Short Lived

CURATED BY GEORGIA STEPHENSON

PRIVATE VIEW Wednesday 19th July 6-9pm
Open 20th July – 16th August
Thursday – Sunday 12 – 6pm
50 Celebration Avenue, Stratford, London E20 1DB
Kindly supported by Get Living

“Short Lived”is a presentation of sculptural works by eight emerging artists/collectives, curated by independent curator Georgia Stephenson. This includes Charlotte Cullen (@_harlotte_ullen), F.A.F Collective (@f.a.f_collective_), Elliot Fox (@elliot_fox), Celeste McEvoy (@celeste__mcevoy), Sarah Roberts (@sarahrobertsfa), Yuli Serfaty (@yuliserfaty), Oona Wilkinson (@oonawilkinson) and Rosalind Wilson (@rosalindfreyaclaire).

Selected works explore how the conditions we find ourselves in force us to adapt. Be that as artists and the practice we develop, or as citizens and the relationships we build with spaces, objects, and each other. Exhibited sculptures will ask, how long can we stay, how much can we keep and who is it that ultimately decides?

The exhibition intends to instigate frank conversations about the sculptural production of emerging artists, as well as finding moments to deepen artist-led networks as a means of connection and stability — Artist-led group 3D women (@3Dwomenplatform) will host their third ‘support group’ alongside a curator’s tour, for anyone to attend.

Short Lived is sited in a former Sainsbury’s supermarket this exhibition is supported by HYPHA STUDIOS and made possible by Get Living. For further information please contact: Georgia Stephenson [email protected]

About the curator
Georgia Stephenson is an art director and independent curator, her work often supports sculptural practices and notable exhibitions include Baggage Claim at Staffordshire St (2023), Patio Project (2021) and The Potion Room at Subsidiary Projects (2020). She is also a writer and co-founder of Collective Ending HQ, her work has been featured in FRIEZE online, FAD, Assemblage Mag and Art Licks print edition.

Graphic design by @katie.our.son.

 

About the Artists

F.A.F Collective (@f.a.f_collective_)
Organically formed, F.A.F emerged out of a shared indifference to the financial and physical restraints placed on the creation of large scale sculptures in London. In a disused industrial site, which had been fly-tipped with construction debris, this shared sentiment first manifested itself with the creation of ‘Stephen Bhatti’s Diving Tower’. Using the physical limitations of sites, as well as the materials contained within, F.A.F creates temporary, fantastical structures. They introduce absurd fictional sub-plots into the periphery of the city. The works exist in the realm of myth due to the in-accessibility of these locations; sightings are fleeting with glimpses being caught from places like the top deck of a bus or through the fence of a station platform. Between 2019-21 F.A.F developed an alternative living situation, occupying a car park in London Bridge. This saw a transition for F.A.F with their construction style being applied to functional spaces. Both this and their earlier work focuses on the repurposing of redundant materials and space, reimagining the normality of the domestic within cities. Alongside their personal practices, F.A.F maintain a co-operative working method that weaves individual research interests with a shared trust and desire to realise ambitious sculptural installations.

Yuli Serfaty (@yuliserfaty)
Yuli Serfaty is a south-London based multimedia artist concerned with storytelling and worldbuilding. They work in textual, sonic, filmic and physical forms to convey geopolitical, critical narratives, and use a rhizome of field recordings, synthesised sounds, video, photography, writing, CGI, game engines and found objects. They are driven by the tension between masculinity, femininity, violence, fear, slow power, the erotic, sexual, mythological, subterranean, the rotten and the rotting, and inspired by the powers of the world to regenerate from dark, moist humus.
Serfaty’s works tell non-linear stories while decentering humanity; the landscape protagonists bear physical witness to the lives of animals, plants, water, people, and political systems alike. Field research, as well as academic writing and speculative fiction, inform the work; subjects of interest include the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the military-industrial complex, queer theory, sci-fi, ecology and postcolonial studies. Serfaty particularly looks at how military presence changes natural landscapes, and how governmental bodies weaponise natural elements to displace, annex, and control land.

