The Kids are Alright: An incomplete portrait of a small sliver of the current artistic generation

November 5th, 2024.

Fireworks are booming across the sky, splattering the firmament with all manner of wild and fiery pigments. I see none of it though. My windows look out to a boring patch of sky where nothing is happening.

To make up for this pyrotechnic pleasure that’s being denied me, my mind turns instead to paintbrushes loaded with paint being swung and flicked at canvases like a fencer’s sword. Colours splashing thick and gloopy. Lately I’ve had the inestimable pleasure of talking to some artists giving me a peek behind the curtain of their work. Like a member of the audience who wanders backstage during a show, except no one kicks them out, happily letting them roam.

This didn’t come by chance. What ties these artists together is their place on the shortlist for this year’s Hari Art Prize, which spotlights and awards the talents of recent graduates, regardless of age. Having a personal curiosity about artists earlier on in their careers – for I believe it is this layer of the art world that is more indicative of an artist’s life – I approached those on the shortlist and annoyed them with my questions.

If you happen to have the chance to walk around the softly lit lobby of The Hari Hotel in London before the 28th of February 2025, you’ll see the artists’ submission to the prize on display there.

Despite the vast spectrum of disciplines being practised here or the wildly deviating personal styles and concepts, many commonalities emerge among these artists. Like order out of chaos. Which emphasises certain tendencies among this generation of artists. And although this article is but a collection of haphazard brushstrokes rather than a complete and considered portrait, the marks I’ll make here will allow you to finish the image for yourself.

One thing I’ve noticed in this collection, something prevalent with most contemporary art, is the development of a new visual language. The eras of art history are neatly classified and categorised – like dead, colourful butterflies in glass cases. Granted, there’s slippage and spillage between various art movements, each has a distinct visual language. Impressionism looks different to surrealism to cubism to Fauvism to whatever other ism you wish to entertain here. With contemporary art, meanwhile, hindsight doesn’t work in the present, so we’re witnessing - with each artwork created - the visual language of our age proliferating into being. Many of our dear artists here are consciously aware of this fact.

Nina Ogden tells me about her recent visit to Southwestern France to see the cave paintings in the Grotte de Niaux. “We had to walk a long way into the caves to see the 14,000-year-old paintings which depicted bison, horses and deer. The main thing I took away from the experience is that painting has fundamentally stayed the same.” Even though styles and sensibilities change throughout different eras of history, painting is “still pigments from the ground spread on a surface. And it carries the weight and essence of the human condition. Painting transmits a language which is impossible to replicate or put into words.”

Me writing this piece becomes a futile endeavour then, but I’ll try anyway.

Her paintings, usually done on wood panelling, are luscious peaks into otherworldly foliage. Or rather, they’re simple, Earthly foliage that seems beautifully alien against a backdrop of violent natural exploitation. Her hazy, muted colour palette renders her paintings into disembodied fragments of quickly-fading dreams, scenes that get lodged into your consciousness like bits of chewed-up food in your molars. There’s something still-life-y (paintings about flowers and random crap) about Nina’s work, but she modernises this long tradition by mingling magnetic film and wiring through her foliage, or depicting backstage spaces reclaimed by voracious overgrowth. These apocalyptic still lives, hence, chronicle the growth of plant life unhindered by humanity, referencing us through our absence.

Yeonsu Ju’s strange and explosive compositions are a paragon of her unique language. Gymnastic strokes of her brush make the colours arc, slide, and sway, giving some of her subjects a spidery quality. Partly disfigured under a shifting whirl of paint, her figures seem lost, engaged in their activities with confused nonchalance. The elegant – I think… female? – subject in “Crumpled Kiss on a Cake Box” (2023), which is on display at The Hari, blows a kiss which explodes across the canvas like fireworks – exactly what I’m looking for right now.

“I was never good at speaking my mind through words when it comes to love,” Yeonsu admits. “I always felt there were things left unspoken. And I felt painting can be the language that delivers my heart.” There’s certainly a palpable desire for connection radiating from her subjects. The contents of her heart crashing directly into our eyes.

Painting comes naturally to Heiyi Tam, who, like Yeonsu, uses it to express and document what she can’t articulate concretely. More than an utterance, she listens to the world through her paintings. “The process of being creative is so addictive; it helps me understand the world around me better.” Her canvases are akin to gigantic, psychedelic Petri dishes in which incomprehensible lifeforms float pleasurably under the gaze of a microscope. Fine, threadlike wisps of white connect amorphous blobs of colour which bob buoyantly in a soup of yellows and greens. The screaming abstraction in her works gives us a glimpse into those thoughts incapable of being put into words and gestures. The meaning she leaves up to you.

