SISYPHEAN
At a time where normality is within our grasp yet crisis after crisis creates instability, the absurdity of human life is represented. This group of emerging London Artists are exploring a practice that is resistant. The exhibition is a culmination of many disciplines, representing our diverse surroundings, disrupting space and context.
ALEX LONG YUAN
In this era of post-globalization, the global butterfly effect caused by unrestrained human activities and individuals has not only brought about positive effects, but also caused immeasurable trauma and side effects.
In this context, as a multidisciplinary artist, Alex Long Yuan centres his research on humans’ living state in modern times and the relationships between humans and nature, humans and humans across cultures, in a bid to find the most suitable form of expression through a variety of interdisciplinary research and artistic experiments, so as to discuss and explore in-depth how humans can best live in harmony with the blue planet and what would their rebuilt future look like if humans put their civilization as a relics in the infinite
dimension of the universe.
In accordance with the requirements of his works and projects, Alex Long Yuan often cooperate with people and organizations with different backgrounds, including scientists, ornithologists, NGOs, museum etc. Adept at the artistic expression in public spaces and inter-media creation, his work probes into multiple challenges; confronting humans and nature in the Anthropogenic age.
@alexlongfineart
ALEX PAVELESCU Hello My Future Art Viewer,
I wish to leave here a few words about me and my art, with the hope that I won’t bore you, too much
Without you, my art would not be complete, it looks like we have each other. I started doing art because I didn’t like maths and I couldn’t stop drawing.
Initially, I really liked the idea of making something out of nothing, like a magician. Then, I felt like a gardener who plants seeds through his artwork in this social and cultural context.
I later found out that this is an expression of the freedom that I feel the urge to exercise. And if I squeeze other things into it, such as a service to humanity and sustainability and a little bit of entertainment, it’s that much better.
All people who try to create deserve to be encouraged. I let my inner child guide me, I try never to lose the pleasure of making stuff, of playing seriously.
At this point I want to apologise to my mother, because I no longer paint beautiful paintings, focusing now more on meaning than how it looks like. As a child I had extra energy, which I had to spend somehow.
I grew up at the same time as the rebirth of Romania after the Revolution which overthrew Communism in ’89.
I spent the first part of my childhood, with my Serbian granny with the Danube river flowing behind our garden. I am Romanian and I was able to get to know the Serbian culture, and now I am grateful to have the opportunity to have a British art education at University of the Arts London.
Being used to moving around to study the arts, and meeting teachers who believed in me, left a great influence on me.
A game-changing moment in time for me was the advent of the internet, other areas that have contributed to my development are graffiti, graphic design, industrial design, web design, puppetry and theater artsit. I found something intriguing in a blank sheet initially, later in white walls, after in untouched canvases or other materials and now in empty spaces.
For me, contemporary art is what can get my father out of his state of calm. I think an artist who always repeats the same recipes is a creatively dead artist . Art cannot be defined; art is a feeling…
The things that have shifted my perspective are: the movie ‘Avatar’, the discovery Franz Kafka’s book calld ‘The Artist of Hunger’ and the admiration of Constantin Brancusi, the father of Modernist Sculpture.
In my pieces, I like to combine: 50% my concept + 40% reinvention of meaning through personal experiences of the visitors + 10% hidden secrets details {fact inspired by the works of art of two of the XVI th century artists, Michelangelo in ‘The Sistine Chapel’ and Hans Holbein the Younger ‘The ambassadors’ }.
I love the combination of traditional techniques (carved in stone and wood) and the latest technology (use of digital softwares and gadgets). Through multidisciplinary lenses I like to be generous in art and always reinvent myself and be unconventional.
I believe in the natural progression of the journey continuous change dominates my desire to be always up to date, to make what is called Fresh Art
BIANCA ANDREEA MIERLEA
Bianca Andreea Mierlea is a Romanian artist, born in 1999, based in London. In 2020 she graduated from ‘Chelsea College of Arts, BA (Hons) Fine Art and at the beginning of 2022 she graduated from an MA in Fine Art at ‘Chelsea College of Arts’.
