Stanley Picker Gallery

Nutrients are not neutral. Continuing their enquiry into critical minerals, FRAUD will examine the finantialisation of waste and nutrient upcycling through the material investigation of phosphate. Phosphate rock is a finite non-manufacturable resource central to the production of industrial fertiliser, and therefore critical to food security, which is necessarily tightly embroiled with conditions of extraction.   

As fertiliser increasingly eutrophicates English rivers with the accumulation of agricultural run-off, FRAUD will tend to wastewater as well as the “historiographical invisibility” of extractive practices central to the production of industrial fertiliser and its finantialisation through phosphate credits within the nutrient mitigation scheme. With Beckton Sewage Treatment Works (operated by Thames Water) being the largest tributary of the Thames, the river itself falls under the definition of wastewater. FRAUD’s aim is to base its experiments in how this refuse is being recycled as fertiliser to create possibilities of engagement with our inseparability to this material’s commodification and its toxic effects. 

This practice inscribes itself within a desire to be attentive to re-circularity and decomposition, or to quote Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “the breakdown and circulation of matter that rebalances generation, productivity, and excess in a finite Earth”. At the core of their  enquiry is to think materially about the ecoloninsation of phosphate upcycling, the finantialisation of its re-circulation, as well as its place in non-modern belief systems. In short, the fellowship will be devoted to phosphate’s capacity to bridge toxicity, othering and health. 

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FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) is a duo which develop modes of art-led enquiry that examine the extractive gaze of the management of raw materials. Through their practice, FRAUD cultivate critical spatial literacy and cosmology building. Somerset House Studios alumni, the duo, currently selected artists for Artangel’s Making Time, has also been awarded the State of Lower Saxony – HBK Braunschweig Fellowship (2020), the King’s College Cultural Institute Grant (2018), and has been commissioned by Contemporary Art Archipelago (2022), the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020), RADAR Loughborough (2020), and the Cockayne Foundation (2018). Audrey is a Senior Lecturer in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Francisco is an architect who was awarded the Wellcome Trust People Awards (2016) and authored ‘Talking Dirty’ published by Arts Catalyst (2016). They are Lecturer in Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins. The duo’s work is part of the permanent collections of the European Investment Bank Institute (LU) and the Art and Nature Center – Beulas Foundation (SP). FRAUD’s current investigations can be explored through the EURO⁠—VISION platform. 

Davinia-Ann Robinson’s new body of work draws on embodied knowledge cultivated within Black and Brown bodies, encountered through practices of stillness – exploring how these encounters might become radical acts of claiming oneself and transforming racial trauma. The research will examine Black feminist theories – presencing and fugitivity practised within individual and collective practices of stillness and relationships to land. 

Through creating sculptures, soundworks and performances, the project explores embodied self-care and liberation, incorporating somatic breath and movement practices, and new engagements with clay – a material used within Robinson’s art practice as a methodology and symbol of ancestral and land displacement, and engagements of grounding. This work is framed by Black Feminist thinking that considers ways of creating embodied understanding – sitting with remembrance, being with grief and being held by the earth. 

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Davinia-Ann Robinson (b. Wolverhampton, lives and works in London) is an artist of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean descent. Her art practice and research are explored through sculpture, sound, writing and performance. She examines how tactility, presencing and fugitivity work to form an undoing of colonial and imperial frameworks of extractions through which nature and the bodies of black, brown, and indigenous people are articulated within colonialism. 