Blythe Plenderleith’s perception of the world is similarly and inextricably linked with her art. “Life imitating art and its reverse are paramount to all my ideas,” she says. A bizarre sense of humour beams off her sculptures which distort reality around them like a black hole. A charred bed frame with no bottom. A perfect cube of sand sliced out of a beach, gradually washed and withered away by the waves. A toy gun which, upon pulling the trigger, projects the faces of the thirteen victims of the Columbine shooting. Or, for her submission to the Hari Art Prize, a ladder with a broomstick going over and under its rungs, like a bendy rubber pencil.

Mengmeng Zhang, when speaking of her influences, says, “My research has been influenced by the French artist Emmanuelle Castellan, particularly her painting ‘Gesture Recognition’. In that painting, she cuts through (physically and metaphorically) a thick linen canvas, painted with a character performing a sequence of movements as if to create a forced pause. I’m drawn to how she uses the physicality of painting—cutting, folding, or other manipulations—to explore ephemerality: how can the language of painting be used to freeze or extend time?”

With how the subjects and objects in her sparsely populated paintings give the impression of shift and oscillation, one can tell the question of temporal manipulation is one she often explores in her work. Things and bodies leave traces and after-images in her scenes, akin to holding a strip of film to the light and watching the elemental particles of movement suspended in static time.

Where time is flattened and dissected in Mengmeng’s work, Meghan Josephine’s paintings exude the tension of paused animation, as if her delicate brushstrokes are itching to burst into motion again. Colours pour off her female subjects like melting wax, all of whom are depicted with powerful intimacy. Her work hung at The Hari is this ponderous display of one woman seemingly consoling another in her lap. A dim gloom that flies under the radar emanates off the canvas. When speaking about her work, Meghan says, “I strive to challenge traditional depictions and propose a new visual language that embraces diversity and complexity.” Art history is balefully awash with objectified depictions of women - à la, the nude. Actually, history in general is awash with near-constant objectification and dismissal of women. “The societal objectification of my body, as well as the repetitive loss of women's rights worldwide, from America to Afghanistan, drives me to create art that fosters meaningful conversations about female experiences.” Meghan’s idea of a new visual language references and replaces these archaic and problematic traditions with a more nuanced depiction of female life, “creating a dialogue between past and present gender narratives.”

Sharing her inspirations, Meghan waxes lyrical about the figurative painters. “What’s particularly spoken to me is the way they transcribe flesh and communicate social issues through the representation of people. I am inspired by artists who introduce deeper messages through their compositions, using the human form as a vehicle for social commentary.”

The body is tangled up in the machinery of politics. It’s for the corporeal self-indulgence of one that another is stripped of their rights and freedom. The body – anatomically and culturally – is a vivid metaphor for the socio-political conditions we’ve created. The body is the table upon which our desires, fears, and ambitions are served to the world like an all-you-can-eat buffet. All that remains afterwards is a once-white tablecloth, stained with every hue of the culinary rainbow.

Georgina Stone’s practice makes her acutely aware of the artwork’s body. “I focus on the visceral, physical, and psychological aspects of painting, approaching each piece as an unfolding process that explores the endless possibilities of paint through colour and gesture.” From the moment the first mark is laid upon a piece, infinite directions open themselves up before the artwork, steered by the artist’s hand. “I create,” she says, “a heavily layered surface to reveal history and doubt. Painting for me is a full-body performance, employing various tools— nails, sticks, pens, and my hands—to create diverse marks.” Georgina’s abstract compositions are this gestural dialogue between the canvas and her, spoken through the lexicon of anything that can make a mark. A fun little game is to try and find – amidst this pandemonium of marks – the first layer she applied. Given how the layers palimpsestically accumulate atop each other, her artworks become a document of their own creation.