Her practice is a combination between painting, ceramics and textile materials. Through her works she explores different esoteric concepts such as out of body experiences, spirituality, but also concepts of femininity and the power of the self. In her practice she plays with different aspects such as: real-unreal, solid-non solid, human versus hybrid being. Since 2011 when she started her artistic career she had numerous group and personal exhibitions. One of her textile installations was recently shown in an exhibition called ‘A lost world’ as part of a collaboration with ‘Sotheby’s Institute of Art’.
@biancamierlea.13
COCO WARNER-ALLEN
Coco Warner-Allen is a London based artist who is currently studying Fine Art at Chelsea. Her multi-media practise explores feminist ideas such as The Male Gaze, the performativity of the feminine and how damaging the current media environment is to girls and women. She is also interested in how beauty and femininity are constructed through both contemporary visual culture and throughout the history of art.
Her textile practise is feminine, humorous and excessive. The works take on a diarist format as she explores female identity and traditional concepts of femininity. She draws on her own lived experience of being in a woman’s body in an image obsessed culture as well as addressing the pain that living in a patriarchal society can cause. She aims to reclaim and modernise the female history of textiles and embroidery by engaging in a larger social commentary of what society expects from women, to be sweet, demure and docile.
Her work as a textile artist subverts the traditional use of embroidery as a mode to keep women with their hands busy and minds idle. She produces pieces that watch the spectator back, denying voyeurism and passivity, and includes language that expresses the often repressed and underrepresented female rage.
The materiality of her pieces also link her work to the modern day by using sequins, beads, ribbons and tulle. She thus provides a connection between the feminine roots of craft and textiles. She aims to engage in the paragone between craft and art by elevating such skills and media which is so often looked down upon as feminine and lowly, not heralded as masculine ‘high art’.
As well as literature-based research, Coco opens up these conversations amongst her own peer group to learn first-hand what it means to be a woman today, and the gender based discrimination that they face daily.
Coco works to give a voice for women and draw attention to their viewpoint, one so often ignored and dismissed. She explores and overtly denies the ideals of what a woman should be and brings women’s voices into the public realm.
@cocowa_art
EVALDAS GULBINAS
Making art mixing drawing and sculpture together. Sculptures reflects human’s positive and negative emotions. Black and white colours dominates in the sculptures to reflect the tragedy of humanity’s incomprehensible life. Messy shapes of sculptures creates and shows the different possibilities of human life experiences. Mental states prevails in the work. As human has past, present and future- it shows the chaos and confusion visually in the faces. Everyones has experiences bad moments in the life and has the dark side, which has been hidden inside us. Unpredictable, mysterious shapes of the sculptures experiences words as, “ugly could be beauty, self-destruction, dark side, crushed, disordered faces, playfulness, situations and poor colours, pain and tears, complex with face, body and emotions. “
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/efka_tattooart/ website: http://www.evaldasgulbinas.co.uk/
JIALI MAI
Jiali Mai is a London based artist working with performance, photography and installation. Her work focuses on the connection between the body, emotional and society creates performance art works that satirize society and the nature of human beings based on the current situation, culture identity, and female representation.
This glass work expresses Mai’s interest in the medical treatment and the chemical reaction produced by the combination of medicine and glass. She had rhinitis all year round, but recently it has been particularly bad in March-April, to the point where she had daily nose irritation. The morning starts with constant sneezing and a runny nose, which can present itself throughout the day. Whenever it happens, she needs to take medication to improve her allergy situation. In the case of severe allergies, she would constantly have tears in her eyes, sneezing and a runny nose that was uncontrollable, which also led to great inconvenience in her life and she could not control her emotions. This is a work of glass full of Jiali Mai’s personal anger and helplessness.
