exhibitions
Critical Edge #5
The Handbag Factory, London, SE11 5RB
23 – 26 May 2025
Participating Artists: Laurelle Blake, Eva Barkardottir, Nele Bergmans, Jessica Brauner, Cass Breen, Matty Emery, Jane Hughes, Nimmi Hutnik, Natsuki Iwamoto, Kate Kelly, StevieRay Latham, Jolene Liam, Cat Needs, Alan Oliver, Iliana Ortega-Alcazar, Te Palandjian, Nasus Y Ram, Sabrina Rodrigues, Megan Segre, Rhi Stanton, Joy Stokes, Eleanor Street, Emiline Trenton, Carmen Van Huisstede, Chisara Vidale.
Blending sculpture, painting, print, and film, this exhibition from Critical Edge Collective explores alternative ways of engaging with Vauxhall’s cultural heritage, power, and physicality - both visible and invisible - and reflects on the notion of the factory. The exhibition is a collection of pieces created by 25 artists in response to their exploration, research and engagement with The Handbag Factory, its surrounding area and history, bringing together unique perspectives, new ideas and innovative approaches to their work.
Critical Edge Collective’s initial research into The Handbag Factory gallery did not uncover any evidence that it was historically a handbag factory. The space, in some ways, is defined by an inaccessibility and invisibility of origin and history. For this show, we sought to make a new industry of production: we asked that all participating artists find inspiration related to The Handbag Factory and contribute their research to a shared drive. As the show approached, we looked at each others’ investigations and used the breadth of information in the archive to each develop a new artwork. To emphasise the value of collaboration and dialogue, all participating artists shared their findings that informed their creative processes and the final pieces exhibited. Each artist has added to and helped build a research archive that is also displayed during the exhibition.
The Weight of Things
an exhibition by FOLD Art Collective, 25-30 March 2025
Morley Gallery, London
The Weight of Things is an exhibition of new works by members of FOLD Art Collective. Borrowing the title from Marianne Fritz’s feminist novel, this show explores both physical and emotional weight, and questions personal and political burdens. The artists are curious about the physicality of made objects; pressure and gravity; abundance and scarcity; the solid and the fragile.
FOLD Art Collective is a group of women artists working across diverse media, who all developed their art practices following other careers and responsibilities. The Collective meets in person monthly to critique and encourage one another’s work in progress.
Featured Artists: Abigail Elverd, Bernadette Enright, Carmen Van Huisstede, Cass Breen, Clare Nicholson, Eleanor Street, Jane Hughes, Jess Blandford, Katherine Rose, Marina Nasso-Beard and Nell Martin. Curated by Eloise Dethier-Eaton.
That FOLD Art Collective have borrowed their title from the novel by Marianne Fritz (often described as the overlooked female James Joyce), feels appropriate. This rediscovered modernist text holds much within its slim 144 pages. It is bleak and very funny; domestic and political; heavy and light. The narrative loops and confuses. Not much and everything happens in this story in which hapless Berta longs to protect her children from ‘the weight of things’.
The times we live in feel particularly weighty right now (though perhaps they always have). What are we to do with this sense of burden? How can we carry all that seems to be happening everywhere all at once? And how can this sit with pleasure, or with a lightness of touch? With irreverence or tenderness? We might secretly agree with Hollywood icon Ava Gardner’s remark that: “deep down, I’m pretty superficial”. Or perhaps rather than seeking buoyancy, we find we crave gravitas. Needing to feel ourselves grounded, not untethered. The weight of things is more complicated than mass = density x volume.
The 11 artists in this show prefer questions to formulae. They explore the weight of emotional loads: memories and grief, hopes and fears, identities and responsibilities. All are curious about the physicality of made objects, and the experience of being a tangible presence in space (including landscape), where gravity and atmospheric pressures take effect. Consumption, abundance, scarcity and fragility are all manifest, and often overwhelming. Some things float while others sink.
Hold in your mind that all these works are made by a female art collective who meet monthly to discuss their work. The collaborative SHELVED project (featured in this show) is a reminder that this group is a supportive structure as well as a forum for critique.
The members of FOLD Art Collective are spreading their arms wide, but as Maira Kalman writes in ‘Women Holding Things’:
“Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly happy or content, I think I can provide sustenance for legions of human beings. I can hold the entire world in my arms. Other times, I can barely cross the room. And I drop my arms. Frozen.”
FOLD seem to know this truth. They have taken Fritz’s words - “as best you can” - to heart. It’s all any of us can do.
Jess Blandford, March 2025
“... the present is always the best time to spread your arms wide and embrace the whole world, all at once, as best you can.”
Marianne Fritz, The Weight of Things (1978)
From The Ground Up
an exhibition by Critical Edge Collective, 10-19 October 2024
Lewisham Arthouse
Critical Edge Collective's exhibition at Lewisham Arthouse investigates diminishing trust in information, urging the re-evaluation of established knowledge systems. By working collaboratively, the Collective challenges individualism in art markets; prioritising trust, inquiry, and collaboration, while remaining critical and playful amidst post-truth polarisation.
In response to the building’s history of being a library, and with Critical Edge Collective’s interest in making new archives and exploring different ways of creating and interrogating knowledge, the artists have collaboratively created a metaphorical ‘library’: each artist has created a new work in response to another Collective member’s research ‘box’. We invite you to look for connections between these ‘boxes’ and another artist’s response to them.
In our ‘research annexe’ the artists explore influences on their own work as a way of making the processes we engage in more transparent. In addition, the Collective have invited guest artists to make and show their own ‘box of influences’ on their art.
