Artists & Works
Artists in the exhibition are: Cameron Ugbodu, Jakob Rowlinson, Esther Teichmann, Güler Ateş, Daniella Valz Gen, Jade De Montserrat
Love and Anger
Brass, oil paints, oil pastels, paper, nails, varnish, acrylic, plexiglass, cloth, bronze powder, hair, ashes, soil, blood, and wood
In this intimate self-portrait, the artist reflects on how emotions can transcend generations and manifest in the future. Ugbodu uses symbolic materials such as blood, hair pigment and soil to represent their emotional transition from hate to love.
Cameron Ugbodu, aka "See You," is an autodidact Nigerian and Austrian multidisciplinary artist living and working in London. Through their work, Cameron investigates family histories, identity and queerness. Influences and techniques learned from their family's heritage from Benin City (Edo State, Nigeria) and the Wachau area (Austria) shape Cameron’s practice. Craftsmanship has always been an important part of Cameron's family, this coupled with difficulty expressing themselves verbally has led Cameron to explore visual expression through different mediums in order to communicate their world to others.
On a constant search for oneself, their work archives different stages of their experience and the space surrounding them with a gaze towards the future and exploration.
Cameron Ugbodu
Courtesy of the Artist
Mask III, Mask V (peppered moth)
Leather shoes, chains, buckles and rivets
Leather trainers, rivets, eyelets, and shoelaces
Jakob Rowlinson’s artistry is centred in craft. He works with leather, embroidery, and jacquard tapestries to question the bounds of masculinity throughout time. This is seen in the creation of his expressive leather masks that reference the natural world and medieval symbolism. He uses found materials such as trainers, which are deconstructed and reassembled to create symbols of transformation. The distinct elements of the masks, when woven together, reflect the Archipelago – piecing together unseen threads to create an organic iconography that reflects queer culture, mythology, and nature.
JAKOB ROWLINSON
Jakob Rowlinson (b. 1990) lives and works in London. He studied BA Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Art (Oxford University), and MA Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (London). He works across leather masks, embroidery, and jacquard tapestries to weave alternative histories steeped in queer culture, mythology, and nature. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Thirteen Fools' at Huxley Parlor gallery, London UK (2024), and 'Faerie Land' at the Dowse museum in Wellington, New Zealand (2023). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (2023), and Guts gallery, London (2023).
Untitled - Mythologies
ESTHER TEICHMANN
Esther Teichmann combines still and moving images with sculpture and painting. Her work provides an experimental way of looking at photography that blends the autobiographical and the mythological. This photograph captures a threshold between the real and unreal. Taken near the artist’s family home, the two subjects on the dinghy are her parents. They are immortalised in an otherworldly environment that is both ethereal and post-apocalyptic.
Photographic print, and hand painted chromogenic print
Object Performance Still (I) - (II)
Archival digital prints
Güler Ateş’ works explore nuances of identity politics as seen through her own experiences of cross-cultural displacement, having moved from Turkey to London in 1998. Her photographs seek to portray multiple perspectives of migratory transition. The performance depicted in this series took place in the square in front of the Church of São Francisco de Paula, Rio de Janeiro. Ateş incorporates local everyday artefacts, such as kitchen utensils found in lower income homes in Brazil.
Object Performance III - IV - V
Archival digital prints
GÜLER ATEŞ
Güler moved from Turkey to London in 1998, studying first at Lewisham College and then moving on to a BA in Painting at Wimbledon School of Art. She subsequently graduated with an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 2008. Her work has been exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including solo exhibitions in Washington DC, Mumbai, Turin, Amsterdam, Napoli, Porto, Okinawa and London. Güler has been awarded numerous prizes for her work including the Arts Council England Project Award in 2020. Her work is also held in notable collections including the Royal Collection, Turin, Italy, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Royal Academy of Arts, and the Government Arts Collection, UK.
Courtesy of the Artist
(Be)longing
DANIELLA VALZ GEN
Photographic prints
The site-specific interventions in (Be)longing represent an element of Daniella Valz Gen’s practice surrounding bodily interventions, stemming from ecological concerns and socio-political issues. By situating the migrant body in key locations (Postling and The Warren, Kent; and Fermyn Woods, Northamptonshire), these images embody the artist’s exploration of unity between body and land.
Alongside these prints and produced for the exhibition, is a poetic document that examines the act of burial as a way to reflect on the migrant body, connecting Valz Gen’s written and photographic practice.
Through a process-led approach, Daniella’s practice explores poetic experience through multidisciplinary modes. Challenging ideas around the distinction between mind and body, Daniella engages in ritual as a way to sensitise them and others to subtler forms of being present with each other, and with our environment. They investigate different forms of embodying liminality stemming from my experience as a multilingual queer migrant negotiating territories, modes of address, and value systems. Daniella’s methods include in-depth tarot and astrology practice, somatics, dance, psychology and ongoing studies on mysticism, mythology and symbolism. Constructing dialogues and social spaces for reflection is an integral part of their practice often expressed through collaborative projects and discursive spaces. They occasionally teach expanded writing workshops. Daniella is currently taking part in Whitechapel’s writer in residence programme.
Real Still
Jade de Montserrat
Watercolour, gouache, pencil crayon, pencil, charcoal, masking fluid, oil pastel, and paper
Courtesy of the Artist
This work depicts metal nails growing out of a mound of earth, and references sculptures of power figures (named minkisi) which are believed to help alleviate illness or social ills in Kongo tradition.
Jade de Montserrat’s research-led practice excavates shared histories alongside delving into her personal narrative. Montserrat works at the intersection of art and activism through painting, performance, film, sculpture, installation, print and text. She interrogates these mediums with the aim to expose gaps in our visual and linguistic habits. Jade de Montserrat is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, (Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project) and the development of her work from her Black diasporic perspective in the North of England. In 2022 she completed 6 week residency in south west France at Launchpad LAB; which enabled her to explore nature and ecology in a more focussed way, and to combine drawing with making sculptural forms. Upon her return she was selected as a commissioned artist for the 12th edition of the Liverpool Biennial 2023. This allowed her to develop her practice further by creating an installation which consisted of life sized drawings and sculpture. The works embodied a healing frequency in response to Liverpool’s troubled historical past.