Davinia holds a BA at Goldsmiths College, London (2010); and an MFA at The Slade School of Art, London (2021). Recent exhibitions include Fugitive Seeds, CCA Derry Londonderry, Northern Ireland (2022); Raw Nerves, Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2022); Residency 11:11 – Gathering, London (2022); distinction between felt flesh – San Mei Gallery, London (2022); some intimacy, (a mediation), Rotten TV, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2022); Radical Landscapes, Tate Liverpool (2022); Metabolic time / Am meitibileach, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2022); connections unplugged, bodies rewired – das weisse haus, Vienna (2021); Our Other Us, Art Encounters Biennial, Romania (2021); New Contemporaries, Firstsite, Colchester and South London Gallery, London (2021); Being Here, Kupfer, London (2021); I Am Unsure As To If It Is Still Alive, Quench, Margate (2021); Tactile Belonging, Mimosa House, London (2021); Bold Tendencies, London (2020); Freedom Is Outside the Skin, Kunsthal 44Møen, Denmark (2020). Recent residencies include Artist in Residence, Schools Programme, Tate Modern & Tate Britain (2022-23); Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania (2022); and Artist Educator, Supersmashers, South London Gallery, London (2019–20). 

Débora Delmar will develop a new body of work Terms and Conditions investigating money’s relationship to value, objects and time in the context of the current financial crisis. Supported by the research community at Kingston University, Delmar will examine the political and economical factors that determine inflation, its effects in society and relation to materiality.

Delmar will also herby explore further strategies of her working within systems, contracts, relationships and institutions. By incorporating the contractual structure of the Stanley Picker Fellowship, Delmar aims to explore artistic labour as a form of currency, hence questioning the power relations established between artists and institutions. Additionally, Delmar seeks to scrutinise our personal relationship with money and its influence within wider society; through conversations with staff, students and members of the public at Kingston University. Her fellowship project will culminate with an installation and architectural intervention at the Stanley Picker Gallery followed by public events and presentations.

Débora Delmar’s work investigates the effects of globalisation on everyday life focusing on issues of class, gender, cultural hegemony and gentrification. This is borne from the omnipresent influence of the United States in Mexico (Delmar’s place of birth), and in the wider world. Within her practice she examines the contextual value of goods, analysing their systems of production, distribution and consumption. In her installations Delmar frequently references the sanitised aesthetic utilised in non-spaces, a neologism coined by sociologist Marc Augé to describe places such as banks, airports as well as corporate and government buildings, which are commonly under surveillance. She’s particularly interested in the psychological and behavioural influence of this kind of architecture. Physical barriers working as metaphors for political and societal restrictions have been a recurrent subject matter in recent projects. Delmar often works appropriated images and objects, as well as with local production processes and direct architectural interventions. She frequently incorporates immaterial components within her exhibitions such as video, text, sound, scent, and situations.

Selected exhibitions include Body Blend Trade Culture, Museo Universitario del Chopo, MX, 2014, Upward Mobility, Modern Art Oxford, UK, 2015; 9th Berlin Biennial, DE, 2016; Biennial of the Americas, US, 2016; and more recently Femsa Biennial, Michoacán, MX, 2020-2021. She has received numerous grants such as the Jumex Museum Scholarship, MX, 2016-2018; Red Mansion Art Prize, UK/CN ,2018; and the Wolfson College Cambridge RA Graduate Prize, UK, 2019. Upcoming solo exhibitions include LIBERTY., Gallleria Pìu, Bologna, IT, 2022 and TBC, Llano, Mexico City, MX, 2023.

Thomas Pausz’ project Haunted Ecologies will intersect the research fields of media, ecology, and ‘hauntology’ – the understanding that our perception of contemporary environment and culture is always haunted by spectres of the past, and by hopes and visions of the future – to propose immersive installations echoing the transformations of local ecosystems in the vicinity of the Stanley Picker Gallery.

From early wildlife photography to digital sensors signalling the pulse of climate in real-time, the media constellations we design evolve with and change our perception of ecosystems. However, in times of loss of biodiversity and climate change, our relationships with the environment are becoming so ambiguous that they seem to escape our means of representation and experience. Relational modes of presence and cohabitation are crossfading with affects of longing, absence, and loss. The scale and temporality of environmental objects are equally changing, from the human-centered perspective and scale of modernism to microscopic events, fine particles and geological time. We are all like Alice, wondering if she needs to shrink or expand, or both at the same time.

