LOCATION: THE BOTTLE FACTORY

18TH JANUARY - 8TH FEBRUARY

PV: FRIDAY 17 JANUARY, 5PM - 9PM

Open Thursday - Saturday, 12noon - 5pm

FLOORPLAN

LIST OF WORKS

South Open 3 is the third edition of our annual open call to artists who are based in South London or studied in South London.

South London has long been a fertile ground for artistic exploration, a dynamic intersection where local culture meets global influences. This exhibition celebrates the vibrant creative energy of twenty-four artists who are either based in or have studied in South London, bringing together a diverse array of practices that reflect the area’s unique position as a hub for contemporary fine art.

Spanning a wide array of disciplines—including painting, sculpture, ceramics, installation, and digital media—these works engage with diverse themes such as identity, memory, ecology, cultural symbology, and human experience. Many artists examine the intersection of personal and collective narratives, exploring how individual identities are shaped by and respond to broader societal structures. This reflects a universal yet deeply intimate inquiry into our shared humanity.

One striking aspect of the exhibition is its international dimension. With artists hailing from countries including the United States, Portugal, France, China, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Korea, this showcase highlights South London’s magnetic pull as a global centre for studying and creating fine art. These artists bring their unique cultural perspectives, fusing them with the distinctive character of South London’s art scene to produce works that are both locally grounded and globally resonant.

Themes of hybridity, transformation, and interconnectedness emerge as common threads. From the dialogue between digital and traditional practices to the exploration of cultural heritage and identity through innovative mediums, the artists challenge conventional boundaries. Their works often blur the lines between past and present, the physical and the digital, the familiar and the strange, creating layered narratives that invite reflection and discovery.

This exhibition is not just a testament to the creativity of its participants but also a celebration of South London as a dynamic crossroads where artists from across the world come to live, learn, and make. It is an invitation to explore the interplay of ideas, materials, and histories that define this diverse community and the art it inspires.

THE ARTISTS:

(b. 1998, New York) Frank is a Japanese-American artist and writer based between New York and London. Working primarily in drawing, she explores the organization of information across realms of difference (in scale, proximity, cultural context, or otherwise) by troubling the relationship between diagram, image, and thing. Informed by her academic background in ecocriticism, she often returns to the theme of an imperfect apocalypse: the restless, approximate marks of her drawings echo the compulsive worldbuilding of doomsday preppers, while fragmentary compositions and framing devices suggest a piecemeal cosmology of particulars. More recently, her research concerns the political implications of aesthetic language.

Amelia is a current MFA candidate at Goldsmiths University, and holds BAs in Visual Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, where she was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. She has attended residencies at the New York Academy of Art (New York, NY), La Wayaka Current (Atacama Desert, Chile), and the Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL).

(b. 2001, Porto, Portugal) Azevedo is a Portuguese artist currently living and working in London. Through intuitive and critical analysis of socio-cultural symbologies, Azevedo’s practice investigates how bodies materially perform as sites where knowledge converges and proliferates. Working across sculpture, installation, writing and sound, she explores her own relationship to the self-consumption of femininity in relationship to representational capitalist structures. Manifesting her interest in the unveiling of power dissonances, she understands sound in her work as a mechanism of truth production and change, reflecting on its power over body, mind and matter.

Selected group exhibitions include Underworlds, at Seventeen Gallery, London, UK (2024); Passages, at D Contemporary, London, UK (2023); Neurosis, at Project Gallery V, New York, USA (2023) and a residency at Usual Business Gallery, London, UK (2022). Azevedo graduated from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, with a BA in Fine Art in 2024, along with a Diploma in Creative Computing from Camberwell College of Arts.

(b. 1986, Brighton, UK) Bance works primarily in painting. His practice is informed by the post-industrial landscape and marshlands that flank the banks of the River Lea in North East London, where he lives and works, and the visual vernaculars of suburban life in the coastal towns of the South East of England, where he grew up. Journeying through this edgeland, he aims to reframe its topography as a site of cultural, political and mythic importance.

