Exhibition Testimony #1: Slade Interim Degree Show 2024

12th December, 2024.

Without a wink of sleep and after a night of hedonism that’s too stupid to be mentioned in print, I stumbled blearily to the University College London. The Thursday morning sky was as dull and lifeless as my mind. Please go home and give me sleep! my brain pleaded… but I didn’t listen as I couldn’t waste my free ticket to the Slade School Interim degree show. Some say bailing last minute on a free ticket is fine. “You didn’t pay anything for it,” they’ll say matter-of-factly. But I’ve bailed on far too many free events that have turned out to be phenomenal experiences my friends refuse to shut up about. Also I told my friend Mengmeng I’d be there and because I’m a people-pleaser, I thought it'd be rude to cancel.

This three-day exhibition was led and organised by the MA and MFA students of the Slade School of Art. Taking place partway through their studies, this was a chance for them to road-test their artistic practice and determine how long they’ll be penniless for after graduation before their career takes off. Plus I’ve always loved artist-run exhibitions precisely for how unpolished and shabby-chic they are. It was also the final day of the exhibition, after which there won’t be any private views or other shows until the new year; a period of time during which I’d shrivel up into a malnourished husk of myself without any art happenings to write about. So there really was no turning back.

The UCL building loomed grand and imposing over me, its boisterous neo-classical pillars dwarfing me with their size and age. Though sturdy and timeless on the outside, inside the scars of time inflicted upon it are still raw. The musty smell of warm wood and concrete, fermented over a century, spiced the air. So loud is the creaking that you can hear a door swing open on the floor above you. And the pipes overhead groaned as spasms of heat fought through the unforgiving winter frost. Only a building buckling under its own weight makes this much noise… But because buildings experience time very differently to humans, this place wasn’t succumbing to entropy anytime soon.

Mengmeng found me loitering in the entrance hallway as I was staring all around me with the cluelessness of someone who’d easily get lost in this warren of featureless corridors. Like the Virgil to my Dante, she’d be my guide through this dusty labyrinth. I crossed paths with and befriended Mengmeng Zhang while writing about the Hari Art Prize. An MFA Painting student, she had two pieces in this exhibition.

“We were told only to include one piece per artist,” she said in her soft and cautious voice, then took a sip from what I can only assume was an iced latte. “But most people submitted more and got away with it.”

Once we arrived at the exhibition space, she had to run off and show her face around; leaving me unsupervised. The residual effects of last night’s sesh still caressed my synapses, making the white walls of the gallery space glow oppressively. Thankfully, the artworks provided my eyes with islands of reprieve amidst this blazing white ocean. Regrettably, space and time constraints stop me from detailing every single island I took refuge on. Otherwise, this thing will spiral out of control and no one will want to read it, more than they already don’t. So here are the artworks that stood out to me most.

It was clear that some artists, discontent with simply putting an artwork in the exhibition space, fused their art into the bones of the gallery. In doing so, they turned the gallery itself into a medium for their art.

Painted straight onto the wall was Teodora Nitsolova’s It felt like the air turned into water, a fresco in honour of the changing states of water. A shimmering palette of blues and greys wash and glide over each other, the impression of a face emerging out of the ambivalence. What’s most striking about this piece are the black steel rods piercing through the painting like a harness or a ribcage, as if trying to arrest this transformation.

My initial impression of a gravitation anomaly pulling random detritus into the corner of the gallery was wrong. It was, in fact, Zijing Ye’s contribution to the show. As this was formerly studio space for the students, the faculty had instructed them to vacate their things to make room for the exhibition. “This abrupt decision from the school left us feeling disrespected. We’d just settled into our workspace!” Zijing tells me. Instead, she simply refused to leave and called it Holdout. In the white vastness of the gallery, Zijing’s workspace is rooted in all its claustrophobic glory. Shelving units are stacked precariously with the usual artistic meteorites: books, art supplies, materials, an electric heater, a Britta jug, plastic and cardboard boxes full of random crap… All this, around a paint-splattered plastic desk and a chair over which was draped Zijing’s German visa printed on a towel. Referring to the heavy overtones of migration and forced removal, Zijing says, “The term "钉子户" in China refers to residents who refuse to vacate their homes to make way for property development. Ironically, while I protested by refusing to vacate the studio during the exhibition, I still had to move out afterwards. It highlighted just how difficult it is to challenge authority.”

