Current project : Melt Art Fair

12-17 October 2010 @ Mile End Pavilion, Mile End, London

Talented emerging artists from the UK and abroad

Contact info(at)arthemisia.eu

L. Chambers: Inventing fantastical objects and constructions are the starting points of her recent practice. These spaces and objects symbolize personal narratives; they are aesthetically playful but have an underlining dark humour. She primarily uses memory but also appropriate from source materials that reference architecture, popular culture, scientific technology, folklore and mysticism. From these sources and through the mediums of paint and drawing, shapes transform into anthropomorphizing inanimate objects or machines. Sometimes they are clunky and fragile never able to function and teetering on the verge of collapse.
The artist studied an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2005-2007) and at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design (2002-2005) where she achieved a BA(Hons)Fine Art with first class honours.
Selected Group Shows include: (2010) BAT Pack, Bow Arts Trust Live/Work Show 2010,Mile End Art Pavilion, London, Pistols & Pollinators: A Collaborative Project, Accident and Emergence, London, (2009) 'Romance Derived' Fringe MK: Annual Painting Prize 2009, Milton Keynes, Salon 09, Matt Roberts Art, London, Fault Line: Art in the Age of Anxiety, The Nunnery, London, Skyscrapers under the Sea, Madam Lillies, London, Drawings with Dolphins, Crimes Town Gallery. In 2008 she was selected for the prestigious John Moores 25 Contemporary Painting Prize.

Russell: An ephemeral artist who continues to explore the walk of life, from the simplistic joy of building sand castles to the curiosities of growing up, communicating, learning and comprehending the meaning of our lives through everyday trials, such as conversation, parent-hood or his own innate love of fear. Continually changing his medium throughout the past twenty years Aaron is currently exploring the realms of film, with inspiration from directors such as John Casavetes and Wong Kar Wai he explores the ideals of human relationships.

L. Kao, a mixed media painter, possesses a wide aesthetic armature ranging from semi-figurative abstraction to pop and neo-impressionism. Candy drips, confectionery delights, melting rainbows, animals, waves, sunsets and psychedelic vegetation sweep the canvas. Occasionally, we see a geometrically oriented and disembodied pop vernacular reminiscent of the commercial milieu. Kao’s emphatic stroke and loquacious colour palette play out the ebb and flow of a contemporary spiritual tide. Executed in acrylic, oil, charcoal and pastel the works possesses a sensitivity and spontaneity not usually achieved by an individual artist utilizing such a range of techniques. Plumbing the depths of her own “animal vigour,” Kao’s mid-size works on canvas evoke the spontaneous outpouring of emotion achieved through music and bodily movement as well as the experience of love, grief and desire. Born in Taiwan, received her Masters in Fine Art in painting from the University of Southampton, U.K. in 2009. She currently lives and works in London.

G. Todd: Gaea's sculpture and installations are concerned with time and transgression. She explores the properties of glass to the limits to create taut, sinuous and fragile forms that can traverse a surface and invade space, generating ideas of control and danger, balance and gravity, entry and escape. She asserts that: Material investigation is … imperative to my practice. My conceptual threads are interwoven with materials and their loaded vocabulary. The attenuated forms carry symbolic liquids, with honey, wine and milk all serving as metaphors for the corporeal. The viscous movement of the liquids maintains a dichotomous sense of tension and release and imbues the viewer with desire through promise.
The artist studied at the Royal College of Art, London from 2004 -2006 and at Brighton University from 2000 -2003. Some notable events in her career to date include selection for The Bombay Sapphire Prize exhibition, 2006 and the creation of a site-specific sculpture, ‘Plug Hole’, for a derelict house in Lumsden, made as part of the Summer Scottish Sculpture Residency in 2007. Selection for the Royal Society of British Sculptors Bursary award. At the beginning of 2010 she completed an ‘Emerging Artist’ residency at Kingsgate Workshops, London and is currently an Artist in Residence at Middlesex University.

G. Picca: Giacomo lives and works in London. His works involves the search for ‘open spaces’ with the potential of change – triggered by the experiences resulted from movements and encounters through different socio-political realities. He uses thus, a culturally charged symbol - the tree, as a mediator of personal experiences and a shared sign operating in different cultural spaces. The tree as a generic form operates metaphorically as a sign for our memories of different spaces, different cultural-political systems and different geographies.