Bance explores the feedback between traditionally normative cultural values and more esoteric or subversive forms emerging from outside of established art historical narratives. A substratum of trash culture, weird fiction, horror cinema, folklore, and the paranormal. The use of this imagery derives from the artist’s own formative cultural encounters and draws upon genre-specific materials such as: fanzines, fantasy art and tabletop gaming ephemera.

He completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in 2014 and has exhibited across the UK and in Europe.

(b. 2001, Beijing) Berziga is a Chinese-Italian artist based in London. Blending traditional forms with contemporary techniques, Dien’s work bridges the past and present, crafting a dialogue between the handcrafted and the digital. Dien’s work explores individuality, and the intimate stories found within urban landscapes. His use of 3D-printed frames, inspired by architectural forms encountered daily, serve as integral extensions of the painted narrative, inviting viewers to reflect on the structures we inhabit and how these spaces shape our perceptions. By transforming everyday encounters into intimate, cherished objects, Dien’s work resonates with the deeply personal yet universal rhythm of urban life.
Dien holds a BA in Fine Art from UAL, Central Saint Martins (2023).

(b. 1989, UK) Black is a London-based artist who works with sculpture and installation to explore the complexities of the human experience from a non-normative perspective. Through fragmented forms, they investigate feelings of otherness and the tension between what is visible and what remains unseen, often using their own body to explore themes of embodiment, gender, disability, and illness.

Emma’s practice incorporates ceramics, moulding, casting, and found objects, creating sensory environments that are familiar, yet strange, and often absurd. They also use unconventional materials such as sugar, pine resin, and beeswax to explore fluidity, transformation, and impermanence, while interrogating the ecological and personal implications of traditional sculptural mediums.

Their recent work reflects on the fragmentation of memory and identity, particularly within the context of prolonged illness, examining how these experiences can disrupt and reshape one’s sense of self and time, challenging linear perceptions.
Emma recently graduated from the Royal College of Art and is currently studying on the MASS Sculpture Programme at Thames-Side Studios.

(b.1998 London, UK) Budden is a British figurative painter working in London. Her work focus on the complexities of spectatorship and voyeuristic exploits within both cinematic practices and the traditions of figurative painting. Budden’s paintings centre around the theme of control and examine the power dynamic between the artist, the subject, and the viewer. By editing and magnifying the female body, she shapes the narrative, transforming the observed into the observer.
She completed her BA Hons (First Class) in Fine Art at Newcastle University in 2022. Recently, she completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. She is currently a resident at Studio West Arts and has exhibited both in the UK and internationally.

(b. 2003, UK) Corrigan is a British artist based in London. Investigating human experience in relation to the circulation of information, she combines incidental moments of artistic gesture with the quasi-structure of rule-based making. By creating work that sits between figuration and abstraction, Corrigan plays with her role as narrator in an effort to challenge notions of legibility in relation to the image and to translate a sense of the current anachronistic media-landscape. Whilst led by a belief in non-hierarchical viewing and making, Corrigan’s work is underpinned by a respect for ancient material processes which act as anchors to the moments of contemporary collage or post-production techniques that appear in her work. Natural dyeing techniques are found at junctures with photo-realism, indictive of the multitude of spatial and temporal dimensions consumed by and exposed to everyone in this day and age. Corrigan is currently studying for her BA Painting at Camberwell College of Arts.

(b.1997, UK) Cox grew up in Devon before moving to London to study her BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Her works are meditations on the limits of looking as an attempt to get to know or understand something/someone other. With an interest in utopian thinking, Cox’s practice considers methods of communication - linguistic or bodily - and how one may find possibilities of 'collapse'. Suggesting the body as a queer and precarious meeting point, where leaking occurs and movement is essential.
After graduating with a 1st in 2023, Cox was awarded The Other Art Fair’s "New Futures Art Prize", Saatchi Art’s "Rising Stars" award, and given an Honourable mention by the Cass Art Prize. She is currently in her first year at the Turps Studio Program.

(b. 1987, France) Dusuel is a French artist based in London. They work across multiple mediums, including writing, moving image, extended reality, sculpture, photography, and social practice. With a material-led approach, the artist's work navigates the complex intersections of class, gender identity, mental health, ecology, and the erotic.
Julie Dusuel spent a significant part of their adulthood in Marseille, where they pursued a BA and MA in Fine Art from the École supérieure d'art et de design de Marseille-Méditerranée (ESADMM) (2010–2015). In 2022, they graduated from the Royal College of Art in London with an MA in Contemporary Art Practice.