Alongside physical bodies, Heather Green is imagining a very different and unexpected kind of embodiment. Touching a salient note, she says, “I think artists often get sucked into the expectation of creating a coherent body of work that conforms to market ideals i.e. producing work that is recognisable, consumable, and marketable — or having a ‘style’. I wanted to resist this expectation and inhabit a space where play and spontaneity are nourishing and valued as opposed to raw, quantitative production.” Her canvases are a glorious dance between lines, colours, and shapelessness. The choreography of her brush is like a swarm of murmuring starlings tossing, wheeling, and twirling through the evening sky. There’s the vague impression of shape - sometimes bodily, sometimes mechanic – but it never fully takes form, like the brief synchronisation between pendulums before they swing back into chaotic disarray again. And none of it coheres to a specific style or pattern. Certain motifs will overlap from one painting to another, only to disappear completely, replaced by something else.

Each artwork is but a fundamental brushstroke that collectively composes the image of an artist’s oeuvre. It is then understandable for an artist to make sure each piece they create is a considered contribution to their body of work. But it is more than easy for them to become trapped within the visual language of their corpus, held hostage by their style and pressured to keep their current artwork consistent with the preceding and succeeding work.

The visual language of Heather’s combined works eschews this practice, each piece being a joyful and situational mark with no consideration for when, where, and why. This, I believe, makes for a more genuine and unhindered expression of her artistic ideas than adhering to the strictures of style.

In quite the same manner as Meghan, Katie Tomlinson excavates art history, absorbing its traditions into her visual language with grace and equity. She declares, “My paintings overtly reference moments throughout the canon of Western, patriarchal art history. I reconsider, reconfigure, and reclaim specific moments from Painting's problematic past. Harbouring this as a tool to enhance, develop, and reinforce my paintings’ contemporary social themes within a post-MeToo era.”

There’s a beautifully gruesome quality to her canvases, given how thick and fast the paint is applied. Some of her works devolve into a nightmarish evisceration of form and substance, while those that don’t are constantly threatening to end up that glorious way. Depicting such phantasmagoric scenes as charred dancers waltzing inside a rusted, burning oven; some suspicious citrus fruit being suggestively peeled; a black cat tending a pastry stand while the world burns behind it; or two girls wandering through a lake of blood surrounded by lurid foliage.

That last piece, titled ‘Over and Over’, is on display at The Hari. This is what she tells me about it, “The two women in the painting were taken from a Marc Jacobs ‘Daisy’ advert. The painting also references Impressionism and how women were depicted as decorative objects. I decided to situate the women inside an Impressionist landscape as a way to merge past and present, addressing the portrayal of women in contemporary media against historical representations in painting, to critique the heteropatriarchal depictions of women and girls today.”

The longer one stares at Katie’s paintings, the more surreal they become, the marks upon the canvas swaying imperceptibly and… tauntingly. It feels like some joke is going around which you might be the butt of. Any efforts to find comfortable identification elude the viewer as the scene recedes away from us like a mirage in the desert, leaving us thirsty and marooned in its imagery. “Through the adoption and utilisation of Bertolt Brecht’s Distancing Effect,” Katie explains, “I want my paintings to invite viewers to perceive the familiar as strange, prompting them to become conscious, critical observers of the narratives unfolding throughout my pictorial imagery.”

Heeding Katie’s words, let’s become conscious observers of the narratives unfolding throughout the artist’s works here.

The intricacy of Jingyi Li’s practice further elaborates the feminist themes Meghan and Katie have so far presented. “My work explores emotions, histories, and experiences through the use of soft, unconventional materials,” she tells me. Textiles are the beating heart of her practice, their flowy softness making a mockery out of the fragile solidity of the objects she fashions them into. Such as traditional East Asian vessels like pots, gourds, and jugs made out of silk; holes in a wicker chair patched up with lace; and, what’s on display at The Hari, silverware intricately sewn with lace, complete with ornamentation and engravings. “I aim to reveal the emotional depth in everyday objects, unlocking their potential to communicate complex feelings.” She continues, talking about her silverware project, “In my recent series, The Hidden Drawer, I delve into the subtle eroticism of domestic life. By entwining traditionally feminine objects with handmade lace, I seek to embrace and reframe their meaning, transforming them into intimate expressions of the female experience within the domestic space.”

“In my current work,” explains Duong Thuy Nguyen, “I explore the intricate narratives of the Vietnamese diaspora, viewing moments of arrival not just as points in time but as intersections of complex stories shaped by displacement.” She springs these stories to tangible life with her sculptural practice. Icons of community and domesticity recur throughout her oeuvre, regardless of the materials she’s using; whether it’s paper and dust, representing the delicate fragility of communities torn apart and blown across the winds of displacement, or cement and wood, equally representing their strength and perseverance. Housing blocks made of wax and plaster, towering at precarious angles as if built on unstable ground, is a favourite image of hers. It carries the same emotional resonance whether it’s cast in a basket, perched on the side of cliff-like wood, or fermented in a jar.