In the ‘Border Line’ series, he uses another charged symbol - the fence. It appears as an active space. It creates a sense of openness that has the potential to deconstruct barriers and frontiers, which signifies differences. This process transforms the infinite space in a place where something can happen.

The artist was born in Brazil and trained as an Engineer in São Paulo before moving to London to study Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design, Wimbledon School of Art and finally completing his MA at Goldsmiths College in 2000. He has exhibited widely throughout the UK and Europe. He orchestrated the project ‘draw_drawing_’ during London Biennale 2004 and 2006, an underground project by the artist David Medalla.

The city
Mixed Media

M. Saurel : Between poetry and object, Saurel´s assemblages and installations are a composition of elements borrowed from the real world (stones, leaves, footprints, urban fragments, daily objects…) which she articulates by working their connection points in a physical and imaginary relation, creating a link on a new frequency with objects as medium.

The built transitory objects incarnate a new intermediate function located in between sign and meaning. Whilst the invention of first use is in the object’s etymology, there is in this later language the stripped imaginary confronting other derivations.

The artist has shown in France, Spain and Germany. Born in France, she lives and works in Berlin.

Lately the structure of the paintings has come from designs within the scene, ornamental paths or industrial constructions, which serve a similar function in creating depth and movement.The strong abstract forms of these structures enable me to explore the strangeness of places where the industrial, urban and rural landscapes overlap.

G. Ramsay is a London based artist. Her current series of portraits uses photographs of Canadian women immigrants from the early 1900’s as a point of departure for imagined depictions of historical people in a new land. Surrounded by animals that are both tame and wonderfully wild, flora and fauna envelop the immigrants as a metaphor for their strange new environment.

There is a tradition of using animals as expressive symbols. The artist re-imagined this tradition, with animals representing the wild and unknown. Like the urban foxes who roam London, animals and birds exist on the margins of society constantly negotiating the boundaries of where they belong. Animals are at once representative of idyllic nature and at the same time a threat to be controlled.

For Melt Art Fair, Ramsay collaborates with Canterbury based artist W. Gould to bring a family of foxes to the Mile End Pavilion. For the duration of the Melt Art Fair the three foxes will be taking refuge in the gallery along with a series of drawings by the artists of the foxes. The drawings are studies, created in the field on the streets of London, while the artists where researching the urban foxes, who will be sheltering in the pavilion.

L. Jacobs: Between ‘me’ and ‘you’ – History series
‘The author does not so much remember the past as recast it, grasping and reshaping herself in the process.’The use of multiple spaces, light, the photograph and text work together to evoke a sense of memory and time, loss and longing, presence and absence. The work has many complexities but because it is a singular proposition with complex layers it accumulates into something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Each image is a separate moment, a fragment of a story. We know the entire narrative through a single frame.
There is an emphasis on the trace, the mark made by the passage of one person through another person’s life, the gap between the self and the other, the space that exists between ‘me’ and ‘you’. We are made aware of the artists’ presence through her role as an onlooker in the scene, as a protagonist and at times as the viewer watching and recording the scene she is witnessing. Rather like being in a dream, the artist/dreamer is both acting in and watching the action on the screen. It is the sensation of being both inside and outside thought, where things can unfold into one another like a double vision. We have a sense of being in two places at the same time, a space within a space, which collapses our understanding and thinking about time and disorientates us. Like a fleeting image on a cinema screen but slowed down as in a dream where things become quiet. The use of the power of light is key, as is shadow to emphasise memory’s place in the twilight between past and present.

R. Donoso-Cortés studies 7 years at the school of decorative arts as a child and later continues working with art as an autodidact. Already as a child he amused himself getting new images from others, combining and taking out of context. Attracted to the forms, colours and distances, taking us to his imaginative word. An artist “ transgressor, original, sarcastic, modern, mocking” with work linked to the Pop-Art. The majority of his work is signed by a marihuana leave, rebellion symbol but also because of his fascination with the image. The colour black is his favourite as background. It allows him playing with the distance and depth creating a sort of “horror vacuum” so he can capture the viewer attention until he focuses on what he wants him to see. His usual themes are of actuality and the so feared Death as a quite distant future. He depicts what he wants and what bemuses him at that time and according to his state of mind he starts or continues one or the other work. His work becomes his hobby, obsession and passion.

M. Krishanu’s practice is based in painting, drawing, and etching. The artist’s work explores the strangeness of everyday scenes. He is interested in iconic images that could have been painted in any era. His characters often seem absorbed in their thoughts, with objects around them that act like props, creating an atmosphere or setting a scene.