Right at the end of the gallery was a radiator, out of which sprouted a thicket of foliage. Autumnal leaves writhed out of the gaps in this hot exoskeleton. Someflower’s Utopia, Weicheng Tang’s piece in the show, more than co-opted the gallery as a medium in his work: it signals Nature’s great reclamation of an abandoned world. Soon after humanity relinquishes control over this planet, Nature will be left to thrive untamed, overgrowing through the cracks and swallowing every trace of our existence. This artwork feels like the beginning of that process. Stuck to the walls were bigger leaves perforated with smaller leaf-shaped holes. It becomes clear upon a proper glance that the greenery growing out of the radiator was punched out of these leaves. A homage to how Nature perpetuates itself.

Across the room, Anna Candlin presents an alternative to how Nature might wrest back ownership of this world. Semiotics c.AC 000170 predicts Nature binding with the technology we’ve left behind as it spreads its tendrils across the planet. Up the walls and across the floor, a network of twigs proliferate out of e-waste such as motherboards and the innards of speakers. This circuitry of twigs becomes dense, where they converge and connect at limbs that look like toadstool heads. Except, engraved all over these strange appendages are these inscrutable markings and diagrams of a technological sort. They feel vaguely familiar and totally alien at the same time, as if I’ve stumbled across the remains of some extinct techno-futurist civilisation.

Anna’s piece seems to exhibit a life of its own. This rapacious growth is reaching for a light on the wall, like it wants to consume and assimilate its design to replicate itself. I’m afraid that if I looked away and back again, it would’ve spread further across the gallery…

Complex mechanisms – whether organic or artificial – having their own will appeared to be a recurring theme in other sculptural works around this show.

Simply listing the various and unrelated items that make up Shiying Song’s Echoes of the Maker would produce a sentence so garbled that it’d read as incomprehensibly as this sculpture looks. But I guess that’s the point. Strange ornamental objects have been fashioned out of sand, which obeys the hand of its sculptor by refusing to dematerialise into a dusty pile on the floor. What look like gelatinous fingers stick out here and there. A badminton shuttle sits atop a tube in an egg cup. A snake made out of blue ballpoint pens slithers across the floor and defies gravity by standing upright without collapsing. A sheet of elegantly embroidered lace hangs limply off a rail. And the rolls of graph paper cascading down the wall and under the sculpture give me the impression this is some kind of recording device. What it’s recording and for what purpose, I haven’t the faintest idea. But I can feel its dispassionate gaze upon me, folding the arrangement of my atoms into its boundless database of (un)natural variables.

In the second room was Jess Heritage’s sentient automaton called Gloss. On a wooden wall was attached a small CRT monitor, an item that seems to be all the rage in student shows these days. Draped over this wall was a roll of paper. Across the wooden wall and the papery sheet was the shape of a person falling back-first, thrown from a great height. At first, I thought this image was painted on the surface, but a closer inspection pleased me greatly when I saw that it was bits of blue tack instead. Apparently there was a performance involved, which I totally missed, however, on my way out of the gallery later, I noticed that the paper had unrolled some more, misaligning the shape of the falling person. Much like how a CRT creates an image one line at a time. How? Why? I didn’t see any motor or mechanism attached to the roll, so it must’ve been pulled by hand. But I was so prepared to accept that it had happened all on its own, that some considered automation had made it happen. This sculpture gives the impression of life in the absence of any, telling of the fact that mere sprinklings of autonomy are enough to imbue a wooden board, a CRT monitor, and a roll of paper with life.