Sarah Roberts (@sarahrobertsfa)
Sarah Roberts is a Welsh Artist living and working in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Roberts works with objects, media and images amassing them into complex curated installations and multimedia works. Her dynamic body of work spans sculpture, drawing, collage and installation. Roberts draws inspiration from everyday life, combining mundane materials like plaster, concrete and plastic with domestic detritus and industrial leftovers to create new regenerative environments on an architectural scale. Often incorporating seemingly bizarre blends of material like fans, gravel, glitter, vinyl and lace, the selections are in fact drawn from real spaces. Casinos, beaches, multicoloured terraces – all re- represented with their guts out and glad rags on, a combination of exposed wires and glittered plasters or pound shop purchases with careful ceramic counterparts. Roberts pays attention to generously balancing playful spaces with underpinning ecological concerns around sustainability.

Charlotte Cullen (@_harlotte_ullen)
Charlotte Cullen is an artist working in sculpture which is jagged and raw, scarred and bent. Cullen’s practice resonates around forms of care, healing and repair, engaging with disciplines that encompass a material practice informed by socially classed labour. An embodied material engagement has led to explorations in steel, and more recently glass, applying techniques including plasma cutting and weaving. Practicality leads form to support a drawn surface which seeks to hold narrative, history and mythology which sit within a lineage of descent, in an effort to recognise lived experiences for those whose lives exist outside of dominant documentation but refuse a co-option into the languages which have denied them. Angus Reid wrote in The Morning Star that “[Cullen] greets the needs of the present without sentimentality and with clear eyes”.

Rosalind Wilson (@rosalindfreyaclaire)
Rosalind Wilson is an artist-educator based in London, UK. She is co-founder and participant of the peer forum Crit Club and is one third of art collective Ebb. She teaches as an associate lecturer of illustration at Camberwell College of Art where she is part of the artist educator collective WAC. Notable projects of hers include Baggage Claim – Staffordshire St (2023), Jingle bells – Sanford Vitrine (2022), Emerging from the rubble – Staffordshire St (2022), SZN Summer (2022), Ashley’s fit up – The Horse Hospital (2022), Crit Club presents – Staffordshire St (2021), The Factory Project – Thorp Stavri (2021), Beyond Each Other – Florence Trust (2021), Chevron Fantasy – SET (2021) and On Wheels (2019-2021).

Oona Wilkinson (@oonawilkinson)
Oona Wilkinson is an artist concerned with the warped boundaries between psychological, and physical spaces of exchange. She is interested in the friction between private and public circulation often working with materials enmeshed with the regulation and discrepancy of excess and repetition. Through sculpture, photography and installation her work draws on the methodologies of industrial design and theories of artifice, hospitality and affect. Utilising different modes of knowledge production to examine the emotional detritus of the systems that underpin our interactions.
Oona Wilkinson lives and works in London. She has a BFA from The Glasgow School of Art (2017) and was a resident of Conditions Studio Programme (2022). Her work has been included in recent exhibitions at Recent Activity (Birmingham), Platform Southwark (London), O’Flaherty’s (New York), Cafe Otto (London) and Las Palmas (Lisbon).

Elliot Fox (@elliot_fox)
Elliot Fox is an artist and contributing member of Collective Ending HQ in Deptford, South East London, an artist-led, collectively-run studio and gallery complex. His practice has focused on his own relationship with Cornwall – where he grew up. Exploring how certain socio-economical, geological and cultural elements have made it the enigmatic place that it is today, as well as investigating the colloquial approach to archiving areas of Neolithic or post-industrial importance, the county’s unique geological makeup and its celtic counter cultures. His work attempts to present a science fictional depiction of the past, present and future. More recent works have centred around a self-styled fictional story concerning Cornwall’s unusually high levels of radon gas, and how this scientific anomaly acts as a catalyst for new and unusual behaviours. In Neolithic times this resulted in stone circles and the embryonic cultivation of rituals that have since developed into folklore, while in the Post-industrial era it led to the birth of surf culture, which can be seen as Cornish futurism in reality. Since graduating from Camberwell college of Arts in 2014, Elliot has presented solo exhibitions ‘Idol Hands’ (Platform Southwark, London) and ‘Psycho Geology’ (Anderson Contemporary, London) curated by Hector Campbell and Georgia Stephenson respectively. As well as selected group shows with Haze Projects (London), Coherent (Brussels) and Tick Tack (Antwerp).