(Un)Visible
an exhibition by FOLD Art Collective, 27-30 September 2024
Safehouse 1
This exhibition explores ideas of the unseen and the hidden. The works are preoccupied with overlooked objects, individuals, stories and systems, and unnoticed moments in everyday life.
FOLD Art Collective is a group of twelve women artists who have developed their art practices later in life, following other careers and responsibilities.
The independent work that the collective produces crosses many disciplines including: sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, textiles, film, and installation; and the artists’ interests are wide-ranging. The artists in the collective are united by a shared sensitivity to materials, time and space; and by the depth of other experiences that each artist brings to her practice. Established in 2021, the collective meets in person monthly to critique and encourage work in progress; and uses whatsapp as a collaborative forum to inspire, rage, laugh, cheer and galvanise.
FOLD Art Collective exists to generously give support, space and voice to the work of mid-life women artists who are often invisible in contemporary culture.
and you would have to believe it
an exhibition by Critical Edge Collective, 28-30 June 2024
Copeland Gallery, Peckham
Critical Edge Collective, a London based artist collective interested in the role of art within political and social issues introduced this show at Copeland Gallery, Peckham. The collective explores knowledge and power, particularly how systems of information colour our perceptions of the world around us. This exhibition questions: ‘What evidence do we use to test whether the information we receive is reliable?’, ‘What sources of knowledge do we trust?’, and ‘Whose interest do information systems serve?’.
and you would have to believe it is an invitation to the audience to engage with the questions raised above and enter into discussion with the artists about their work.
The show features 24 emerging artists exploring a wide range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, computational arts, and printmaking: Sofia Alrich Veytia, Nele Bergmans, Jess Brauner, Matty Emery, Helen Grant, Jane Hughes, Nimmi Hutnik, Caroline Ip, Chrysa Kanari, Kate Kelly, Alexandra Kim, S. R. Latham, Belinda Moren, Georgina Odell, Iliana Ortega-Alcazar, Te Palandiian, Chanin Polpanumas, Nasus Y Ram, Rhi Stanton, Joy Stokes, Eleanor Street, Carmen Van Huisstede, Tong Wu, Jeremy Wyatt.
What We Bring to the Table
an exhibition by Critical Edge Collective, 21-25 March 2024
Safehouse 1, Peckham
Critical Edge Collective presented their new work in an exhibition, ‘What We Bring to the Table’ at Safehouse 1 on Copeland Road, Peckham, featuring the work of nine recent MA Graduates from the College of Fine Art at Camberwell.
Through a blend of performance, sculpture, painting, print and film the exhibition draws attention to and explores alternative ways of looking at class tension, the corporal body, paradox and power. Each artist brings a unique visual voice to the show but as a collective, they have a shared commitment to question how art can enable and enact social and political change. Taking as a starting point Appadurai et al’s 2021 quote.
… is aesthetic, artistic, or political radicality in art still possible under the neoliberal condition? Can, or should, artistic practice constitutes a significant site of resistance? Conversely, is the contemporary art world a paradigmatic case of, and even a model for, neoliberal capitalism?
Recognising the power of the group show format, this new collective finds its home and connectivity in the ‘Safehouse’, an abandoned skeleton of a former Victorian terraced house. Responding to the remnants of this former domestic structure with its social symbols of place, the collective transforms and subverts the physical space in its investigation into the relationships between inequalities, power and ephemerality.
'What We Bring to the Table' is an invitation for the audience to engage with the questions raised above and enter into discussion with the artists about their work.
Layers of Being
An exhibition by art collective Second Shift, 9-11 December 2023
Safehouse 2, Peckham
The Second Shift Art Collective is a group of women artists who have developed their art practice later in life, following other careers. The independent work the collective produces crosses many disciplines including: sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and installation; and the artists’ interests are wide-ranging. What holds the Collective together is a shared sensitivity to materials, time and space; to the depth of other experiences that each artist brings to her practice; and to the relational contexts in which work is created.
The Collective meets in person monthly to critique and encourage one another’s work in progress, and uses whatsapp as a collaborative forum to inspire, rage, laugh, cheer and galvanise. The Second Shift Collective has this agenda at its heart: to generously give support, space and voice to the work of mid-life women artists who are often invisible in contemporary culture.
Layers of Being is the inaugural show of the Second Shift Art Collective. The works of the 9 artists involved, weave together stories, memories, secrets, objects, time and identities. The show includes paintings, textiles, sculpture, video and printmaking, exhibited in the forgotten space of a derelict Victorian terraced house in Peckham; the works engage with this eroded domestic space.
Convergence
'Convergence' was an exhibition of work by women artists from across the Camberwell MA Fine Art pathways, which I co-curated with fellow student Carmen Van Huisstede. The participating artists were from a wide array of backgrounds and artistic practices and were all MA Fine Art students at Camberwell. The core concept of the exhibition was to juxtapose the perspectives and cultural influences that each artist brings and to celebrate the connections and friendships that evolved over the past year.
My works were porcelain tiles that I had coated with photo-emulsion and developed images using negatives from some of the many photographs my father took - making these pieces was an exercise in remembrance and catharsis.
I also showed two collaborative work with Joy Stokes: Dialectics of the Skin which considers the paradox of the skin’s fragility in the context of lymphoedema – needing regular heavy moisturisation with thick, greasy creams to prevent cracking and tearing – with its function as barrier between the body and world; and Fluid Dynamics, which juxtaposes an image of bubbling, lively crystal clear alpine streams with the gestures and movements of Joy’s legs where the lymphatic fluid collects and distends.
