Graduate Studio Award

Graduate Award 2024

Deadline 6th November 2023

We are now seeking applications for this year’s Lewisham Arthouse Graduate Award!

The Lewisham Arthouse Graduate Award is an exciting opportunity providing recent graduates (between 2020-2023) with free studio space and production support. It is a studio and mentorship award for recent graduates from university and alternative art education programs, please see eligibility at the end for further details. It is free to apply and the award lasts one year, it provides a first floor 200ft studio based within the artist-led cooperative and community of Lewisham Arthouse and a mentorship program with local professional networks and mentors selected by the awardee. At the end of the year, the awardee is invited to share the outcomes of their time in Lewisham Arthouse through a public event; such as an exhibition, a workshop, performance, symposium or gig.

This year’s award will run from January 2024-2025. The deadline for applications is midnight on November 6th. For more information please look at our Information Sheet.

You can also email us at graduateaward@lewishamarthouse.org.uk

In case the hyperlinks don’t work, please see:

Equal Opportunities Form

Lewisham Arthouse Graduate Award Application Information Sheet


Rosie McGinn – Biggus Icarus

Graduate resident 2019-2021

Rosie McGinn’s solo exhibition ‘Biggus Icarus’ follows her extended year-long graduate residency at Lewisham Arthouse. It will take place Friday 2nd – Monday 12th July, 12 – 6pm. Preview Day Saturday 10th July.

The show will feature a large inflatable sculpture of a human free-falling from the stratosphere surrounded by a sequence of drawings and paintings that explore ‘A History of Human Flight’. From a Benedictine Monk fixing wings to his hands and feet and jumping from the top of Malmesbury Abbey to a Serbian flight attendant surviving a plane crash to Icarus flying too close to the sun; this new watercolour series continues McGinn’s research into the human spirit of exploration.

Rosie McGinn’s work explores moments of euphoria often centered around recreational activities such as bingo, clubbing and sports. Her work investigates the ritual element of these practices and reflects upon the highs and lows of these shared experiences. Recent exhibitions include: The Soft Display, Division of Labour, London (2020) Get in There (with OOF Magazine), Tate Modern, Tate Exchange, London (2019); Joyous Dystopia, The Bass², The Bass Museum, Miami (2019); The Boléro, Art Lacuna, London (2019); ULTRA: Art for the Women’s World Cup, J Hammond Projects, London (2019) Our Way[s] Of Life, Austrian Cultural Forum, London (2019) Young Gods, CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, London (2019) 3for1, Picnic Gallery, London (2019). Rosie gained an MFA in Fine Art from Wimbledon School of Art in 2018.


Sola Olulode

Sola Olulode
Graduate resident 2018-2019

Lewisham Arthouse is delighted to welcome our new Graduate Resident for 2018-2019, Sola Olulode.

Sola Olulode’s canvas is stretched with her own version of Adire, an indigo-dyed textile traditionally made by Yoruba womxn in Nigeria using resist-dyeing techniques. She felt the need to have a connection to her Yoruba heritage present in the works. She uses batik, tape and a traditional cassava paste to create intricate and lineal resistance patterns. She plays around with using these rich textiles to elevate the backgrounds and to enhance the figures in the foreground. Using collage to layer gorgeous textiles and textures over figures bringing their saucy outfits and glorious hairstyles to life. Sola’s paintings are a look into the lives of Black womxn, in particular looking at when Black womxn and femmes discover their sense of self. The works document this exploration of sexuality, relationships and individuality through the form of figure painting. Her paintings have been deeply influenced by the culture and community that surrounds her life and I want to project in my paintings something that black womxn and black femmes can relate to and see the complexities of their identities reflected in.

Sola has graduated BA (hons) Fine Art Painting from University of Brighton. She recently exhibited at BBZ BLK BK: Alternative Graduate Show, Orbit UK Arts Graduates Show, Affordable Art Fair Recent Graduates and took part in the VON GOETZ ART Frieze Week Residency.

Kate Fahey – Repetitive Strain

Repetitive strain

Kate Fahey – Repetitive Strain

Working across the boundaries of various mediums including moving-image, sound, stills, sculpture, and installation, Fahey’s practice explores our relationship with images through contemporary screen-based perspectives: aerial, satellite and elevated (drone’s eye) views, particularly in the technological hard and soft wares of encounter. Focusing on imagery predominantly appropriated from YouTube, her multidisciplinary fine art practice engages with the surface and materiality of the aerial image employing metafictional and subjective approaches to their habitual modes of spectatorship online.

www.katefahey.co.uk

Kerri Jefferis and Sophie Chapman – What happened in between?

What happened in between?

Kerri Jefferis and Sophie Chapman – What happened in between?

Sophie Chapman + Kerri Jefferis work exclusively through collaboration, their work explores collective agency and ways to navigate or confront the social structures imposed upon us.