Her submission project is a documentation of Vietnamese refugee communities in Hong Kong detention centres. Duong takes these images, captured by Joan Wakelin, and embosses them on Perspex-backed aluminium.  This is what Duong has to tell me about it, “The series consists of sixteen hand-embossed images, each serving as a window into the lives of Vietnamese refugee communities. Central to the collection are images of children in the detention centres. These images are presented in a dualistic framework, with moments of familiarity intertwined with the alienation of displacement. Through this juxtaposition, the series becomes a testament to resilience and adaptability.”

Heiyi, meanwhile, was born and raised in Hong Kong, moving to the UK when she was 15. “I have,” she says, “always been very curious about identifying the subtleties of the merging of East and West through landscapes, cultures and cuisines as I have spent so much time in both countries. There are a lot of diasporic narratives that underline my work throughout, echoing specific flavours or feelings in a particular place.” One could, then, interpret the shapeless splashes of colour in her paintings as those manifold sights, sounds, and tastes from the East and West floating, merging, and influencing one another. An abstract snapshot of her experience.

Libby Bove’s work has a narrative and lore all of its own. Straddling performance, photography, and theatre, her projects depict a fantastical world where motor vehicles are powered by folkloric rituals. “Most of my work,” she exclaims, “explores the repositioning of folk custom and magical practice back into daily life. Drawing from the historical prevalence of folk ritual, plant knowledge and magic used day to day, my work seeks to re-weave and reimagine these practices, into a contemporary setting. Central to my practice is Roadside Magic;  the imagined construct where plant knowledge, magic, and ritual play essential roles in the repair and maintenance of vehicles. Roadside Magic started life when I asked the question - What if the witch crazes never happened? What if plant knowledge, intention and ritual were still part of daily life? What would our world look like if that shared folk knowledge and culture hadn’t been obliterated? I came to the conclusion we would be using it, amongst other things, to fix our cars.”

Which explains why some of her subjects are riding around the countryside on motorcycles in traditional old country garb, brandishing bundles of wheat to bless the byways. Or why some of them dance around engines to retune them. Or other such bizarre fusions of folklore and vehicular realities.

Before things begin to sound too far-fetched, Libby intervenes and says, “At first glance, the concept of treating mechanical issues in this way may seem preposterous, however, looking back just a few generations, such practices and rites were an intrinsic aspect of agricultural life. From ‘Burning the Bush’ in the West Midlands to Wassailing orchards in the West Country, folk rituals for a healthy harvest are numerous, diverse and often bizarre. With this in mind, then, is it that strange to think that we might molly dance for an M.O.T. test? Or parade the streets with coagulating herbs to ward off gasket leakages?”

Playfulness strikes a sonorous chord right at the heart of community and belonging. Libby’s practice, then, is no less than Chopin before his instrument. About this, she says, “I am also really interested in the therapeutic power of folk ritual as a way of reconnecting with the landscape and with each other. By coming together in these acts of pageantry and celebration, we are not only tapping into our desire for play and community, but giving thanks for that which sustains us, whether it’s the blooming elder tree or the local electrical substation.”

William Reinsch tells me about the beginning of his artistic journey. “I've always had a creative urge in me and drew a lot growing up. However, I only realised I could be an actual artist after a therapist told me at 19 that I should try drawing out issues I was having a hard time expressing. This was a revelation to me as I had never approached art this way before. I was just drawing silly cartoons up until this point.”

Whether it be his misty landscapes or jaundiced portraits, there’s something inexpressibly disturbing about his compositions; nothing explicitly grotesque or gory but an icy dread that spreads like frost across the window panes of the soul. A sheep, either dead or passed out, lays limp and lifeless on a merciless bed of grass in ‘Naked Island 60’, Will’s painting currently hanging in The Hari. His frenetic brushstrokes lend themselves to the texture of grass and wool that mutually devour each other, colour being the only demarcation. A black hole of an eye pierces into the soul. A purple 60 is sprayed, graffiti-like, on the grass. It’s all very morose and distressing. There’s a morbid deliberation in his application of pain(t); obscured by the fog in his landscapes and thrown into terrifying relief by the closeness of the portraits. “I have taken inspiration from other fictional worlds, such as Silent Hill and Twin Peaks, while making this series. Specifically, Silent Hills’ idea that the world is a projection of our own subconscious fears.”