(b. 1972, Devon; b. 1972, London) Eveleigh-Evans are an artist duo who met at the RCA in 1998. Living and working together, they pursue a post-disciplinary, research-driven practice that investigates our shared humanity and relationship to nature through the timeless connections between spirituality, ecology, and culture. Using radical materials—from forever chemicals to biomatter—they seek to create a language of alchemical minimalism that speaks to the transhistorical constants that unite us. Their work reveals the symbolic power of universals, oscillating between the ancient and the modern, both familiar and strange. By collapsing time to expose our interconnectedness, Eveleigh-Evans invite viewers to envision new possibilities for hope and magic in our chaotic times. The duo have exhibited internationally, with works held in private collections.

(b. 1994, UK) Galletley is a sculptor living and working in London who works with ceramics. Beatrice is inspired by multi-dimensionalism she explored this through objects; they defy boundaries both physically and metaphorically. Beatrice ceramic works engage with her direct and intuitive approach to her practice. Since then Beatrice fascination with objects in a state of flux, has expanded to look at this idea within herself. Exploring these ideas in relation to her life, the ever shifting nature of humans. She calls her sculptures creatures of her subconscious. The abstract forms take on a creature like state, encapsulating and making permanent moments within her subconscious. These permanent moments within her subconscious however shift and change with time and context.
Beatrice studied an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal Collage of Art (2018 – 2020) BA in Fine Art at Newcastle University (2018-2014) and a Foundation Diploma at Kingston University (2013). Beatrice is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptures.

(b. 1969, UK) Hallett is a British artist based in London. Her practice plays with paint as an analogue form that combines the ugly, the brutal, the awkward with elegance and power. The resulting forms are muscular and witty, jarring and beautiful. Hallett’s hand is very present in the work, which are sculpted and excavated and layered. Her work is scraped back and renewed on an almost daily basis in this pursuit for meaning and authenticity. Hallett was
born in Bath and graduated from Goldsmiths in 2006, RCA in 2013.
Her work features in the private collection of John Moores family; she was the recipient of RCA and Goldsmiths College’s Purchase Prize. She was in New Contemporaries in 2007, and was the recipient of the Neville Burston Prize for Painting in 2006 and received 3rd place in the Welsh Portrait Prize 2008.

(b. 2000, Reading, UK) Hargreaves is a painter based in London. She revisits historical events typically written off as unique, bizarre, or unexplainable, and attempts to situate them in broader contextual tapestries. Elements of this research material are often difficult to understand from a 21st-century perspective; resultant paintings bring new life to distant pasts so they might be revisited without the need to find conclusion. Her current series delves into the early 20th-century wellness industry, looking at the treatment centres and fad diets that became fashionable in this era, and exploring through how this possibly traces through from a Catholic tradition of fasting up to conversations around food we see today. Hargreaves recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, which selected her work as its annual painting acquisition. She has also previously been awarded the Tooth Travelling Scholarship and the BAGT Open Founder’s Prize, been a finalist for the ACS Studio Prize and Valerie Beston Prize, and been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize.

(b. 1988, China) Hu is a Chinese artist based in London. Her practice focuses on oil painting. Rooted in the realities of daily life and their extensions—film viewing, reading, and contemplation—her work captures fleeting intimacies, private objects, fragments of bodies, atmospheres, fields (conceptual spaces), and dwellings. She considers her pieces a collective series of ‘self-portraits’, forming a continuous inquiry into themes of female identity, the paradoxes of self-perception and societal expectations, and the restless nature of individual desire. Xingxin earned an MA in Fine Art: Painting from UAL Camberwell College of Arts (2022–2023) and holds a BA in Law from the Communication University of China (2005–2009).