The artist completed an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College in 2009, and has exhibited nationally and internationally. He has completed commissions for Whitechapel Gallery and Camden Arts Centre. Selected exhibitions include The Big Rip Off - Fake Modern, Camden Arts Centre, 2010; This is England, Beaconhouse University Gallery, Lahore, 2010; Creekside Open selected by Jenni Lomax, APT Gallery, 2009; The Mausoleum of Lost Objects, Iniva, London, 2008; Let Me Tell You, Whitechapel Gallery, 2008; Creekside Open x 2 selected by Victoria Miro, APT Gallery, 2007. Matthew’s forthcoming solo show at the Parfitt Gallery, London, runs from 15 November – 1 December 2010.

J Robinson is final year BA Fine Art at the John Cass, Whitechapel. His current practice has developed from an original project that he started in 2009. It began as an abstraction of a deck of playing cards. Each card evolved into an entirely different entity, and took the form of an edition of a set of collagraphic prints. These are now used as a source material for further paintings and for his series of screen prints of which all originally evolved from the ten of diamonds abstraction. Robinson thinks of this one idea of abstraction as a seed that is now growing organically into many more ideas of work.
The work has been an experiment in shape-making and the relationship between shape and colour in creating a response from the viewer. In this series of two works the artist attempted to enliven the grid, bringing electricity to it, as it were .
The artist was born in Essex in 1967 and now lives and practices in Limehouse, London. He studied for the fine art foundation course at The John Cass, London Metropolitan University and is about to begin his third and final year studying Fine Art B.A. at The John Cass. Specialising in printmaking his work plays with colour and aims to create objects which activate their surroundings. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Portable’, Hales Gallery, London 2009, ‘Studio as a Building Site’, Commercial Road, London 2010. ‘Taste’, the George Tavern, London 2010, Melt Art Fair, Mile End Pavilion, London. 12-17 October 201

I. Crawford: At the core of her practice is the investigation of the uninhabited space, both real and imaginary. The driving force behind this lies, not in the high drama of life but the mundane and everyday repetitive routine. As an artist it is more important for her to be able to communicate the experience of place with the emphasis on the emotional response rather than a literal interpretation of the space. To be able to share an empathy with the viewer as we recognize our similarities and celebrate our differences would be the ultimate goal. The making of images is an ever evolving process with each project leading to the next body of work.

Since graduating from Coleg Menai, North Wales in 2009 gaining BA(Hons)Fine Art 1stClass, work experience has included photographically documenting the redevelopment of the Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno. Images have been selected for exhibition in the Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy and also for the Royal Photographic Society’s 153rd International Print Exhibition which will go on tour until May 2011. In addition, prizes for selected work have been awarded in both the Bangor Open Exhibition, Bangor Museum and Art Gallery and Wrexham Open Exhibition, Oriel Wrexham.

At present, large format digital photographs from ‘Behind the Façade’ and ‘It Wasn’t Always Like This’ can be viewed in a solo show selected for Colwyn Bay Library, Conwy until October2010. Work has also been shown in selected group exhibitions, ‘No Added Sugar’, Rotunda Gallery, Llandudno Library with Central Arts Studios Cymru (CASC) and ‘Cynefyn’, Galleri Ianto, Beaumaris. Other experiences have included stills photography for Global Asylum Films.

M. Fletcher is a Canadian artist, living and working in London. Michele's current work, although rooted in the genre of landscape, sits outside of the nature. Dreamlike spaces of colour take their influence from a variety of sources with the natural world becoming a point of departure for an investigation into an invented environment."

N. Finnegan

The artist is an Irish artist working in the U.K. since 2007. She presents challenging images of political and cultural conflicts. Her recent work reflects on Northern Ireland in the context of the Thatcher period and contemporary Britain.

Her work reads as a statement to be read collectively. She received her Masters in Fine Art from the University of Brighton in 2009.

Wook Lee: Primary interest is to deal with finding veiled issues in daily life. The subject is related to his experience and familiar problems such as system and relationship. However, it could be unimportant depending on people as points of view are not similar. These makes him concentrate on the gap as collision of various situations cause to generate unknown areas from daily life. The organised objects describe environment and atmosphere which section is observed through my life.