Thomas Pausz is an artist and researcher born in Paris and based in Reykjavik. He graduated from the Royal College of Arts in 2009 after studying philosophy and epistemology of sciences in Paris. Pausz´s fictional ecosystems take various forms to explore unforeseen interactions between humans, non-human life forms, and media. His worldbuilding projects are informed by field research in specific environments, and critical dialogues with researchers in the fields of biology, climate science, and bioethics. Pausz puts a particular emphasis on the design of exotic technologies as a medium to redefine interspecies relations. Can VR for pollinators, software to read sea shells, or ´spectral´ wildlife photography refocus the human gaze and offer poetic spaces, where biological and technological are renegotiated? Recent projects include Making New Land, An Intertidal Aesthetics, an essay in speculative biology published by the Performance Philosophy Journal; Species Without Spaces, a series of documented expeditions reflecting on media representation of endangered ecosystems for the Laboratoire Modulaire (FR), where Pausz is a guest artist in 2022. Previously he was a fellow of the Academy Schloss Solitude (DE), artist in residence at the Politics of Food program at the Delfina Foundation (UK), and member of the interdisciplinary Swamp School (LT).

Recent exhibitions include Interspecies Futures (IF) at Centre for Book Arts, New York; Nature in Transition, Shifting Identities at The Nordic House, Iceland; The Wildflower at Hafnarborg Museum, Iceland; The Swamp Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale; Species Without Spaces at Istanbul Design Biennale 2018; Food: Bigger than the Plate at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London UK and Out of the Sea at Passerelle Contemporary Art Centre Brest, France.

Ilona Sagar works with a diverse range of media spanning moving-image, text, performance and assemblage, forming research-led works that resonate with the politically charged social and historic infrastructures found in the public and private spaces we inhabit. By instrumentalising historical archives and their institutions, not as an encounter with a safely sealed past, but as something current and unstable that speaks urgently to our present condition, she explores the links between language, surface, technologies and the body through our increasingly mediated encounters in social, political and experiential space. A significant aspect of her practice is the broad cross-disciplinary dialogue generated through collaboration with a range of art and scientific disciplines; including dance, architecture and neurology. Illusion and material [dis]honesty set the stage for works which seek to seduce, alluding to something familiar yet other. In 2018 she won the Research in Film Award at BAFTA HQ and is the Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki, artist for 2021. Forthcoming commissions include ‘The Radio Ballads’ Serpentine Gallery, where she is one of four new commissions with Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock and Rory Pilgrim (2022), and is embarking on a new solo commission with Firstsite Gallery, Colchester. 

Recent projects include: ‘Deep Structure’(2019) S1 ArtSpace, Sheffield, ‘Living with Buildings’, Wellcome Collection, London (2018/2019); ‘Self Service’ publication and event series, CCA and GOMA, Glasgow as part of Glasgow International (2018); ‘Correspondence O’, solo exhibition at South London Gallery, London (2017/2018); ‘GLORIA’, Yinka Shonibare Guest Projects 10 year anniversary, London (2018); HereAfter group show as part of the SPACE HereAfter residency, The White Building, London (2017); solo project at Pump House Gallery, London as part of ‘The Ground We Tread’ (2016).

Ligaya Salazar’s project A World of Islands – On Palms, Storms and Pineapples considers the juxtaposition between contemporary interests of the Global North in indigenous practices and materials, and historical fabrications of tropical utopia and dystopia. Positing the ‘tropics’ as both a mythological and real place with shared colonial trauma but wildly divergent histories and cultures, the project will unpick some of the tropes of tropicality and relocate agency in the ‘tropical’ narrative.

Using the relationship between the Philippines and Mexico in the period of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon trade (1565 – 1815) as a starting point, in particular the exchange of plants and the craft, building, food and medicinal knowledge associated with them, the project focusses on the continued omission of the individuals that held and continue to pass on knowledge about these practices. The coconut palm, banana tree and pineapple plant act as lenses into the subject.

