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Kate Burling
Kate Burling (b.1998, Reading) lives and works in South East London. Her iridescent finger-paintings examine a corporeal experience of exponential change. Marking the inside and outside of the skin as initial zones of softness and hardness respectively, Burling observes a gradual obscuring of boundaries as the sponge-like body ages and absorbs. Her paintings are amalgamations of rolling mass with repeated motifs, scattered like confetti. They are places of rumination, where the artist attempts to catch elusive ideas and map them in soft, organic space. Since completing her BA in Fine Art at Camberwell College in 2022, Burling has presented two solo shows with Nosbaum Reding (Brussels) and Ronchini Gallery (London), as well as taking part in a number of group exhibitions at Christie’s, Guts Gallery, Soup Gallery and Milan Art Fair, and residencies at Goodeye Projects, Pictorum Gallery (both London) and Fondazione Sandro Moretti (Umbria). Since November 2024, Kate Burling has been a participant at the Conditions Studio Programme in Croydon. She is currently working towards a breadth of projects within the programme and externally, including a solo show with Solito Gallery, Naples in October 2025.
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1:17:32
Grant Foster
Grant was born in 1982 in Worthing, and is a London based artist who completed a MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2012. In 2019 Grant was International Randall Chair at Alfred University, New York, and in 2016 was Fellow in Contemporary Art with The British School at Rome.In 2007 he was a Prizewinner in John Moores 25, and is currently a mentor on The Turps Banana painting program and founding member of audio/visual recording project in a skull.
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1:29:53
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1:29:53
Hannah Bays
Hannah Bays (b. 1982) is a London based painter who graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in London, 2015.Through painting, Hannah Bays explores psychological terrain associated with the sacred, the profane and the transformational. Familiar objects are used symbolically to convey existential meaning, whilst gesturing towards broader philosophical, social, and global concerns. These objects within the paintings echo the ritualistic potency of ceremonial vessels that hold our deepest desires, memories, and fears. Drawing upon mythological and folkloric references, Bays often anthropomorphises animals and everyday objects, playing with scale to shuffle hierarchical relations. Colour is employed emotively, with line and form expressive of a bold desire - the sensual properties of paint a vehicle for meaning. Recent exhibitions include: I’m Not Afraid of Ghosts, Palazzo Tiepolo Passi in Venice, Italy, Confessions, which was a solo exhibition at Jack’s House, London, and ABG Emerging, Alice Black Gallery, London which were all in 2024 as well as Muscle Beach, two-person exhibition with Ana Kazaroff, Kupfer Project, London in 2021 Residencies include the Malevich Residency, Lake Como, 2021; Dover Arts Club Drawing Room Residency, 2020; Eton College Artist in Residence, 2018 and RRU Artist in Residence, Liverpool, also in 2018.
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1:36:46
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1:36:46
Mary Herbert
Mary is based in London and graduated from the Royal Drawing School in 2018 and Goldsmiths College London’s BA in Fine Art and contemporary critical studies in 2010.Her works have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Moskowitz Bayse (Los Angeles) and Lychee One (London), and have recently been included in group exhibitions at The British Museum, White Cube, Union Pacific, and Huxley-Parlour (London), Hweg (Penzance), F2T Gallery (Milan), Harkawik (New York), and Clint Roenisch (Toronto), among others. I visited Mary a few days after her most recent show ‘Careful not to fill an Emptiness’ opened at Moskowitz Bayse in London, which is where our conversation takes place. So as our conversation predominantly references the work within it, a fitting introduction to the work in the show, and to lead into our conversation as a whole would be to read an excerpt from her press release.The experience of the body can’t be measured in feet or by the length of its limbs. But as a changing and curious instrument, the body knows space as something foreclosing – an abrupt cul-de-sac in a dream – and sometimes so blown open it can feel like sensory deprivation, extending past any textured surface or distance in time.The artworks in Careful not to fill an Emptiness move into spaces which have held – and been held by – the body. Here, these spaces are loosely described by paint or in dry materials on paper. They are shared and solitary at once: a group of figures stand together with their heads bowed, someone holds out a flower to another who is angled away and appears not to see them but is still supported by bodies on either side. When an object or body is depicted, a surrounding space forms by default. Around the bodies of natural elements, Mary Herbert paints a kind of default landscape that doesn’t need to be clearly defined to be occupied. It is a not-quite place that exists despite the body’s vulnerability, despite the human dualisms of language.
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Anna Ilsley
Anna Ilsley is based in Suffolk and graduated from Royal Drawing School in 2010 and University of Brighton’s BA in Fine Art Painting in 2006. Anna is inspired by mythologies and cultural references from across eras and cultures, be that a saucy detail from a Medieval manuscript; mythical representations of feminine power, the erotic frescoes of ancient Pompeii or the latest series of Love Island.Her paintings and drawings address the physical and emotional impact of motherhood and her intensely strong urge to kick back against the cultural and political forces that shape women’s relationships with their own bodies. Her work often draws on the mess, joy and viscerality of her own experiences. Using the physical constraints of the canvas itself as a structure that both restricts and supports the figures it contains, the characters she depicts are in turn resplendently fleshy, embracing, smothering, saucy, monstrous.
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1:38:19
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1:38:19