Any act of creation follows us putting a piece of ourselves into the thing we’re creating. Whether we intend to or not, we imbue an essence of self into the things we make: food, clothes, art, love, and hate. Earlier, we looked at how the current generation of artists is redefining the visual language of our age. Now, let’s take a look at the self they use this language to communicate and how they map out their central nervous systems on the pieces they create.

Tara White says they use art as an intuitive language, offering scope to express the intensity with which we inhabit the world. If perception depends on our physical senses, our interactions with the world are purely subjective; the idea of an objective and essentially true world out there starts to lose meaning. Just like a book read by a thousand people is a thousand different books, there are as many versions of this world as are people inhabiting it. Although they’d prefer to call it collage, the accretion of Tara’s sculptural practice can best be described as exhibits in some museum of memories. Whether they’re found objects or things they’ve created themselves, they’re presented as a contact point with a larger story (cultural or personal) that unfurls itself upon interaction with the object. A moustache on a plinth. A robin perched on a wall, surveying the area like a CCTV camera. A teapot in a net hanging from a hook in the wall.

Tara continues to say, “Things I make sometimes uncover subconscious feelings, and when the viewer recognises something in the work, it suddenly expands to become more than my relationship to art-making.” Given the trinket-driven nature of their practice, their pieces take on a life of their own when audience members cultivate their own associations with objects they may or may not have seen before.

Where Tara’s work recontextualises objects, George Richardson’s decontextualises. “I often,” he says, “bend, exaggerate or change the material or form of a familiar object to create a sense of distance between the object and the reference point.” Think back to Brecht’s Distancing Effect which Katie loves to employ in her paintings. Often, he casts objects out of incongruous materials that defeat their original purpose. Some of his sculptural oddities include brass snooker chalks, enveloped letters made of aluminium and stainless steel, cigarettes cast out of brass and plated with copper, a single ale tap in the middle of the room pouring its contents into a seemingly bottomless glass that never fills…

George continues, “By presenting familiar objects altered to distance them from their cultural and personal reference points, these transformations attempt to capture the liminal spaces inhabited by the body through the material objects held in collective muscle memory.” A halfway point to the idea of objects having their Platonic Ideal Form is objects having an average form. We collectively know what a letter or a snooker cue or a cigarette or a window is supposed to look and behave like. When this average appearance or behaviour is changed, our brains suddenly can’t compute that. The ensuing cerebral confusion is what George is interested in as it emphasises the superficial nature of our relationship to these objects and the mild sacredness to which we accord these things their appearance.

As Heiyi and Heather’s paintings can be seen as a reflection of their place in the world, the wildly different flavours of abstraction in their works mirror how they respond to the world’s happenings.

“Because my work,” says Heiyi, “surrounds the reimagination of snippets of memories and moments, I’m constantly cataloguing moments and memories when they resurface. I also jot down ideas or phrases when I’m reading or watching films as they slip into my mind. And often, that is when I have the impulse to create.”

Meanwhile, Heather believes that “painting is coloured by the metaphysical frameworks of emotion and information that affect the painter at work.” Whatever is going on inside the artist’s head will inevitably end up in the work itself. Heather continues, “It is fitting, then, to mention that one of my key sources of inspiration comes from reading the news — a personal ritual I have developed to combat moments of hesitation or conflict while I’m painting. It offers me an escape from anxiety by immersing myself in the world’s events, shifting my focus to the experiences of others, and stimulating new emotions that guide me back to painting. I often extract fragments from these stories and weave them into the work, using them as creative stimuli. Therefore, I believe paintings are not just pure creations; they become responses to both the material itself and my intuitive interactions with the world.”

Most people choose to tune out from the events of the world, given the avalanche of bad news that comes barrelling down the slopes of newspaper presses and out of our phones, computers, and TVs. It is then not only refreshing but also hopeful to foster a new kind of interaction with the news. Rather than running away from it and living in ignorance, we could productively engage and respond to it in whatever way works for us, whether that’s taking part in civil action, making art about it, or researching the issue to better inform ourselves.