KRISTEN DONOGHUE-STANFORD
In analyzing the treatment of women as abject and uncanny beings, my practice revolves around womanhood and femininity as inherently Gothic on the basis of subjugation under patriarchal trauma. Horror and desire morph into beautiful obscurity and ugly clarity to utilize the Gothic as a catalyst to the reclamation of power and control over the self.
Musings, Epistles, and Conversations act as an exploration of internal horrors and desires, and the more complex idea of being horrified by our desires. The scale and placement of the writings on the page act as a visual representation of the emotions tied to each statement. Presented in half-truths and ambiguity, these writings exist as moments of Gothic sentimentality intended to embrace and distract the reader from understanding by placing on display private musings, epistles, and conversations.
@kedonoghue_stanford
LUCIA BOAGHE
Lucia Boaghe is a London based artist, exploring the intercultural interactions. She believes people are making this planet a beautiful place with their differences by spreading their traditions and colours around.
The amalgam of many contrasting cultures is an endless source of inspiration for her. She likes to explore humans and the modification of feelings in a new multicultural environment. Her works are a personification of her experience of emigration. She’s building emotions and feelings, not objects.
Lucia’s work draws on her personal experience of immigration, exploring the complex emotional impact it has on her practice.
Working predominantly in ceramic, Lucia has chosen her medium carefully, to represent the fragility of the inner world, and build spaces ready to fill with new experiences and knowledge, adding further layers of meaning to her work.
The new reality.
This specific work is a mirror of the world’s situation during the pandemic, where fears and anxiety have become the way of living. Today this work is even more expressive with the war in Ukraine, the fear of a nuclear war is becoming a new reality.
@lucia_boaghe_art
MEL WOO
Mel Woo is an emerging London artist. She has showcased her artistic talents at the Saatchi Gallery, London Grads Now 2021 exhibition and during the same year she won the ‘Peoples Choice Award’ from the renowned Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden. Her work is rich in contextual information, her reflection is influenced from environmental, ethical and philosophical debates. Her practice is continually experimental, incorporating performers, movement, sound, craft and biography rooted in an exploration of the self and identity during a context of unprecedented change.
@melwoo2020
VICTORIA ROTARU
Victoria Rotaru is an emerging artist with a massive interest about the magic of
macro world. She transforms familiar items into fantastical abstract forms. Her art
is about continuity of life and the transformation of it.
Through this new reality, her practice has shifted into a focus on tactile
representations of intimacy and connection between humanity and nature. A
connection that borders upon sensibility and the sublime, especially in a world
continuously rocked in chaos brought on by the natural order. This
preoccupation has morphed from highly detailed photography of the surfaces
to magic abstract forms. The skins of the plants act as a connection between
humanity and nature, highlighting in rapid process the journey of life and has
led to her most recent fascination with mold, showcasing and highlighting these
textures, intimacies, and connections in a state of decay. A point of life in which
touch ceases completely, but when new life is born again and the cycle of
touch, intimacy begins anew.
@vic.rotaru
WILL GRIFFIN
Will Griffin moves through diverse spaces, searching for materials and listening for rhythms that resonate.Triggering lines of investigation, Will’s process thus becomes a combinational process, creating compositions. Urban spaces are seen as an arena through which to trace the movements of people. It is only by using natural forms that Will can confront perceived connections/interactions between unique forms. In short, his practice is one in which he rejects the idea of autonomous objects in any capacity.
As a result, Wills's practice can be seen to intertwine found elements. Brought together, they push and pull amongst each other, creating a dynamic that develops into a dialogue. Forging a veritable tete-a-tete, experimentation that underpins the basis of Will’s practice.
His current research brings a western perspective to the material-based disciplines of Japanese ‘Wabi Sabi’, ‘Suiseki’ and the contemporary writings upon the Sublime.
Will works in sculpture, painting, sound, and kinetic movement. Materials are sourced from the immediate environment: flintstone, bronze, shopping trolleys, sheet steel, cardboard, and wood.
@willgriffinart