To The Studio

• 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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• 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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• Jennifer Caroline Campbell

  Whenever possible Jennifer Caroline Campbell obsessively cultivates a shifting bag of mixed fragments, recombining, contaminating and navigating without a map. Textures and stories build up like minerals. The crystal bundles snowball and scatter into multicoloured slices, oscillating shiftily between slathered picture and lumpy thing. Through reckless and rhythmic process new thoughts are shaped and multiple characters are inhabited. They exchange gossip stumblingly while glancing and clutching at the surrounding terrain. This process is both childish play and serious questioning. It is honed in order to expose unseen power cloggings, weave silken nets, nourish unsolved shadows and side-step claustrophobic categorisations.

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• Ross Taylor & Luke Burton

  Ross Taylor was born in 1982 in Harrow, London, where he continues to live and work. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Painting, he was awarded the Abbey Scholarship at the British School at Rome and was artist in residence at the Edward James Foundation. Taylor’s work is concerned with an emergent space; a swilling and churning dual sphere of production and consumption where all that enters is incessantly gnawed, singed and regurgitated. He sees the studio as a restless stomach-cave which rages, and correspondingly pacifies. A place wherein each stain, drip, blob, and smear, can appear to congeal, much like grammar. And, through the contemplation of this surface, each idea, word or moment running through his head has space to intensify, making it conceivable to take control of chaotic ideas, order the subconscious and attempt to model thoughts that are somewhat impossible. Luke Burton (b.1983, London) lives and works in London. He studied at Chelsea College of Art for a BA in Painting and the Royal College of Art for an MA in Sculpture. He works across media including painting, vitreous enamel, collage and installation. He has an ongoing interest in the relation of ambivalence to aesthetics and politics, especially as to how it may pertain to the decorative. He is also interested in the sticky concept of style and its relationship to ideas around language in painting.You can get in touch with us with opinions and suggestions at:Email - [email protected] - instagram.com/tothestudioThis podcast features an edited version of the song "RSPN" by Blank & Kytt, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blank__Kytt/Heavy_Crazy_Serious/Blank__Kytt_-_Heavy_Crazy_Serious_-_08_RSPN

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