Dialogues of Distance: Pollen Collective
About the Artists
JULIE DERBYSHIRE
Julie Derbyshire’s work explores themes of fragility and transience through a physical and visual engagement with objects and materials. She uses the constructed photograph as the final distillation of a creative process that encompasses acts of making, manipulation and disruption. Her fabrications, which are often small scale and of a temporary nature, are made more compelling through the medium of photography; transient moments of precariousness and suspense are captured within the frame. Julie’s works are defined by a unique combination of beauty and disquiet, inviting the viewer to reflect and to question what lies beyond the image.
For this exhibition, Julie’s new work responds to the interior and exterior spaces of her restricted domain during the pandemic. Noticing that throughout the months of lockdown her vision has become more forensic, more attuned to the beauty, textures and forms of her local landscape and to the details of her living environment, her work explores the dichotomy of confinement and freedom through an intermingling of visual motifs.
Julie holds a BA Photography from the University of Westminster and an MA Photography from the London College of Communication (UAL). She has exhibited in the UK and abroad and her work is held in private collections. She was a finalist in the Travers Smith Art Awards (2015) and the Arte Laguna Prize Venice (2016), and was awarded the Photofusion Prize (2017). Julie was also nominated for the RPS 100 Heroines Awards. She held a solo exhibition at One Paved Court in 2019. Julie lives and works in London.
http://www.juliederbyshire.com/
ISIS DOVE EDWIN
Isis Dove-Edwin is attracted to the infinite potential of clay to hold memory, and take on different identities through materiality, process and form. Her work explores and documents historical and contemporary social themes that resonate with her identity. She often uses other media to enhance the narrative and complement the ceramic elements.
Her first contact with clay was as a medical student, seeking a creative outlet. Getting back to clay many years later, she explored surface and shape in functional forms. Although she experimented with non-functional work, she realised that to take this further, and push the critical boundaries of her practice, she needed an immersive, structured environment, and so enrolled in the BA Ceramic Design program at Central St Martins in London, where she is now in her final year.
For the One Paved Court exhibition she uses readymade plates in a dishwasher rack to present a documentary piece; contemporaneous images and journal entries made during the March lockdown range from playful to serious. These pieces touch upon experiences, themes and images that resonate beyond her own domestic environment.
RACHNA GARODIA
Rachna trained at the prestigious National Institute of Design in India and The Royal School of Needlework in London. Her work predominantly involves hand embroidery and weaving; her visual language continues to evolve, combining echoes of her life in India with the experience of living in London. Rachna was shortlisted for the 2019 Sustainability First Art Prize; she was included in Design Fresh at 100% Design 2019 and she has been selected to participate in the London Creative Network. Rachna’s commissioned pieces are held in private collections in India, London and America.
Rachna’s initial impetus to create always comes from nature. As an artist, forager, weaver and maker, she has explored the beauty of quietude in this year of pandemic, uncertainty and fear. Her art pieces explore the need to be comforted and enveloped in a cocooned state. Rachna works through her thoughts and ideas in her own private, deep time. Richmond Park has been a muse, accomplice and mentor as she has gathered inspiration for the creation of the work for this show.
VANESSA GIORGO
Vanessa is an independent curator, currently based in London. Through her projects, she explores issues from a conceptual perspective, aiming to raise awareness of contemporary socio-political matters and the promotion of the arts on all levels of life. Identifying diverse phenomena, she researches questions via collaborative processes using both theoretical and practical approaches. She considers human connections to be unique dynamic artworks and she continually investigates alternative modes of being and creating.
Her special interests are centered on the concepts of identity and current societal and political trends. These themes are informed by her everyday encounters then examined through the curation of multimedia exhibitions. Vanessa’s interdisciplinary training and multicultural upbringing support her diverse creative approaches.
Vanessa has a BSc in Marketing and Communication from the Athens University of Economics and Business, a minor in History of Art from The American College of Greece and a MA in Curating from the University of Kent. She has collaborated with multiple art institutions including the Onassis Stegi Foundation in Athens, Art Athina, The Beany House of Art & Knowledge, TOMA (The Other MA) and independent galleries in the UK and Greece. She is currently working with the Pollen Collective and the Aphrodite* Queer Feminist Film Festival, and is part of the Management and the Curatorial teams of the Feminist Library of London.
http://www.vanessagiorgo.com/about.html
HARRIET HOULT
Harriet Hoult is a London based abstract artist who works with acrylic and mixed media on paper. Her practice is intuitive and her pieces are built up instinctively in layers, mark by mark. Her work can be seen as meditations, drawing influence from both the inner and outer landscape. For this exhibition, she has explored themes of home, boundaries (both physical and psychological,) belonging and freedom: her work aims to move beyond the intellectual process to an underlying visceral experience. There is a sculptural element to her painting, which creates a rich sensory experience; she is bold with her use of texture, composition and colour.
