance paintings through to Caravaggio, whose work I greatly admired and now I’ve come to love deeply. They brought alive the drawings and paintings of Phillip Guston, another artistic hero whose dialogue with Rome had such an influence on his work. 

I worked on a collection of colours with Francesca Wezel, a paintmaker in London - this new range of household paints is based on The Nativity, by Piero della Francesca. I had the great good fortune to be able to look in the BRS library at editions of wonderful print quality (especially B/W ones) and pre- restoration reproductions in books to compare to my colour/tone notes made from my intimate understanding of the painting after working at The National Gallery for 20 years. I sent colour sheets to Francesca and she sent paint back for me to test with, which I used in my striated wall work in the Mostra.  

@ dillwynsmith 
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