Scattered all around Jess’ piece were colourful paper airplanes, soaring through great heights at my feet. Which one of these airplanes was the person whose silhouette outlines the front of the sculpture thrown out of? More importantly, these airplanes represent to me how this artwork spills out from itself. As if its escaping its own medium. Invisibly thin contextual threads tie these items to the main body of work. The logical leap from an airplane to a person falling is like hopscotch. Unable to be contained by its medium, the excess fragments of the artwork flutter out cartoonishly. This was another aspect that recurred throughout the show

Sophie Smorczewski being another example of this. Her work, The garden, although small in size, is mighty and clear in its effect. A topless androgynous figure lies bathing in golden sunlight amidst some flowers. Sophie’s soft and flowy brushwork blurs the boundaries between the figure and the grass, as if one is absorbing the other. It’s a peaceful and dreamlike image. Meanwhile, the dried allium flowers that lay beside the canvas are like details that follow you out of your dream and into the waking world. I want to feel that fresh breeze that blew those flowers out of the painting and into this gallery.

Dotted around the place, on the walls and hanging from the ceiling, were these playfully bizarre prints by Iris Su, also known as jiayi. Part of the artwork entitled Landfill #1,  these prints depict an undisciplined hive of colourful squiggly lines, as if someone told a maniac with a set of crayons to “go at it”. The geometric bonds holding shape and form together have broken down into a plasma of frenetic lines and colour. Right next to the artwork was a glass door that looked out into the dilapidated back of the building. Upon its glassy surface, I found the same colourful disarray of squiggles as on Iris’ prints. Whether these had anything to do with the artwork or not, it serves as a serendipitous spilling of her style out of her work.

Similarly, I came across random objects in different parts of the gallery; an unplugged stage lamp, a plug socket that had been painted over, a water bottle, a tiny blank canvas stuck to the wall… These seem like items accidentally left behind, yet they blended in perfectly with their surroundings. I saw people watching their step around them the same way they did around the art. Suddenly these objects had artistic camouflage. The art legitimised the space, and the space, in turn, legitimised all other objects within it. These could also be interpreted as Zijing’s protest piece pouring out of its medium.

In the second room, through its own sheer grotesqueness, Ben Qi’s vicious sculpture overflows out of itself and disturbs the senses. Repetition of the bodies II shot out of the middle of the room as this towering black latex monolith with hands growing and reaching out of it. Like some malignant and cancerous mass, it spreads in all directions to choke and smother everything organic. So high did this lumbering growth reach that I was afraid it’d come timbering down on me. The fact that it didn’t is a testament to Ben’s sculpting; to make something stable look otherwise requires great skill. More hands lay dead on the floor with their fingers snapped off, however, I don’t trust them not to attack me. Just a few paces off from this monstrosity was a pair of non-descript black shoes. The most vanilla office shoes you’ve ever seen. Sinisterly plain. I believe whoever was wearing them spontaneously combusted, leaving behind nothing but a pair of smoking black shoes. Or perhaps they were consumed by the unwholesome and ravenous black mass in the middle of the gallery. Maybe I should swiftly move on!

In the manner that Ben’s work exudes this animalistic quality, other pieces around the gallery tap into that energy, making me feel like I’ve chanced across an unclassified creature in the wild.

Tobias Gumbrill’s aptly titled Critters is the first thing I encountered upon walking into the gallery’s third room. Legs, no matter where they come from and to what they’re attached to, are one of those objects that have certain semiotic qualities hardwired into their DNA. Swap the legs between a chair and a human and it’ll still somehow work – regardless of the messed-up image. Taking advantage of the Leg’s ontological ambiguity, Tobias creates these simple creatures that look like they’ve crawled out of a landfill after gaining sentience. There was a bike seat with legs made out of bike stands. Its companion was a coffee table with a bike stand for its back legs, and the legs from presumably the same coffee table as its front. These are the wet dreams of many Londoners: cycling and antique furniture. Freaky as these objects are, they retain the bare minimum of anatomical familiarity for us to accept them as reasonable.

Same applies to Gwenllian Davenport’s Rhythm. Sheets of steel are smoothly curved and shaped in such a way that defies the rigidity of the material. They flow as smoothly as waves drawn out of pencil. And they look like a pack of slithering snakes. Apart from being long and curvy, there’s nothing snake-like about them. But those qualities are pronounced enough to convince me these are snakes. Those cork tiles they’re slithering over only goes to consolidate the image of snakes moving through an arid, desert landscape.