Wook Lee has a M.F.A.(2002-2006) and B.F.A(1995-2002) at the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University Seoul. South Korea. Having participted in many shows in Korea, such as “umbalance in the Museum of Art, Seoul (2007) and “fixed motion” at Space Cell in Seoul. Second prize in Joog-ang Art Competition ein 2003, Special Prize in Danwon Art Competition in 2003 and in Art Competition of Korea in 2004.

Crotty
His paintings refer to the history of art and are indebted to the traditions of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century painting. They coincide however with a strong contemporary influence, commenting on rituals in contemporary and common culture. They are figurative, gestural paintings and are evidenced by film in the cinematic device that compresses the pictorial space and eliminates perspective and collapses figure into ground, stressing the surface. The artist likes to strip away any context and see what he is left with. The paint will be applied without interest in creating a conscious dichotomy between form and content. Strokes of paint will be applied deftly in feverish highlights and rich contemporary baroque chicroscuro to the starkness of the reality represented. A reality both obscured and conveyed by the beauty of the narrative content and the ravaged surface which can be read as humiliated vulnerable flesh.

P. Sáenz was born in Seville on May 8, 1974, studied fine arts at St. Elizabeth of Hungary School in Seville, where she graduated in Sculpture and Applied Arts studies at the Escuela de Artes de Sevilla, she is currently completing her PhD. Her work focuses primarily on sculpture, sitting up slowly and in parallel to the world of printmaking.

Sculpture is the passion and thread in her work. Her work is partly about her personal life, emotions, fears and experiences, just as the print work is a continuation of her concerns about the world of three-dimensionality.

She is currently working on sculpture around the theme of silence and solitude. In her engravings, she conducts studies on the I, which means the idea, memory, experience, the constant effort of being or not being, the accumulated memory of the unconscious, the process of all this is the "I", the experience is always strengthening the "self" and she works in a plastic form by embossing and digital printing.

She has exhibited widely around Spain and Europe ... and has won provincial and national awards for printmaking and sculpture.

M. Hudson lives and works in London. Her paintings reflect on tiny moments in the urban and rural landscape. In some canvases the scenes are absolutely recognizable and in others close-ups of a particular environmental feature become more abstract. She has featured in group shows in London and abroad; including Art Futures in 2007, One Love at The Lowry 2006 and regular exhibitions at Seven Seven, The Nunnery and Standpoint Gallery.

L. Belenguer's work straddles the realms of sculpture, painting and drawing. In one area of his practice, he transforms metal objects into sculptures that evolve from the visual rhetoric of Minimalism and double as ‘canvases’.
Belenguer is like a hunter who trawls the city for found objects, sometimes sourced as locally as the back garden of the studios' church. The work is then dictated by his discoveries, which include steel grids, a mattress reduced to its mesh of springs, and blacksmiths' tools. These he reads as masculine objects. He intervenes with these structures by oxidising the metal elements in salt water or acids and dabbing them with paint of primary colours. This transforms how the objects are read, emphasising the points at which layers of meaning converge. He has extensively exhibited in many countries and venues. His last show No Soul for Sale was at the Tate Modern, London.

F. Fernandes
The artist with a Master of Visual Arts from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, graduated on fine arts at FAAP, SP. Rooted in Florianopolis where the artist turned to painting, printmaking, installations, interventions, and video. Since 2001, she has been conducting various artistic interventions in public places, like street Victor Meirelles in Florianopolis, Largo São Bento in São Paulo, University of Edinburg. Currently she participates in the’ transfronteira da arte contemporanea" trans-border of contemporary art - gallery Marta Traba-Memorial of Latin America's project POLO-of the 29th Biennial international of São Paulo, and show circulating in other dimensions "traveling in Brazil and abroad. She teaches at the same time as curating projects like the six “arts festivals of governor Celso Ramos, SC” and the art show of the Italian grupposinestetico-synestheticos ad ogni costo, MIS-Florianopolis-SC. She lives and works in Florianopolis.SC

Mayers
Mayers' artwork deals predominantly with identity: specifically the self but also cultural, gender, body image. Almost invariably his work is figurative, autobiographical or informed by personal experience, and with a strong sense of narrative.
Violence and masculinity are also recurring themes. Social issues are addressed in his work although he distances himself from social commentary or political statement. Ideas are often knee jerk or reactionary, themes are treated subjectively.
If the artist uses text, he will often use dialogue he has heard used in conversation or thoughts that he has had that do not necessarily reflect how he would feel when thinking objectively. He tries to take a morally ambiguous stance. The work can be a starting point for a discussion, but having ‘the answers’ for anything does not interest Mayers. The idea is to make work as ‘real’ as possible, and in reality there are no easy answers for anything. There is a tangible truth in ‘the moment’, where all we have to go on is what is happening now. Everything before has led up to this; consequence and resolution are the unknowns.

