Participating Artists

Marcia Teusink

Marcia Teusink's practice investigates how collapsed or broken built environments can be reconfigured and repurposed, utilising paint, found objects, photography and mixed media to create new possibilities. Her work demonstrates how fallible structures can be, acknowledging that the world we inhabit is in a constant flux of deconstruction and renewal. During the Ground Collective's Incubator of Ideas week at APT gallery last October she took daily walks nearby and found abandoned household objects which became the focus of examination and playful intervention. By utilising everyday objects her work is intrinsically relatable, encouraging others to reflect on the ordinary forms, devices and objects they rely on to keep their life going, and how quickly this efficiency stops when they fail. She frequently collaborates with other artists and has participated in a number of residencies. This year she had a MASSMoCA studio residency in North Adams, MA, USA. Her studio is currently in Stoke Newington, London and her work is shown in galleries in Europe and the USA.

@marcia_teusink

Madi Acharya-Baskerville

Madi Acharya-Baskerille scours shorelines, woods and forests to find shed organic forms and discarded ephemera. These journeys are micro-reflections of the diasporic experience she has as an Asian-born, Oxford-based artist. She adorns and reconfigures the objects she discovers with focused intent, drawing together concerns for the environment, migration, exile and gender. Her work is now in the permanent collection, Whitworth, University of Manchester, as part of the Art Fund New Collecting Award (2021). She has also been awarded Developing Your Creative Practice Award from Arts Council England (2021). Her solo exhibition, ‘My Life as a Bird’ at Darl-e- and the Bear gallery, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, explores ocean pollution from plastic and associated debris (2021).

@madiacharyabaskerville
https://vimeo.com/636025441

Joost Gerritsen

Joost Gerritsen is a Dutch-born, Valencia-based artist working in a range of media, from ceramics through drawing to photography. Since moving to the countryside outside Valencia in 2006 his creative relationship with the rugged land that surrounds his studio has been a growing inspiration for his work. Joost brings a non-urban view from mainland Europe to the project. He uses organic and man-made items that he finds on his daily walks as content for sculptures, drawings and photographs. He runs, with his wife, Ojalá an Art Centre, https://www.ojala-lliria.com, where he regularly teaches. He is a highly experienced artist, winning Art in Volkspark Award (2007). His work is in many collections including RABO Bank Enschede, SBK Amsterdam and AKI Academy of Fine Arts. 

@joostgerritsen_

Mark Sowden

Mark Sowden uses sculptural and photographic processes to give attention to objects. Journeys through various landscapes become opportunities to search for objects. Sometimes he takes the things he finds, either the objects themselves or their images as photographs. The Thames foreshore is a special landscape where searching becomes a heightened activity to locate material evidence of London’s past. The things he finds are often broken, misplaced and on the point of losing their object identity. His processes bring these objects back into sight, locating them in new contexts and showing them in new combinations that revitalise them. Sometimes the objects are used performers to make photographic work. They are also incorporated into curated shows and have inspired a new series of ceramic sculptures. Mark is a Technical Demonstrator at University of East London managing a casting, ceramic and metal fabrication workshop. 

@marksowden3

Matthew Swift

Matthew Swift is the founder of the Ground Collective. His painting practice emerges from the walks he takes through the hinterlands of the East Kent Coast, where estuaries abut land and industrial structures give way to rural pastures. These journeys nudge out of him conflicting patchworks of painted and drawn responses. Stitching is utilised, juxtaposing clashing halves together to fascilitate an immediate visual dialogue that he then builds upon with paint and other materials. Whilst documenting a personal narrative his intention is to draw viewers into a psychological space, a site of shared recognition, where opposing positions are made to sit next to each and encouraged to communicate. He has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Melbourne, London and Kent and shown extensively in group and two person shows, including ‘Contructure’ at Standpoint and Dialogue with DeKooning at RCA. He completed a year’s residency at the Florence Trust (2008) and was shortlisted for the Chiara Williams SOLO Award (2018).

@mswiftyart

Ana Vicente

Ana Vicente is a Portuguese-born, London-based artist-researcher-teacher working in drawing, film, performance, photography, sound and writing. She uses fine art, somatic movement and performance-making methods to explore how meaning can emerge from apparent nothingness, in the realm of the everyday. Her work explores different modes of perception, attention and contemplation in unfolding stories of the self and understandings of contexts and environments. She has been interested with how waiting and duration are implied in time and space, and how we perceive this in and through our body. In her activities, Ana surveys and maps the time and space that is shaped by the entanglement of presence and experience, of bodies and things. The sites she works in/with are treated as laboratories for entangling visible in the invisible, the extraordinary in the ordinary, gently and quietly, in looking, listening, researching, wandering, nudging, conducting, composing and directing. Ana is also part of the duo Lorie Jo and Ana, with whom she was the recipient of the ArtsAdmin BANNER Award 2018. Ana’s is a PhD candidate at the University of the Arts London developing art pedagogical research.

@anamvicente

Mike Sims

Mike Sims is a poet and writer and has produced poems and texts for each iteration of our project: ‘Going and Looking’, about John Clare’s journey through Essex (2015); ‘8 Divigations’, a book-length poem inspired by input from fellow members of the group, produced as a handprinted Leporello book (2019); ‘Everything Saved with Time’, a large-scale poem and mixed media installation for our ‘Incubator of Ideas’ week at APT, which drew on the group’s mudlarking expeditions to the Deptford foreshore (2020). He has collaborated with the artist Roy Willingham on several artist’s books: Letter of advice to Amy by Joseph Cornell (2017); My Book A Lever (Restrukturanta La Mezepoka Libro) (2017); and This Westward (2020). In 2019 he collaborated with the poet Julia Bird on the book Paper Trail, inspired by an 18-month, wordless exchange by post, of objects and the poems they inspired. His open, playful approach to language reveals layers that would otherwise remain hidden. He works at the Poetry Society.

@abosimian

Sam Hodge

Growing up on the Kent coast has given Sam Hodge a lifetime curiosity about the point where land and sea meet. Walking along coastal paths is an ongoing practice, where she collects ephemera, which act like clues in a bigger puzzle that she is trying to work-out. What she finds on her walks becomes the content of her work. Old boxes become forms for intaglio prints and discarded plastics become images for photographic etchings. Through her training as a painting conservator (working at the Tate and other national art galleries) Sam Hodge brings an analytic and scientific underpinning to the Ground Collective. Her understanding of how paint is composed has allowed her to explore making inks and paints which she concocts out of many of her found objects, such as bones and coal. This has led to an exploration of the parallels between the ebb and flow of muddy waters onto land with the liquid and drying state of paint itself as it is poured and left to evaporate on surfaces. Sam has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows and participated in a number of residencies both in the UK and abroad. She recently completed Radical Residency VI Exhibition, Unit 1 Gallery/Workshop.

@samhodgeart

Tom Banks

Tom Bank’s atmospheric paintings and constructions materialise from walks taken through built environments. He deploys his perception of land, architecture and the space between to convey concerns about isolation, exclusion, class and identity. Growing up in North Peckham, not far from APT Gallery, and now living in Hastings, has given Tom an awareness of the changing shapes and scales of dwellings that can be navigated between London and the Sussex coast. These journeys will resonate with many South East Londoners who will have made similar trips backwards and forwards over the years. Tom brings an understanding of how walking through and repeatedly observing familiar urban environments imbues crucial layers of connection onto individual identity. The 28 paintings he is making for Ground Work are based on a walk he has taken around the 28 miles of the border of the London Borough of Lewisham. He has exhibited widely in solo and group shows, participated in residencies and won the Beep Wales International Painting Prize (2016).

@tmobanks