(b. 2001, Hong Kong) Hutchings is a British painter based in London, England. Her practice spotlights the absurdity of human tendencies, focusing on shameful behaviours and ones that reject our social conditionings. Through figurative paintings of nighttime scenes, Lucy addresses the familiar world as unsettling and carnivalesque, visually constructed from personal and shared experiences of debauchery, most likely when inhibition is lost. The mouth, along with its external and internal surroundings, plays an important role in her paintings, exploring the open and penetrative as a visual device to evoke our fears of abjection. Orifices, bodily fluids, laughter and pain are subjects that push and pull imagery which are both pleasurable and grotesque, seductive and repulsive. Lucy has recently graduated with an MA Fine Art from City and Guilds of London Art School.

(b. 1983, London, UK) Lee's practice functions as a modern ritual designed for contemplation, creating a space to explore complex themes of self-identity and heritage. As a British-born Chinese artist, Lee's background profoundly influences his work, guiding his exploration of the intricate visual codes and conflicts that arise between Eastern and Western perspectives. Using surfaces such as Chinese rice paper and canvas, Lee intricately weaves together symbols and objects rich in spiritual and cultural significance. His work delves into the contemporary reinterpretation of sacred imagery, employing techniques like layering, abstraction, and obfuscation to evoke a sense of ambiguity and temporal dislocation—mirroring the overwhelming visual saturation of daily life. Lee's body of work serves as a visual chronicle, documenting the evolving meanings of these symbols in the context of the digital age's processes of manipulation and commodification. By engaging with his subjects and motifs, viewers are prompted to reconsider the relevance of historical traditions and cultural semiotics in today's consumer-driven society.
Lee holds an MFA from Goldsmiths and is an alumnus of The Florence Trust Residency.

(b. 1998, Canada) Moreau is a contemporary artist and current postgraduate MFA student at Goldsmith’s University. Born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Gabriel soon moved to Montreal in 2018 to pursue his career and BFA. During this time, his work was rapidly and thoroughly exhibited in Montreal through private galleries and public institutions, as well as internationally in London, Tokyo, and Hong-Kong. During his last Undergraduate semester, Gabriel received the Godro Prize for Emerging Artist of the Year during the 2021 Cultural Grand Prizes of Trois-Rivières. Since the beginning of his short career, he exhibited in 19 groups shows through 15 institutions, received personal articles and interviews with some of Quebec’s biggest media outlets, been granted funding for multiple projects through the Canada Council for the Arts and Quebec’s Council for the Arts, and, most notably, has seen his first solo exhibition “The Skies have Eyes for Knives” open late 2022 in downtown Tokyo through JPS Gallery. Now moved to London, he is set to graduate Goldsmith’s University of London in 2026.

(b. 2002, Spain) Oppe is a Spanish artist based in London. Her practices explores body experiences through a phenomenologica understanding and the distorsion of three-dimensional figures. Looking into queer identity and reproduction systems within the series of sculptures ‘Mare Womb’s’.
The work is born from a singular ceramic piece of the mare, then scan becoming a multiple/hybrid of itself within the digital space. These are then are 3D printed and covered with wax, oils, resins, and wood stains, giving them new skin while returning to a physical space. Furthermore her work explores how perception and identity is intrinsically shaped by language and its conotations through objest and their materiality. By attributing the visual qualities of one material, such as stone, to another, such as plastic, she seeks out to disrupt established conceptions tied to physical characteristics of the sculptures' materiality in relation to their enbodied reality.
Casilda graduated from Goldmiths University, with a BA in Fine Art & Art History in 2024. And is currently completing a Digital course at Conditions program.

(b.1992, Greece) Papandreopoulos is a London-based visual artist working across sculpture, installation, photography, and digital media. With a focus on the human body, gender, and identity, Theo’s work investigates how society constructs and performs gender roles, particularly through objects. By recontextualizing everyday items, he challenges conventional ideas about masculinity, sexuality, and the "ideal body," offering audiences thoughtprovoking new perspectives.
Theo holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Visual and Applied Arts from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). During his studies, he participated in the Erasmus exchange programme at Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV) in Amiens, France. Theo’s work has been showcased in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as The Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret and St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. He has also presented two solo exhibitions: one at the Lion and Lamb Art Space in Farnham, invited by UCA University, and another with The Koppel Project last year.
Through his practice, Theo continues to explore the intersections of body, society, and meaning, encouraging audiences to question cultural norms and reconsider familiar narratives.

