LOCATION: PECKHAM ARCHES, SE15 4QN
24.04.24 - 04.05.24
Open Thursday - Saturday, 1 - 6 pm
PV: Wednesday 24th April, 6 - 9 pm
This exhibition is the result of an open call to artists who are recent graduates or currently studying at South London institutions, including Camberwell College of Arts (UAL), City & Guilds of London Art School, Goldsmiths (University of London), London College of Communication (UAL), Royal College of Art (Battersea Campus), and Turps Art School.
Our first ‘South Open’ exhibition, which opened in March 2023 at Peckham Arches, brought together artists who live, work or studied in South London, reflecting our endeavour to illuminate the breadth of talent across the artistic community south of the river. Since March 2023 times have got tougher for artists across London, with Plaster Magazine stating in February of this year that ‘the future for artist studios in London looks very, very grim’. Especially so in South London, with a series of studio buildings closing over the course of the last year. Despite this, there is a thriving community in South London, reflected in the over five hundred artists who applied to be part of ‘South Open 2’.
The fourteen artists whose work we selected to exhibit in this exhibition are from multiple generations, all studying fine art at differing stages of their lives. Bringing together a group of artists through an open call can create a disparate presentation, but themes of storytelling and narrative, belonging, our innate ferality, pleasure, memory, and strangeness are threaded through the artworks and the practice of the artists.
ARTISTS:
Holly Keogh
Lana Locke
Jemima Moore
Mae Nicolaou
William Reinsch
Moussa David Saleh
Jonathan Tignor
Izzie Beirne
Shane Keisuke Berkery
Alice Delhanty
Giulia Fassone
Samantha Fellows
Alexander Gilmour
Hanaka Holland
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Izzie Beirne (b.1996, UK) primarily works with painting alongside ceramics, creating works which deal with themes of sexual violence, healing and a reclamation of pleasure. Beirne transforms stills from her own films into paintings, creating canvases with frenzied filmic movements. Beirne uses ceramics to add to the level of discomfort permeating the work, creating pieces that reference decay, fragility and the grotesque.
Beirne completed a MA in Fine Art Goldsmiths University in London in 2023.
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Shane Keisuke Berkery (b.1992, Japan) is a contemporary figurative painter who manifests on canvas the complexities that arise within our experience of consciousness. His practice began in 2015 since graduating NCAD and he has exhibited work extensively and internationally, receiving the Hennessy-Craig award from the Royal Hibernian Academy and having work secured in the Irish state collection.
Berkery is currently undertaking MA Painting at Royal College of Art (Battersea Campus).
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Alice Delhanty’s (b.2001, UK) recent abstract paintings explore dynamic spatial situations, poetics, and the agency of the material. Delhanty’s paintings are built up intuitively, one mark is a reaction to the previous, forming a dialogue as she works towards finishing a painting. Pools of colour bleed or drip into one another, marks are overlaid, interrupted or eclipsed, as she is driven to navigate tension and sentiment through painting.
Delhanty is currently undertaking a BA in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School.
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Giulia Fassone’s (b. 1992, Italy) practice displays a conceptual approach, often positioning the personal within larger frameworks expanding beyond the human realm. The layering of organic and inorganic materials in her work emphasizes, often in a humorous vein, the tension between fiction and fact, present moment and memory, and between what is real and what is not.
Fassone is currently undertaking a Graduate Diploma Fine Art, Goldsmiths University of London.
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Samantha Fellows (b. 1971, USA) is concerned with capturing moments; the sense of a fleeting experience or memory, held indelibly in the swirling application of paint over a slick surface. In the act of painting, she carefully manoeuvres and slides translucent layers of oils over a glossy white ground of enamel, her goal is to disturb the slippery glazes of oily colour until the desired image and accompanying sense of something, is secured. Her focus is to present the souvenir of a sensation.
Fellows completed the Correspondence Course with Turps Art School in 2023.
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Alexander Gilmour (b.1990, Leeds) is a painter and multi-disciplinary artist, with a practice that focuses on figurative painting in the expanded field. His work interweaves memory, observation and imaginative manipulation to cross examine perspective, masculinity and his working class background. He lives and works in London.
Gilmour is currently studying MA Painting at the Royal College of Art (Battersea Campus).
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Hanaka Holland (b. 1999, Japan) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in London. Her practice is deeply affected by her experience of being hāfu (half English and half Japanese) as she looks to Japanese Shinto, folklore and tales to reveal the immanence imbued in the everyday. Her work isolates and explores this subtle magic, often through feelings of nostalgia and transience, as a way of considering our self and the world, being in between or on the outside, on a familiar but profound level.
Holland graduated from from Camberwell College of Arts in 2023.
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Holly Keogh’s (b. 1991, USA) uses a combination of lucid washes, pressed pigment and realistic renderings the artist addresses themes of femininity, belonging, desire and Jungian psychology. Keough’s practice pulls from their own film photographs, family videos, and popular culture in a way that collapses reality and imbues existing imagery with new meaning.
Keogh is currently undertaking a MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London.
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Lana Locke (b.1982, London) is interested in the idea of the 'feral' – out of place, between the wild and the civilised - and the political and artistic promise of this state of indeterminacy. She often utilises plant forms such as flowers and vegetables to evoke and make strange human and non-human bodies and organs, and our collective ecological entanglement.
Locke is currently studying a MA in Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication at London College of Communication (2023-25).
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Jemima Moore (b.1992, UAE) investigates the formal properties of old master paintings, football team formations and tapestries, amongst other sources. She uses oil pastels and paint to trace how the eye engages with the source image and then responds to the internal logic of the new painting to generate new forms. She works iteratively, making repeated studies of the same images, dissolving the original into a series of fragments and allowing the original motifs and forms to emerge and submerge across the series of paintings. The artist studied History of Art at Cambridge University (2011-2014) and Fine Art at West Dean College (2021-2022).
Moore is currently studying MA Painting at the Royal College of Art (Battersea Campus).
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Mae Nicolaou’s (b. 1997, Ireland) interests lie in the social narratives surrounding the life cycle of items—from how they are made, enter our lives, to their eventual disposal as part of human waste. She explores how these narratives intersect with personal worries or concerns, such as the want to afford nice things, the perpetual cycle of gaining and losing, and the significance of employment.
Nicolaou is currently pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths University of London.
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William Reinsch’s (b. 1994, United Kingdom) works consist primarily of haunting landscapes, yellow figures in the darkness and spray painted sheep. These ideas all come together in a series the artist has been working on over the last five years titled 'Naked Island'. The series allows Reinsch to explore ideas, urges, and the duty to unravel mystery.
Reinsch is currently studying at City & Guilds of London Art School and will graduate in 2025.
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Moussa David Saleh’s (b.1984, UK) practice is underpinned by a desire to paint serious subjects in a playful, vaguely subversive manner. Sitting alongside an examination of perennial topics such as time, death and how humans (in particular men) use formality to cloak our innate ferality, he is also interested in what it means to live and experience intimacy in an age in which we have perfected the technological tools with which to shame and tear chunks out of one another.
Saleh completed the Correspondence Course with Turps Art School in 2023.
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Jonathan Tignor's (b. 1997, Dallas TX) paintings betray a concern with narrative. However, this is a conflation of his interests in imagery and tension. Stories are built around tension, and Tignor uses this as the building material in his paintings. Tignor's paintings ask viewers to linger with the strangeness of what's before them and question the role of their viewership through images that integrate themes like violence and precarity.
Tignor is currently undertaking a Master’s in Painting at the Royal College of Art (Battersea Campus).