Alongside exploring the manipulation of time in her paintings, controlling its movements like the limbs of a puppet, Mengmeng Zhang also pays close attention to how the self exists in this directionless world. “My recent body of work focuses on the fragmentation of reality. This could be from simply the co-existence of contradictory feelings and facts, to the detachment between the body and spirit. I often feel as though my sense of self is split, composed of countless physical and spiritual fragments that operate like an undisciplined group rather than a unified whole.” This is a point of view I’ve interpreted from many conversations: that there is no single, solid, and essential self. That we’re simply a fragmentary collection of memories, experiences, and relationships (to people and things). A collage, if you will. Like electrons orbiting around the nucleus of the self, we are defined by loosely bound aspects which can be easily lost and found. The hazy softness of her paintings - giving the impression of being looked at through thick mist or underwater - is an evocative expression of drift, of being carried along by ungovernable currents, of being passengers rather than drivers.

Illusions are an integral part of looking. Whether it’s the illusory movement of frames in a film, optical illusions, or even the fact that the eyes bring images to the brain upside down before being inverted to what we think we see, there’s a subtle yet actual disconnect between what we see and what’s there.

Jess Beaton’s work seeks to foreground the intricate details of the world that go unnoticed by our naked and limited eyes. She tells me, “My work is inspired by photomicrography and intends to reveal the complex details of the microscopic world. Working with paper has always interested me, where a continuous process of paper cutting provided a delicate component to create a sensory illusion.” Although the youngest artist on the shortlist, the fractal-like detail she puts into her works is far beyond her years. Small pieces of different coloured paper are cut into serrated zig-zags and pasted onto the canvas, the accumulation of which creates the image. This deceptively simple act encapsulates her current practice, but such sublime simplicity requires an astronomical level of patience, delicacy, and calm. Like building a ship in a bottle, except there’s water in the bottle and it’s high tide.

Complex cell-like and membranous structures recur throughout her works, with the blades of paper distinctly looking like patches of grass swaying synchronised in the wind. “My overall aim,” Jess admits, “is to infuse this idea of fluidity and movement throughout the work and explore illusion as a way of expressing depth of colour and vibrancy. Illusion involves a misleading perception of reality, which has become an interest throughout developing my work.”

Film and TV are founded on the illusion of movement. Frames flicking through a projector 24 times per second is all it takes for static images to spring into motion. The construction of an artificial reality is an illusion that requires the confluence of multiple disciplines, such as camerawork, acting, music, and storytelling. But the one we’re most interested in here is set and stage design. Tara White and Nina Ogden’s practices have been influenced in riveting ways by their background in working on sets and stages.

Nina’s work has been marked by a fascination with the artificial. “Before establishing my fine art journey, I worked in television and film as a scenic painter. Working within these simulated modes of reality (from spaceships to council houses) has left me questioning the truth of what we see. Much of my life as a scenic painter was spent on dark film stages with dramatic lighting.  My experience of working in these conditions has informed my work.” This is instantly recognisable in the stark and odd lighting that illuminates the flora in her paintings from strange angles.

Tara’s experiences in set design have left them with unresolved questions about the conceptual and formal qualities of touch and texture, which they continue to test throughout their artistic practice. “How can touch be felt through a screen, sound or words? How could it convey the sensuality/richness of a spectrum of textures? How can I sculpt without using physical materials?”

We can attempt to answer these questions by thinking about how some of the artists here imagine the materiality of the mediums they work in – turning their mediums into messages.

Where Jingyi Li has an erudite fascination with soft materials, Eleni Maragaki’s creative growth came with an introduction to heavier materials like wood and metal. “This helped me expand my practice into more durable and large-scale pieces.” Even while she was working with paper, there was a divine geometry to her work where interlaced folds and cuts joined to one another would make her prints and books open up like the blossoming petals of a mathematical flower. The shift to sturdier materials only magnifies this tremendous effect. The geometry of her more recent works looks somewhat science-fictional, as if straddling the boundary between 3D and 4D. Eleni explains, “My art practice engages with the idea of geometry as a fundamental language that both systemises the urban environment and provides a means of comprehending the natural one. I examine the structure, system and materiality of the geometric form in its natural or artificial state, drawing inspiration from nature as well as human-made structures.”

From the microscopic world to the macro, all the way up to the cosmic level, geometry and mathematics are the language with which we empirically comprehend the universe. Everything around us is a bizarre combination of shapes and lines, some rigidly defined while others flow freely without any defined rules of form. Like the interplay between a drummer’s percussion and a sax player’s improvisation, the natural and artificial influence each other. She continues to say, “My work is focused on bridging the dichotomy between urban construction and the natural environment, as for me, architecture should be in constant dialogue with the landscape. As a response to the densely manufactured urban space, I am inspired by the delicacy found in the system of natural structures, including chemical elements and crystals. ‘A Universe’, my sculpture that is currently exhibited at the Hari Hotel, is conceptually linked to the idea of geometry being present within mineral formations. The choice of wood, being an organic texture on top of a strictly symmetrical form serves the purpose of highlighting the meeting points between the natural and the geometric.”