I finally came across my friend Mengmeng Zhang’s work. The first one of two was a canvas displayed proud and large on a wall. Out of a fiery pit of pink emerges a human figure, fighting to break free while also reaching out for something. On the brink is a beautiful and haunting depiction of a soul’s struggle to escape. This is precisely the kind of figure I envisaged while reading about the damned denizens in Inferno. Melancholy blues and greens flash through the composition which our figure is desperately trying to remove themselves from. This resistance against hellish obscurity is expertly represented in the anatomy of the figure, surgically accurate in places while amorphous and vague in others.

The same reverence for the body can be seen in Gaia Hills’ hypnotic Snowbathing. A naked female figure lays pleasurably upon the snow with a white fur coat as a sheet. She is framed by the roots of great trees sticking out of the snowy ground. Her outline – giving her solidity in places while making her transparent elsewhere – is the only thing stopping her from completely fading into the snow’s embrace. Capturing the monotonous texture of snow is no easy feat; Gaia accomplishes this delicately with the blending of her colours. Long and winding brushstrokes render the figure’s graceful hair, while short and snappy strokes deliver the soft feel of the fur coat she lays upon. Beside the painting was a zine hanging from the wall, which I completely forgot to read. Sorry.

Tom Hallimond’s take on the body is more tongue-in-cheek. Throwing your toys out the pram looks like something out of a child’s nightmare: innocent and freaky at the same time. Apart from the frame of the pram, everything in this piece has been pierced by Tom’s needle and stitched together into this playfully bizarre scene. Even the pram’s cover and seat have felt Tom’s hand. Some granny’s cupboard was raided for textiles and buttons to create this. A heavily Coraline-coded child sits in the pram with a colouring book and a plushy furry-black-fuzzball. The rest of her toys lay scattered around the pram in the aftermath of some prodigious tantrum. The toys radiate personalities worthy of a CBeebies pre-bedtime children’s show. Why does that hairy black thing look like it’s up to no good while that fluffy brown one looks like is about to crack some dumb joke no one will laugh at?

With what little cognitive function I had brought to this exhibition, I was conscious of the fact that I’d remember very little of what I’d seen here today. So I had to resort to the obnoxious behaviour of taking pictures of EVERYTHING. Each artwork, every little architectural detail, all the maps and contextual information, I dedicated it to my phone’s camera roll. As I was shuffling around the gallery with my camera aimed forward, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a certain charcoal and distemper work. A diptych across two calico stretchers, Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King depicted this monumentally sombre scene that brought me to the verge of tears. The details in Mid or Post movement didn’t jump right out at me, but I saw a crouched figure looking down a lane that was swallowed up by an ominous and smoggy horizon. Other figures can be seen down the lane. There was something about this piece; the manic marks of sorrow, the pigment bleeding in certain places, the cold and unforgiving landscape, the shapeless figures, all of these mirrored the doomstruck state my comedown had engendered in me. It was dreadfully beautiful.

So I quickly took a picture while no one was looking and moved on to the next piece….

Wandering through this exhibition, looking without seeing, there were times when I felt watched. When my spine tingled with the sensation of someone’s vision digging into me. Even when the gallery was empty, the feeling persisted. Eyes were a theme that I noticed plenty across many different works in this show.

In homage to the infinite trauma of the camera, Julia-Anna Simonchuk’s short film Testimony of Chaika gave voice to an old Chaika II camera as it recounts everything it’s seen but hasn’t documented. Lens caps aside (which doesn’t apply here), a camera’s eyes never cease seeing. Light is always pouring through the lens, mediated through the viewfinder. Julia’s monochrome narration and the creeping zoom into the camera’s lens pulled me deep into its flickering and fragmented soul. Given the camera’s neutrality, it’s easy for us to convince ourselves that it sees only what we bid it to. But even the things we force it to witness and bear testimony of are often too grotesque and twisted to imagine. The camera embalms history and preserves it for posterity, but what are the implications of the history we tell when images can be so easily doctored? Heading into the realm of science fiction here, when we reach a point where sentience becomes a part of technology, will it be ethical to make the camera witness the many horrors we as a species unleash on a daily basis?