Celeste McEvoy (@celeste__mcevoy)
Celeste McEvoy is a sculptor and co-director of platform ‘3D Women’. Often presenting roadside debris and found objects alongside her ceramics as means of ethnographic collection, her work investigates themes of aspiration, hierarchy and the need for cultural capital. McEvoy’s work often uses the road as its backdrop – having grown up next to a busy dual carriageway, the daughter of a van driver – this space is embedded in personal nostalgia. She reimagines this site and makes hand built vessels as tribute. Recent solo exhibitions include Forehead on the Glass (GLOAM Gallery, Sheffield) and (IF YOU DON’T PLAY), YOU CAN’T BE A WINNER (Kupfer Projects, London). McEvoy studied painting at Camberwell College of Arts.

contact information

Email: [email protected]
Websites: https://stephensongeorgia.com/
Socials: @georgialaurenstephenson Charlotte Cullen (@_harlotte_ullen), F.A.F Collective (@f.a.f_collective_), Elliot Fox (@elliot_fox), Celeste McEvoy (@celeste__mcevoy), Sarah Roberts (@sarahrobertsfa), Yuli Serfaty (@yuliserfaty), Oona Wilkinson (@oonawilkinson) and Rosalind Wilson (@rosalindfreyaclaire).

Featured Artworks

F.A.F Collective

As a Child with a Matchstick Castle (Section 1 – Three Sheets to the Wind)2023
Mosaic of parts
320x160cm
POA

F.A.F Collective

D) Mosaic tiles, undulating cast concrete. 45.5×65.5x12cm

Yuli Serfaty

MQ-9 Reaper / aimless horny & alone 2023
Scaffold, tarp, rope, CGI
344x120x60cm

Sarah Roberts

Baggage 2023
Mixed Sculptural Assemblage
3m²

F.A.F Collective

B) Mosaic tiles, undulating cast concrete, 13x27x12cm

F.A.F Collective

E) Mosaic tiles, porcelain tiles, undulating cast concrete, cast terrazzo – shells, ceramic pipes, aluminium strips, metal strips from filing cabinet files,120x90x12cm

Charlotte Cullen

Study for a Shield After Battle (After the Knight) 2023
Mild steel and aluminium
126 x 126 x 85cm

Rosalind Wilson

NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM 2023
Cardboard
2.5 x 4 x6 m

F.A.F Collective

C) Mosaic tiles, undulating cast concrete, 34×76.8x12cm

F.A.F Collective

F) Mosaic tiles, undulating cast concrete, cast terrazzo – shells, ceramic pipes, aluminium strips, metal strips from filing cabinet files. 99x59x12cm

Oona Wilkinson

Selsdon Wood Lovers 2022
MDF, photocopy, wallpaper
160 x 170 x 50cm

Elliot Fox

ANT TALKIN’ 2023
Aluminium, UV print, Polyurethane foam, Fibreglass resin, handmade stickers, PLA, Spray Paint, Lacquer, MDF
120 x 110 x 100 cm

F.A.F Collective

A) Mosaic tiles, undulating cast concrete, cast terrazzo – shells, ground mosaic tiles, ceramic pipes, aluminium strips, metal strips from filing cabinet files,162x136x12cm

F.A.F Collective

D) Mosaic tiles, undulating cast concrete. 45.5×65.5x12cm

Yuli Serfaty

Eyes Did See My Golem 2023
Stoneware ceramics, pine bark, AI, UV print on aluminIum, castor wheels
65x78x50cm
POA

Charlotte Cullen

Study for a Shield After Battle (The Knight Gives) 2022
Mild steel, aluminium, rivets
70 x 50 x 40cm

Rosalind Wilson

Meal Deal 2018
Video, Gifs
Variable dims

Celeste McEvoy

Makes no odds 2023
Cardboard, earthenware clay (green), found objects (various car emblems)
Variable dims