Sophie + Kerri’s work manifests in performance, scored propositions, film and direct acts that are either experienced live or represented via boundary objects: drawings, sculpture, text; that offer poetic records of the events.

Informed by the feminist practice of doing, each project has its own particular set of parameters and infrastructures that seek both a critical and convivial perspective in the context they are located. Common to each work is the desire to bring differing people together, to enact prefigurative forms of resistance and document social time. Each encounter that they stage invites those present to re-orientate, unlearn or embody a different way of being, together.

Image credit: Sophie Chapman + Kerri Jefferis, documentation of Friendsslashcolleagues performed by Chloe Cooper during What Happened Between?

www.kerrijefferis.com/what-happened-between


Chris Alton – Under the shade I flourish

Chris Alton

Chris Alton was the recipient of the Graduate Studio Award in 2015, his final project for the residency was Under the shade I flourish.

During the mid-1960s, “an unknown rhythm ‘n’ blues band”* called Trident were briefly managed by the non-UK domiciled billionaire, Michael Ashcroft; a controversial figure notable for “opaque tax practices” and “operating in the dark”. Under the Shade I Flourish (2015-16) imagines that Ashcroft continued to manage Trident.

By incorporating feedback from his life into their narrative, Under the Shade I Flourish engages in a cartographic process, which involves the cross-pollination of both fact and fiction.
Trident become a vehicle to discuss the connections between Britain’s colonial history, offshore finance and soft power. Fictitious tours see them zigzag haphazardly between venues, mimicking financial graphs; song lyrics repurpose Latin mottos and tax terminology; and posters advertise performances in notorious centres of tax avoidance (including Belize, where Ashcroft resides).

*Dirty Politics, Dirty Times, Michael Ashcroft, 2005

www.chrisalton.com

Luke Burton – Singspiel

Luke burton singspiel copy
[toggle]Singspiel (image credit the artist)[/toggle]

Luke Burton works across sculpture, video, and photography. He uses urban landscape and architecture as either a central protagonist or stage-like foil to explore Romantic artist positions, play and humour as a form of gentle dissidence, and the complexity of the decorative in contemporary culture.

The representation of the artist’s hand is privileged across Luke’s work, correlative to the indexing of human touch as both the figurative and literal embodiment of the creative act. He considers how this can be used alternately to create a sense of intimacy and estrangement; autonomy and contingency at the point of aesthetic reception.
Luke graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture in 2013. Recent exhibitions include An Uneventful Day, Carrol/Fletcher, London (2013); A Dense Glitter of Alternatives, Vitrine, London (2013), and Love/Architecture, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2013).

www.lukepburton.tumblr.com

Ruth Beale – FFWD The Revolution

Ruth Beale FFWD the Revolution

[toggle]FFWD The Revolution (Image credit Simon Beesley)[/toggle]

The focus of Ruth Beale’s work is often the relationship of culture to society, in particular the cultural representation and expression of political ideas. She is also interested in how the preservation and dissemination of ideas and objects impacts on what is valued and overlooked.Beale’s practice also includes drawing, video work and the collection and the re-presentation of archive material.

For her final project for Lewisham Arthouse Graduate award, she wrote and directed a performative tour of Lewisham Arthouse, with script read by current members of the cooperative. The lighting scheme (lamps, projectors, studio equipment) is desiged in collaboration with Brian Archer. The performers are Oliver Campbell, Amanda Francis, Alma Tischler Wood, Sara Willett and Eleanor Watson. The semi-fictional narrative charted the different users and groups that have occupied the building, including Deptford Library, a film set, free raves by anti-capitalist soundsystem Spiral Tribe, and the Lewisham Arthouse cooperative.

www.ruthbeale.net

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Nicky Teegan – Stargazing Lazer Cats

Nicky Teegan stargazing lazercats
[toggle]Stargazing Lazer Cats (image credit the artist)[/toggle]

Nicky Teegan’s work is deals with fetishism, collecting and fanaticism. It specifically focuses on the fetishisation of everyday objects, outmoded technologies and found oddities and their subversion into devotional objects. It examines the function of these devotional objects and rituals and their purpose.

Underlying this, Teegans’ work draws from dystopian science fiction and UFO cults, taking influence from texts by H.G Wells, J.G Ballard and William Gibson.
With this in mind objects, drawings, installations, videos and sound pieces are made and archived. The practice is a collection of handmade oddities and devotional objects, referencing films, books, music and everyday life.  The objects are built to serve a performative/ritualistic function, or as curiosities. Lo-fi and the handmade are essential elements of the work, understanding of material and format is imperative to the practice. Repetitive industrious methods such as weaving, repetitive drawing, sound looping, layering and photocopying are deployed. Audio pieces are developed through a laborious method of looping and layering, evoking elements of chanting and drone.

www.nickyteegan.com