Akin to Eleni, Ömer Öner’s creativity was galvanised by a particular material. For him, it was clay. When his BA at Central Saint Martins came to a grinding halt due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, instead of sitting on his hands, he continued his creative progression by collecting discarded junk off the street and casting them in plaster.

“This process,” he reminisces, “born from necessity, deepened my connection with transformation and materiality, which continues to influence my work to this day.” Domestic items are his muses. Teapots, candleholders and vases are the usual suspects that end up comically altered by his hand. Some will sprout tall, animalistic legs, some will grow swan or dolphin heads, a sink tap will appear on the side of one, and church bells on the side of another. Forms will sometimes clash with one another to create oddities such as a candelabra with the handle and spout of a teapot. Or a cookie jar/urn with table legs. Or a vase on legs. Despite all these Frankenstein creations, Ömer’s ceramics exude an eccentric opulence, as if they belong in the estate of some rich weirdo.

“I’m drawn to everyday objects – whether fragments of furniture or discarded items,” Ömer says, “and when I find them, I visualise how they might become part of a larger domestic item or be transformed into something entirely new, disregarding their original function or material.  As a ceramic artist, I cast these objects in clay, engaging in a process that echoes the tradition of using clay to imitate and reproduce other materials. This transformation aligns with my artistic philosophy of taking overlooked, discarded items and giving them new life through material change.”

Nina and Katie treat the materiality of their media in different ways, Nina paying attention to the surface she’s applying to while Katie is thinking of what and how she’s applying to the surface.

Nina’s paintings, usually done on wood panelling, present her with unique parameters for the expression of her floral scenes. “I tend to use a limited colour palette in oil and expose the wood ground to stop the pieces from being overly descriptive. The wood forces me to paint more gesturally as it’s so absorbent and sometimes rough. The panels take on an architectural existence similar to the theatre and stage rather than a canvas in some way.  The wood grain adds this extra earthly texture to work with.”

Katie, who is more concerned with the implications of what she’s applying to the canvas has this to say. “Using vivid colour, playful and surreal motifs, symbolism, and varying applications of paint, my works are imbued with tension, concealed messages, and fluctuating tempos. My paintings serve as both an exploration of the medium and the figures which inhabit the frame. These figures demand further exploration, inviting questions about their identities, actions, motivations, and relationships with one another.” Her application of paint is the compass Katie uses to chart the topography of her medium and the emotional effect she can deliver using it. Applied thick and carefree in some places while deliberate and fine in others, she creates (or removes) boundaries between characters, objects, and their background. This simple aspect of paint, completely removed from the image she’s constructing on the canvas, is enough to guide our interpretation of the work.

The artists are on their way to the studio. The relationship between art and the space in which it’s exhibited has been interrogated to the point of exhaustion. Does art legitimise the space or the other way round… etc, etc. Few, however, turn that same line of questioning towards the space where art is created. What constitutes a studio? Does it have to be a space separate from where one lives? Can a kitchen be a studio? The toilet? Does the creation of the artwork have to be intentional for the space to be a studio, or can it be coincidental too? These are questions I shan’t be answering, for this piece has already become nightmarishly long, and I expect none have made it this far down the rabbit hole. For those of you who have, I implore you to seek help. Don’t you have anything better to do than reading this gibberish?

Anyway, the artists are on their way to the studio. But first, essentials! Nina and William will make themselves coffee. Some have decadent tastes, like Yeonsu, who likes to drink “an iced Earl Grey vanilla tea with a shot of espresso”. Georgina and George prefer a humble cup of tea. Singing the highest praises of tea, George says, “Coming from a northern family, tea and biscuits have been an important part of my routine for as long as I can remember. This first brew often gives me a chance to plan my day a bit as well, to go through my to-do lists and to settle into the studio and also to have a look at what I'm working on.”

Once they get their various administrative obligations, like replying to emails and such, out of the way, the artists get to work. The process of creating an artwork is by no means fast, but the nature of some of the artist’s work makes it even longer.

