Ancient Vessels
15 - 18 December 2022
Thurs to Sun, 12-5pm
Private View :
Wednesday 14 December 6 - 9pm (Performance by Chris Owen at 8pm)
Artist Q&A / exhibition tour:
Sunday 18th December 3-5pm
Curators and artists, Noelle Turner and Emma Papworth, will hold a Panel Discussion with the other participating artists, talking about the influences behind their work, and the notion of ‘ancient courage’; whether it can be regarded as nostalgic or an intrinsic part of human nature. The talk will discuss artists’ research into cultural memory, eco-feminism, queer history, and the Anthropocene – exploring how these issues converge and coagulate together into a concern for the environmental crisis: from the geological to the biological to the cosmic.
‘Ancient Vessels’ is a group exhibition that aims to show how artists translate recovered lost knowledge, through multiple paths of thought, and how they relate this to their experience of the contemporary. From evoking science fictional worlds, the alien, and the unhuman; to the archaic and the personal, all are modes of expression that are united in the same ground: the search for an ancient energy not yet lost to be harnessed to give us courage for the future.
Ancient Vessels
‘Ancient Vessels’ presents a group exhibition of twelve artists working predominantly across sculpture and painting. Folklore merges with futuristic worlds, and the past merges with the future, as the show juxtaposes artists who have a shared interest in researching historical material, and a yearning to locate meaning by recovering a lost knowledge from history. Burrow into the muddy earth; hidden codes, symbols, annexes and doors of meaning reveal themselves inviting the artist to act as a vessel to excavate, tune and communicate its knowledge, helping us to better understand the self, others and the earth.
This exhibition aims to show how artists translate recovered knowledge, through multiple paths of thought, and how they relate this to their experience of the contemporary. From evoking science fictional worlds, the alien, and the unhuman; to the archaic and the personal, all are modes of expression that are united in the same ground: the search for an ancient energy not yet lost to be harnessed to give us courage for the future.
Artist Introductions
Conor Ackhurst (b. 1995) works predominantly in sculpture and installation as well as video, print and performance. Focusing on the knotty intersection between public and private space. Creating fantasies around the industrial and the domestic made eerie, elevating ordinary objects in ways that draw out their inherent complexities. @conor_ackhurst
Jakob Rowlinson (b.1990) creates textile collages imbued with queer codes and mythical symbolism. Exploring medieval queer ecologies, the artist forms rich textural landscapes of fleshy foliage and floral figures, employing them to reject a ‘nature vs. human’ narrative, hinting instead towards a more queer future. @jakobrowlinson
Emma Papworth (b.1993) makes sculptures and installations that questions the urban environments we inhabit, drawing on materials and forms that express their age and history, as well as the story of their origins and past human use: to offer imaginary futures as well as contemplations on technology, tradition, community and long timescales. @emma_papworth
Francesca Dolor (b.1991) produces paintings, sculpture and drawings of text/image panoramas. Their work is concerned with areas of extremity to form a type of psychic self-surgery. Their paintings and drawings are formed of self-automated internal subject matter, which explore internal landscapes and architectures, ideas of subversion, as well as the subconscious. @francesca_dolors
Steven McInerney (b.1983) is an artist combining film, digital projection and sound to create experimental films, live performances and installations. McInerney draws upon dichotomous energies, meditating between the sacred and profane. His cinematic work explores psychospiritual tropes, often blurring the lines between science and fiction. His live performances utilise multi-channel projection and real-time feedback systems to exploit the audience's awareness of time within the moving image; pushing the boundaries of perception and the medium itself. He is the founder of Psyché Tropes, a label investigating the synaesthetic intersections between sound and its visual counterpart. He performs and releases as Merkaba Macabre and hosts a monthly radio programme on Resonance 104.4fm. @psychetropes
Amba Sayal-Bennett (b. 1991) working across drawing, projection, and sculptural installation. practice explores how methods of abstraction are exclusionary and performative, crafting boundaries between what is present, manifestly absent, and othered. Her recent work focuses on the migration of rational forms and their role within fascist and brutalist architecture. Using translation as a method, she explores the movement of bodies, knowledge and form across different sites, processes inherent to the diasporic experience. @ambasayalbennett
Rebecca K Halliwell-Sutton (b. 1991) works across sculpture, photography, written word and curating, making use of the transformative properties of materials. The work meanders through geographies and histories, from the micro and internal expanding outwards into a birds-eye view. Grounded in a feminist critique of land ownership, bodies and desires, the undercurrent of the work explores an intergenerational connection through cyclical time, bodies, and place, and the boundaries between them. @studemood
Zinong Zhang creates sculptures that question the reality of the material world, the convention or normality rarely questioned. She proposes fiction as an alternative scenario and brings the multi-layers reference from everyday mundane settings to blur the line between definitions. With the awareness of subjectivity of the perspective under individual perception, she intends to illustrate and describe the intangible feelings. She builds scenes for her audiences to re-imagine the linear and binary condition into chaotic and disordered fluidity. @zinong.zhang
Nicola Bergamaschi is a visual artist born in Parma, Italy. He is currently based in London, where he’s attending the MFA at Goldsmiths University. Nicola’s practice expands over a myriad of media, mainly working across sculpture, video and image making. He focuses on processes that enable him to shape and create objects or reconfigure images in order to empower them with a reinvigoratd purpose. Constants in his work are themes such as crisis, nostalgia and the imagining of the future. His latest series of work reflects on topics such as necropolitics, surveillance, weapons fetish and our relationship with death. @nicola_bergamschi
Carl Anderson creates sculptural forms that are playful and curious introspections of his own experiences and combines them with a visual language reminiscent of relic and artifact. They attempt to create objects that function as totemic signals for the deities of ancient civilizations that are both foreign and familiar to the viewer. They are also a means of investigating how specific belief systems connect to contemporary culture. @carl_j_anderson
Anouk Verviers work engages in extensive long-term art projects revolving around discussion on collective issues. She articulates her art practice as a bicephalous entity: one head exists in the social realm, through collaborative and research-based projects, and one head exists in the art world, through artworks and exhibitions. Meeting different communities, she creates mobile sculpture-furniture that, by disrupting usual interactions while preserving a sensation of comfort, facilitates exchanges. @anouk.verviers
Alia Hamaoui (b.1996) work explores how images, both printed and digitised are intercepting our perspective on historical narratives and the exotic. She is interested in cultural spaces that we use to escape our everyday. She thinks of them as self explorational spaces, where people try to identify or link themselves to some form of their own cultural identity. @aliahamaoui
Noelle Turner (b. 1993) recent work has consisted of installation, sculpture, painting and writing, which reconsiders the relationship between ecological and technological systems, the balance of chaos and control in nature, and the spiritual world of objects. Drawing upon wide ranging influences, from religion, biology, cosmology, psychology to science-fiction, she investigates the prehistoric to imagined future worlds in search of knowledge to help understand a deeply personal present time: hope, sadness and searching. @noelleturner1
Ella Turner-Bridger (b.1998) is an artist and filmmaker, who lives and works in London after graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2020. I make film installations that play with the language of cinema, fragmenting moments from horror and Sci-fi films into multi-sensory and abstract narratives. My work has been exhibited in galleries across London. My recent shows include, On the Rocks, Unit 1 Gallery, and Active Bystanders Ltd., No-Format Gallery, along with screenings of my recent films 'Starman' and 'Fishing In The Devil's Punchbowl' at The Waiting Room, Film Festival and Jellied Reels, The Castle Cinema. @ellaturnerbridger