A World of Islands references the importance of readjusting notions of what can be understood as the centre and the periphery (the mainland and the island) in the trade of knowledge plants, and material. It reminds us of how we all interconnect in ways we have unlearnt.

Ligaya Salazar is a curator and programme director who has devised creative cultural programmes across the cultural and museum sectors for 15 years. Her work as a curator and commissioner focuses on contemporary interdisciplinary practice at the intersection of design, fashion, art and graphics. Her approach is shaped by an interest in how audiences can be positioned at the heart of curatorial practice, enabling a human-centred take on storytelling. As Director of Fashion Space Gallery and Arcade East, at the University of the Arts’ London College of Fashion campus, she developed the strategic direction for the two spaces and managed the programme, budget and team. She devised the public exhibition and events programmes there from 2013–20 and curated specific projects as part of that, including the Designer in Residence programme, Creative Lab, Polyphonic Playground and Fordlandia. 

She is currently working on two upcoming exhibitions: on the subjectivity of sight at the Wellcome Collection, London (2022), and on the design of sneakers at the Design Museum, London (2021).

Dani Admiss is a curator and researcher working across the fields of design, art, technology and science. Her approach is framed by world-making practices and community-based research prioritising these as lenses to explore alternative forms of curatorial practice.

Her Fellowship project Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline explores and enacts just transition in the arts. Across 2022, a coalition of art workers, agitators, dream weavers, makars, and caregivers, will co-create a bottom-up and open-source decarbonisation plan for art workers.

Admiss has curated projects across the UK, Europe and internationally including at the Barbican Centre, Somerset House, MAAT, Lisbon and Lisbon Architecture Triennale. 

Larry Achiampong is an artist whose solo and collaborative projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural and post-digital identity. For his Fellowship project Achiampong developed a new work processing the imprints of depression, digital anxiety and Black Masculinity. Through field recordings, moving image and materials from Achiampong’s personal archives, the project delicately unfurls the tensions of grief, dislocation, legacy and lost kin.

Achiampong is a 2018 Jarman Award-nominated artist and a 2019 Paul Hamlyn Award recipient (for Visual Arts) and has worked with major institutions on commissions, residencies and exhibitions with spaces including Tate Galleries, the Venice and Singapore Biennales, Somerset House and Transport for London.

‘A Letter (Side B)’ (2023), ‘A Pledge’ (2024) and ‘A Funeral’ (forthcoming) form part of the series ‘Ghost_Data_’ co-commissioned by The Mosaic Rooms, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University and Heart of Glass.

Maeve Brennan is an artist based in London. Her practice explores the political and historical resonance of material and place. Working primarily with moving image and installation, she develops long-term investigations led by personal encounters.

For her Stanley Picker Fellowship, Brennan’s proposal focuses on the illicit antiquities trade; working collaboratively with forensic archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, the project will trace international underground networks that facilitate the looting, smuggling and selling of cultural artefacts.

Brennan has recently had solo exhibitions at Wäinö Aaltonen Museum, Finland (2019); Jerwood Space, London; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin (both 2018); The Whitworth, Manchester; Spike Island, Bristol and Chisenhale Gallery, London (all 2017). She was the recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Award 2018.

Ben Judd is based in London. His work examines collectivity and participation through performance, moving image and installation, enabling different forms of communities to be explored in relation to site and context. He often works with collaborators as a method to develop self-reflexive folk histories and construct temporary communities.

For his Stanley Picker Fellowship, Judd will collaborate with students from Kingston School of Art to create an offsite project using the nearby River Thames as the site for a floating resource for the local community that reflects upon Britain’s island status. 

Judd has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, recently including ICA, Art Night London, Whitstable Biennale and Victoria Gallery & Museum, University of Liverpool.