A striking display of surveillance came from Jacob Freeman’s oil painting, Grey County, Ontario. The pair of eyes framed abruptly by a rectangle over a messy tangle of neurons? vines? roots? branches? whatever they may be, instilled a sense of caution in me. The pale tone of the watcher’s skin is juxtaposed marvellously over the midnight blue and pale green that blankets the dense background.

A similar framing of eyes looks back at you from one of Harry Whitelock’s pieces in the show. A pair of hollow eyes look down – or is it up? – at you from the only gap in the artwork. The rest is smothered under layers of clingfilm, with each layer marked with random strokes of paint. This palimpsestical build-up of plastic and paint totally obscures everything underneath. Until a hand reaches up from this grave and rips out a hole to see what’s above. This artwork is suitably titled Resting Places.

Moving along to Katja Farin’s collection of paintings, titled The looks, I encountered depressing eyes staring blankly out of morose faces. Painted with oil on linen, all their figures have expressions that go from numbly neutral to abject fear. Whether it’s close-ups of these dejected faces, an elderly woman in mourning with dying flowers, or a man creeping through a fence, the colour palate is muted and strange. It gives me the air of someone turning blue in the face from suffocation. Though their faces are inscrutable, their eyes explode with unendurable emotion. These are the looks of people cursed with consciousness.

Turning down the volume of existential dread is Mengmeng’s second piece which is just across the room from her first one. A fool, very different from On the brink but more in line with her previous work, is this dirty, coffee-stained composition of a faded man lost in melancholic thought. Neither in the back or foreground, the face emerges timorously from what looks like a checkerboard tablecloth that hasn’t been washed in god knows how long. The figure averts his eyes, unwilling to project onto us whatever film is running through his head.

Handing the gaze back to us, Hannah Naify simulates something towards which our eyes are often drawn: windows, specifically looking in. Sometimes we can’t help but look through someone’s windows, whether it’s something beautiful or bizarre that beckons our eyes. Invasive as it is, our inherent curiosity tempts us to briefly relish in whatever story that’s taking place through the glass. Thus, with Ex-votos da Piranha, Hannah creates an acceptable situation for us to stare through someone’s windows. One of those stiff and crappy windows that always get stuck is fixed to a wall. On the other side, something of a story is told through personal images and cuttings glued to the glass. Mementos to no one’s life. They’re about as linear and cohesive as the random scenes one catches through someone’s windows, for only a creep sticks around to watch the whole thing through strange windows.

Looking at Hannah’s window-work, what’s become clear to me is that - among this cohort of art students, at least - there’s a strong drive towards building art around found objects and random trinkets. That’s just as well, because life is art and art is made in response to life.

Also a part of Iris Su’s Landfill #1 is a freestanding metal and glass pilar, the kind you can find in the stairwell of a council estate. In keeping with the vibe, it’s covered profusely with all manner of colourful oil pastel marks, as if graffiti tagged. Just like every mark and tag left upon a council estate by its residents testifies to their existence, lacing the place with the personality of its inhabitants, Iris’ pillar tells a similar story through the same vernacular.

The simplest and most effective way of using a found object is to refashion it without hiding its true identity. Which is exactly what Varvara Uhlik does with Swan. It’s simply two car tyres cut up and positioned to resemble a black swan, complete with the tip of its head spray-painted red. The effect hits instantly like a shot of espresso.

Although not exactly found off the streets, Seon Hee Jung’s Lost&Found embodies the concepts of found objects. Their series is made up of tiny, easily comprehensible pieces that go down like a glass of water. The canvases are no bigger than a closed fist, of which there are three, depicting different ambiguous landscapes in soft hues. There’s a small wooden antique fixed to the wall, as well as a hand-shaped bit of linen hanging off two threads. There seems to be very little relation or connection between these objects, precisely mirroring the nature of things lost and found. Seon Hee tells me, “Recently, I developed an interest in antique shopping on eBay, and I included in my work some items I bought. These antiques play a role in symbolising the 'found' aspect of the series. They represent things that are 'found' on the surface. But they also have deeper meaning because they connect to my story by including objects that others have used and lost in the past.”