(b.1998, France) This is a story where the mundane becomes mythical. Emerging from a cheap and strong beer can – a raw symbol of societal margins and cycles of excess and escape – Rubio creates a figure that is both playful and haunting. This character, born in moments of introspection, transcends its origins to embody questions about identity, duality, and human conflict. Through its enigmatic charm and unsettling presence, it reveals the tension between indulgence and the shadows it casts.
Rubio’s paintings place this void persona within dreamlike landscapes, shimmering with uneasy beauty. Wilted flowers, broken windows, and fenced enclosures hint at control, decay, and the fragility of innocence. These symbolic elements are more than decorative; they serve as visual metaphors, exploring themes of temptation, fragmentation, and transformation.
As Rubio reflects, “Painting is my way of exploring the conflicts within – the allure of escape and the weight of consequence.” This dialogue between good and evil resonates in every composition.

(b. 1994, New York) Sohn is a Korean artist living and working in London. Her practice uses ceramics to investigate reality as perceived through touch. She makes abstract sculptures that act as cave paintings born from direct, pure contact of the hand: I am here. In an era of AI generated figures and social media personas, her recent body of work literally reflects embodiment and tension in relation to temporality. Unu Sohn is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, where she achieved her MA Ceramics & Glass in 2022, following a BA Gender Studies degree at UCLA in 2016. Her work has been exhibited internationally including PAD Fair (London), Galerie Joseph (Paris), and David Salkin Creative (Chicago). She is a recipient of Arts Council England DYCP funding (2024) and the Barbican Arts Group Trust award (2023), and was shortlisted for the Charlotte Fraser Prize (2024).

(b. 1997, UK) Whitelock is a painter from Hull, Yorkshire who now lives and works in London. He completed a BA in Painting at The Edinburgh College of Art (2020) before undertaking a year long residency programme at The Leith School of Art (2022). He then completed his MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art (2023), where he was a recipient of the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award. He has recently shown with Studio West Gallery, 3812 Gallery, The Royal Scottish Academy and The Freelands Foundation Gallery.
Whitelock’s imagery ranges from what might be described as bucolic - trees, flowers, landscapes - to the disquieting and abstract; natural forms give way to sudden compositional breaks and textured foregrounds that tail off into sombre horizons and densely layered surfaces. These painterly interventions allow him to realise and dissect lived experiences into material forms, each composition becoming a vessel to hold certain psychologies - a painting that is initially rooted in grief, doubts, fears and curiosities, oscillates to something that instead embodies notions of growth, disruption, repair, hope and resilience. This duality of painting is what keeps its vitality, in its multiple states of transformation. Forever evolving but without a necessity to become something more.

(b. 1993, London, UK) Wilson works across printmaking, ceramics and digital media - she uses these mediums to create components which are combined into sculptural configurations. Her work is informed by histories of representation - she is interested in the artificiality of tools like Alberti’s window and their relationship to the Euclidean geometry of the game engine. Windows, portals, screens and membranes reoccur throughout her practice. Recent work uses representation as a lens to explore object, animal and environmental agency. Wilson is an MFA graduate from the Slade School of Fine Art, where she was the recipient of the Felix Slade Scholarship. Recent exhibitions include group shows at the ICA, London, UK; Winchester Gallery, Winchester, UK; and Turf Projects, Croydon, UK. Recent residencies include Derby Arboretum Park in 2023 and Cambridge School of Art from 2021–2022. In 2023 Amy was selected for Collusion’s ART//TECH//PLAY mentorship programme, received DYCP funding from Arts Council England and was selected for Condition’s Digital Lab Programme.

THE OPENING:

Photography by Hannah Burton

(b. 1997, Moscow, Russia) Zagidulina is a London-based artist, whose practice is focused on performance and sculpture. Her practice looks into mechanisms and systems that produce and sustain care, and its complexity over being nurturing and oppressive. Her works span the bodily extensions that draw on encountering urban and industrial environments as a way for empirical experience, self-expression and coping mechanisms. She holds MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and BA in Performance Design and Practice from Central Saint Martins.