Harriet has spent time living and working in Cornwall, which has had a strong influence on her work. She was mentored by the renowned ceramicist and artist, Sandy Brown. Her work has been shown in galleries, art fairs and is held in private collections throughout the UK, Europe, the Middle East and the US.
LEONORA LOCKHART
Leonora Lockhart’s practice responds to collection, site, and narrative using the medium of clay and glass. Lockhart is inspired by the overlooked and disregarded objects of the everyday, bringing them back into focus, through distinctive contemporary art objects. Her pieces are imbued with the feeling of the mass-production, from which, she finds her inspiration regularly comes.
With an upbringing in France, Brazil and Portugal, Leonora now lives and works in London. Her career started in Advertising and moved into Illustration, but a change in creative direction and a growing interest in materiality led to a BA in Ceramic Design at Central Saint Martins. In September 2019 she began her MA Ceramics & Glass at The Royal College of Art. During this pandemic year, fired up by her MA studies, Lockhart has extended her practice to include cast glass.
During lockdown Lockhart has used objects from her living environment as a catalyst for exploring the materiality of clay and glass as an expression of interior and exterior boundaries. Simultaneously, she is examining the internalised feelings that manifest through the continued psychological and physical impacts of the pandemic.
https://www.leonoralockhart.com
KATE LOWE
A background in writing and media has made Kate a compulsive, visual story-teller. Her practice is grounded in the complex experiences of collective themes such as domesticity, motherhood, memory and ageing.
Kate trained at the Royal Drawing School, Central St Martins and did an MFA at the Chelsea College of Art (UAL). Kate regularly exhibits in the UK and Canada; her work was selected for the 2020 Royal Academy Summer Show. In 2020, Kate founded the Pollen Collective: an association of 25 emerging, professional artists from diverse backgrounds. The Collective is focused on professional development and creative collaboration and support. She is also an artist member and trustee at Kindred Studios and was a former director of the Recentre Artist Residency.
Kate works across a variety of media including painting, collage and mixed media, drawing, poetry and photography. For the group exhibition at One Paved Court she has created a series of poems and small paintings and collaborations, which explore the Pandemic experience of restriction and connection to the outside world through our domestic portals. Her works are intuitive responses to both the reductive and joyful experiences of “staying at home.”
https://www.kateloweartist.co.uk
NAZANIN MORADI
Nazanin works with performance, painting, costume making, soft sculpture, and collage. Addressing themes of gender, the body and death through the broader context of cultural history, mythology and memory, she creates deeply personal mysterious spaces to imagine an ‘other space’.
Nazanin’s art practice is defined by constant construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. She moves between three-dimensional textile works and two-dimensional images to create a dialogue between her materials, the studio space, and her body. She uses her body as a site of storytelling; “Once I wear the costume, I let the body speak on itself, to tell its own hi/story”, she says.
Nazanin is an Iranian-born artist living and working in London She received an MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art (UAL) in 2016. She has exhibited in the UK, Europe, America and the Middle East.
http://nazanin.co.uk/shortcodes/
AMY ROBSON
Amy Robson is a British/American artist who creates drawings, paintings and animations that consider the experience of being in a place – interior or exterior, physical or psychological. Her work pushes representational boundaries with disjointed pictorial spaces and uncanny juxtapositions, which emphasize her subjective response to contemporary dislocation and collective anxiety. Weird and wonky trees or banal net curtains and ghostlike figures suggest the uncertainty and strangeness of being alive in the modern world.
Born in America, Amy Robson has lived in the UK for 25 years. She trained at the Royal Drawing School and holds an MFA from Chelsea College (UAL), London. Her work is held in private collections in the UK and US. She has exhibited in various group shows and in one solo exhibition in the UK (2019). She had her first US solo exhibition with Jane Deering Gallery in 2020. In 2019 she was selected for a residency at PADA Studios in Portugal, and she was recently awarded a fellowship by the Jentel Artist Residency Program in Wyoming (September 2021).
For the One Paved Court exhibition, Robson responded to the psychological state of isolation to create paintings that amplify a sense loneliness and disquiet.
LUKE WHITE
Luke White’s photographs feature in elite international magazines worldwide and his portraits have been selected twice for the prestigious Taylor Wessing Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery. The research for some lectures at the Sorbonne University renewed Luke’s interest in conceptual work.
Using both analogue and digital formats as well as alternative printing techniques, Luke’s work explores themes of transformation and magic in perception. For Luke, photography is dreaming in daylight. For his residency show at the Re:Centre in London in March 2020, Luke exhibited ‘SOLAR’- a series of Solar Plate Intaglio Prints. These etchings of shadows and sunlight are the numinous echoes of the originals cast on the studio wall.
At One Paved Court, Luke extends these themes by collaborating on pieces with other artists, using ambiguous figuration and non-traditional photographic materials like porcelain, as well as presenting original sculpture.
POLLEN COLLECTIVE
Read about Pollen Collective HERE