Like Jingyi, for example. The soft materials and the intricate uses she puts them to often require a slow and mechanical deliberation which draws out the process. “This balance of focused intensity and rhythmic work allows me to engage deeply with the materials and ideas I’m exploring.” A sacred intimacy forms between the artist and the artwork, where calculated and minute actions accumulate into something complex and beautiful. It becomes a labour of love.

Georgina and Heiyi both work in a lot of layers, and it’s apparent with how dense and flavourful their compositions are. Heiyi says, “The paintings take a lot of time and I need to listen to what it needs from me. I’ve learnt to be really patient with my work, even though I work very intuitively.” This idea of a nurturing conversation between the artist and their work is a very beautiful one. During this symbiotic process, the artist and their art become one, seeking to replicate themselves onto this object being made.

Libby brings up a striking point which pertains to the formation of ideas through the act of creation. “Sometimes it emerges fully formed, right from the start and everything I do is a response to it,” she says. “But more often than not, it’s a conversation which weaves its way through my making, turning itself over in my head, snowballing, gaining veracity, as it slowly becomes a form of fact.”

To those who can’t hack repetitive work, the idea of cutting minuscule pieces of paper and pasting them for hours on end on a canvas sounds not only time-consuming but also tedious. Jess doesn’t mind though. “This idea of a labour-intensive practice appeals to me because of the excitement that comes with the piece developing over time,” she says. The longer the artwork is in development, deeper goes the conversation between the artwork and the artist, greater are the directions to take the artwork in, but greater, also, are the opportunities to fuck it up.

“I was going to say that painting is where I feel most comfortable but that’s not true at all,” Heiyi says. “There are a lot of times when I have felt uncomfortable when painting. Sometimes I can’t figure out what the composition needs at the time and it can be frustrating (which is often when I do something else and ‘not’ work/paint).” Creation entails vulnerability; we let all our guards down to release our ideas and selves onto whatever we create. So when the thing goes wrong, it can feel like someone has stabbed you in the stomach with a poker.

“I can’t stand looking at a painting and seeing that I’ve fussed it; in those moments, it feels like I’ve let the anxiety of painting win,” Heather says. Your creation begins to taunt you, and you suddenly feel useless at this pursuit you’ve spent your entire life doing. Heather continues, “If I start to fuss a piece it’s often because I’ve become too precious over a certain mark or texture, or the overall look of the work, which stops me from being able to move the work forwards. I find those moments incredibly sticky and I get sucked into hesitation which I find really frustrating, so this is usually when I will call in that coffee break!” Sometimes, something tiny yet lethally venomous will creep into the work, a mistake or a wrong turn that leads you aimlessly down the labyrinth. What does one do then?

“I have a sign up in my studio, which is a quote I took from Amy Sillman, that says ‘send it over the cliff’” Heather shares. “When I realise I’m in that sticky place of fussiness and hesitation and preciousness, I send it over the cliff; I totally erase, cover, destroy, or resurface the piece to remove the thing that is causing me to stagnate, and I then respond to whatever is left! That’s not to say I am always able to do this on the day I notice I’ve become stuck, sometimes it can take weeks for me to build up the courage to take that bold action, but it feels so freeing when I do finally manage it.”

Mengmeng Zhang employs a simple and prudent approach to this conundrum: she leaves. She says, “A typical day in the studio ends when I almost feel like I might ruin a painting—that point where I start to lose my sense of judgment and control. Painting, to me, is all about decision-making, and overworking is a silly mistake (which I often make).”

“There’s a John Cage quote I absolutely love and relate to,” Katie would like to share. “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.”

Every day, it seems like the obstacles in the way of young creatives (who aren’t loaded on their parents’ cash) wanting to live their passions are growing mountainous. More hours must be worked at jobs we hate to keep this pursuit of ours going. Often there are times when it seems bleakly futile.

“There are so many easier ways to make a living, and when I’m carrying heavy objects and countless bags full of materials on busy trains or buses to and from the studio, I’ll often question this mad pursuit I’m on,” George tells me. “That said, I think doubt is an important part of my work and looking for solutions rather than answers is often productive for me.”

What we can take away from George’s words here is that it’s all worth it for its own sake. Even if the best success we find is posthumous, the fact that we did something, anything, while alive is a great achievement. When it comes to the pursuit of something good and wholesome that fulfils you, if you feel like everything in the universe is getting in your way, that’s all the more reason to pursue it.