Important to keep in mind here is that as students, their practice is still in the making. In between styles and concepts, they’re trying to find their footing and artistic voice. Which is why I’ve always enjoyed turning up at exhibitions featuring young and emerging artists, to see how their practice evolves later down the line. Like being a long-time listener of a band and witnessing the evolution of their sound.

An integral step in trying to build something or figure out how to build it is to tear it down first. Take the wreckage and turn it into something new. Many of the artists in the show took their practice and dissected it, like a frog in biology class, to lay bare the connections between its vital organs. What I mean by this gratuitously gory metaphor is that the seemingly irrelevant minutiae of the artistic process become part of the work itself. Usually, the decisions that go into making an artwork are paled by the brilliance (or crappiness) of the work. Here, the artists plot the topography of their practice by making those decisions somehow apparent.

Zijing’s work is a shining example of this as she’s simply left her workspace in the gallery. Her creative aura vibrates off all the art supplies and random materials that litter her piece. Even though there explicitly isn’t an artwork on display here, the anamnesis of past and future artworks reverberates off her tools, turning them into pseudo-sacred objects.

Another piece that’s a part of Harry Whitelock’s contribution to this show is a box full of random crap balanced atop a stack of books. Inside this rusted metal box are a bunch of miscellaneous items like some tape, a mushroom, and bits of fabric - like an occultist first aid kit. The books on which the box sits are an eclectic collection of Christian self-help volumes. Whether this reading list influenced this work or not, I interpret the pillar of books as the preliminary reading that goes into solidifying an artwork’s idea. It serves as the foundation upon which the work is built. Furthermore, if these books played a part in the ideation of this specific work or not, simply leaving a precarious stack of books puts the audience onto the scent of what might have gone into the work. Whether true or false, this gets the audience thinking on a deeper level about the steps the artist and the work went through.

I was particularly taken by Lucy XC Liu’s way of deconstructing her practice. Veilings confronted me with two pieces. One was a rectangular piece of silk with the faintest impression of a face staring out from a dirty mist. It was the colour of a cup of water used to clean paintbrushes after a long painting session. The second was a long piece of silk draped over some steel wires to look like a scarf blown away by the wind. Most peculiarly, however, this flowing piece of fabric has every shade of colour used in the painting next to it. A reversal of time and action by separating all the colours from this murky melange and arranging them one after another on silk. This, to me, is a documentation of Lucy’s palette that mixed all these colours together.

No attempt was made in Gloss, Jess Heritage’s wooden wall sculpture, to hide the artifice and process of the work. The internal mechanisms of the piece are left plainly for us to see. Like the thin façade of a stage prop, a single peak behind it reveals all the mess she didn’t bother hiding. The mess I’m glad she didn’t hide. The CRT monitor is simply propped up by a box, a book, and two slabs of wood. Bits of paper are wedged between the monitor and the hole that faces out to the other side. To ensure the device is held securely. And all the cables loosely hang off the back, entangled in each other; my perfect nightmare. Some of the cables aren’t even plugged in, for Christ’s sake. I can just about feel the franticness in which this sculpture was installed, and if indeed it wasn’t franticly installed, then the effect is doubly impressive. The process of installation has become an apparent part of the final work.

This introspective deconstruction of their art practice is fitting for a bunch of students who, with a watchmaker’s delight, are disassembling their work and ideas to see what makes them tick. And then they put it back together in all manner of bizarre and wonderful arrangements. I look forward to seeing more of their work in the future and bumping into them so I can coax them into rambling at me about their work.

But now is not the time for that. I must flee. I’m on the brink of imminent physical collapse. If I don’t leave now, I’ll fall asleep on the spot and will be dead to the world for the next 46 hours. Mengmeng has already noticed how shattered I look. It’s time to exit stage right, through the non-existent gift shop, before this building changes its mind about standing.