Ida
The primary motivation behind Ida's work is the curiosity to apply materials that may be more or less available to her because of “situationism”. The artist discovers their multi-faceted potential and manipulate their initial form. Thus she is able to create “being” or “thingness” (physical presence). For it is more often than not that things are parts of other things and that purity is rare. Resulting from distraction, her work represents the crossover of disparate areas. It creates links between art and design or art and science (i.e. the “blurred object”) and formulates scenarios. With the latter, Ida wish to nurture the creative power in individuals and allow for moments of unique emotions and unforeseen encounters.

Budenberg is a North West based artist, born and raised in Liverpool. As an adult she returned to education and completed her studies in Fine Art at Liverpool in 2000.
Her work questions and considers our idealised notions and inherited sense of family, both domestic and universal. It tells of the hidden anxieties of physical, psychological and spiritual space as it uncovers and examines the emotional responses and conflicting desires of the individual within a family group, in particular the mother role.
Her prolonged questioning to unravel the past and the roots of our expectations, passions and beliefs, as self imposed, as inherited and as expected bythe society and culture from which they emanate and her search to understand and reconcile the legacy of our past with the present, is ongoing.
Her practice of making art shares the same process of questioning and attempted reconciliation of past and present. She conducts an ongoing dialogue with the pieces whereby they remain organic, questioning the iconography, ideology and permanence of the relic’s past; revisiting and adapting them to reflect the authenticity of the passage of time.
A journey that reflects her understanding so far of the implications of our personal and artistic history and legacy, the society and culture of which they are a part, and how they can shape us and, in turn, how we can then influence and inform the present and future.

Litson is an artist that works with a variety of media including projection, painting, print, and audio production.With both his paintings and projection work, figures and textures are enlarged to the point of breakdown. The artists is very interested in perceived identity and how it has been manipulated through the filter of mass media.

His paintings portray colourful graphic images of anonymous figures in states of detachment, as depicted in everyday media such as the Internet, magazines and newspapers. Many of the selected images are culled from mass produced materials or are the result of printing errors. The subjects are transformed from anonymity and represented in an elevated state of being.

His work with architectural projection evolved from a career in guerrilla advertising. This included the notorious projection of Gail Porter onto the Houses of Parliament. This led to a commission for the Turin Biennale. He projected images onto ten landmark buildings in the city landscape. The images projected onto the buildings were created from medical photography and equipment collected from The Royal College of Surgeons. The artist chose this imagery to highlight human frailty and present it on a maximum public scale.

Recent work has included projects with 'The Light Surgeons’, an established audiovisual collective. The artists produced the audio and toured their live performance, 'True Fictions.', that was performed at International festivals and concerts, including The Big Chill and The London IMAX.

Litson also developed his own audio/visual performance under the remit of 'Blipvert.' This project has been developed for a performance at the ICA in London and Leeds Sound and Music Expo in 2009.

I. Godfrey returned to London from Scotland in 2006. Since 2008 she has been studying Fine Art at the Sir John Cass College of Art, East London and has just received a Graduate Certificate, with distinction, in Ecology and Environment from Birkbeck College, University of London.

Recent Exhibitions include Ten Artists at Lauderdale House in September 2010, and Drawn Together, a Princes Drawing School exhibition of life drawing in October 2008. She was short-listed for the Ellen Clarkson award at the Sir John Cass College of Art in May 2010.

In her recent small oil paintings on board she has been investigating atmosphere, stillness, contemplation and melancholy; drawing from life and using as subject matter spaces viewed both in and from the house. In considering form she has often chosen an unusual angle from which to observe a space, in order to enhance a sense of intimacy. She uses a subdued and limited palette to evoke memory and suppress narrative. To create a sense of depth in the compositions, she has included angles that move the viewer through different planes within the painting and so draw her/him in. By deliberately creating ambiguity of subject matter in some works, she attempts both to suggest partial remembrance and to set up a dialogue with the viewer.
 Her work addresses an overarching concern with the environment by trying to draw to the attention of the viewer the tenacious wilderness ever present but often overlooked in our urban spaces.