The Future is Now Part II: Re/Form~ation

CasildART Contemporary have inaugurated their new gallery space on Connaught Street in London with a group show titled ‘The Future is Now Part II: Re/Form~ation’.

Seven contemporary black artists explore the transformative potential of materials to confront past and present and imagine the future.  The featured artists are; Àsìkò, Donald Baugh, Christopher Day, Othello De’Souza-Hartley, Elaine Mullings, Margaret Scott and Theresa Weber. Although working across different mediums including painting, sculpture, photography, textiles and glass, what binds these artists together is the love of their craft and a thorough grasp of the material process and form of bringing an idea into being. This innovative exhibition delves into the profound dialogue between material and form, and showcases how artmaking can challenge outdated paradigms and transform everyday objects into powerful artistic expressions. 

'The Future is Now Part II: Re/Form~ation' features the work of Christopher Day, a glass artist who, only 4 years ago, was working as a plumber. Day has created a bespoke artwork specifically for this exhibition, which will be unveiled at the preview. The glass sculpture, titled "Unconditional Love," is a symbolic and powerful reminder of the most brutal of circumstances. During the transatlantic slave trade, children were ripped away from their mothers and sold off to the highest bidder. The most horrific images depict enslaved Africans being auctioned off, with children clinging to their mothers in desperation, unaware of the horrors they would face. The material, therefore, does not merely function as part of the composition but beckons the viewer to engage in a dialogue about Britain’s racial past and present, and the tragic legacy of Colonialism.  

Sukai Eccleston, founder and curator at CasildART Contemporary, shares her inspiration for the exhibition: "In The Future is Now Pt. II: Re/form~ation, we celebrate the boundless creativity that arises when artists push the boundaries of what is considered art. This exhibition is a testament to the ingenuity of artists who use materiality to challenge what we think is real, finding beauty in the discarded to forge connections across time and layering the work with new meaning and context. The artists in Re/ Form~ation are not just makers; they are storytellers, weaving narratives that bridge the gap between the past and the present, paving the way for us to think about traditional structures and expand the possibilities for a better future now!”

CasildART Contemporary is a not-for-profit gallery dedicated to addressing the underrepresentation of Black artists in fine art institutions, commercial galleries, and museums. CasildART Founder Sukai Eccleston launched the gallery with a mission to be a catalyst for change and transform the visual landscape in the UK by inserting Black narratives into the culture. Eccleston believes art has the ability to foster connections and initiate conversations about culture and heritage, and through the CasildART programme her aim is to redress the racial and cultural balance within the UK and international contemporary art scene.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Àsìkò

Àsìkò is a self-taught visual artist focused on reaching into his African culture and heritage and redressing the beauty standards of what it means to be black. He was born in the UK, spending his formative years in Nigeria and his adolescent years in the UK. These multifarious culture codes influence and inform his autobiographical work. His work is explored using mixed media through photography, sculpture, collage, Ai and Film.

Àsìkòs work has been exhibited internationally, more recently at The Gagosian, The John Randle Centre (Yoruba Museum), Gloucester Museum, 154 Art Fair, British Film Institute, The South Bank Centre in London and Rele Gallery in Lagos, Nigeria. His work has been featured on the BBC, The Guardian, Vogue, CNN, The Financial Times, etc.

Christopher Day

Growing up in the West Midlands, Christopher Day has become Britain’s only black glassblower, or certainly the only one that the artist is aware of. He creates highly personal works in glass and mixed media and his intention is to discuss and investigate the treatment of black people in Britain & the USA, with much of his research focussing on the history of the slave trade in the Eighteenth Century and the events leading to up & during the Civil Rights Movement.

A self-confessed ‘arts enthusiast’ Day’s creative career comes after more than two decades as a plumber. Initially feeling that his life had taken him on a journey that significantly detoured away from his early love of the arts, Day is now able to reflect on the fact that many of the skills he has developed in his earlier career have directly transposed to the creation of his artworks. Combining materials used in both heating and electrical systems into his creations, Day finds he is able to create the perfect marriage of his artistic path and technical knowledge, both of which rely on dexterity and high levels of skill and craftsmanship.

A reoccurring and signature theme are ‘copper cages’ which enclose his glass, representing the restriction of movement both physically and mentally that traders possessed over other human’s lives that were viewed simply as ‘commodities’. These are created from simple copper tubing and wire but to dramatic effect. The glass, by contrast, Day compares to the human spirit, attempting to break free despite the restrictions that hold it in place. An emerging artist and a recent graduate from Wolverhampton University, Day received a special commendation at the 2019 British Glass Biennale held in Stourbridge, UK. He has not only become a leading voice within the contemporary British art-glass scene but also with the continued conversation surrounding Black Lives Matter and racial inequality, giving his time for numerous interviews for both TV, radio and social media. 

Othello De’Souza-Hartley

Othello De’Souza-Hartley is a London-based mixed media artist who explores aspects of human expression in contemporary society. The paintings celebrate the interplay of inner growth and outer imperfection, honouring the resilience, beauty and history embedded in our bodies and the spaces we inhabit. They are an invitation to search and find beauty in every day and appreciate the fallible journey of life.

De’Souza-Hartley merges personal experience into visual investigations of prevailing quandaries and contradictions by applying minimal gestures to maximum effect. Working predominantly in photography, moving images, drawing, performance, and painting, the human body is at the core of his practice, either directly as a subject or indirectly, via the marks and layers applied to canvas. 

Inspired equally by the subjective gaze of classical paintings and notions of non-duality in Eastern philosophy, by the geometry and texture of Modern architecture and improvisation in experimental music or contemporary dance, De’Souza-Hartley’s practice is not confined by medium or genre. His Masculinity project has received extensive press coverage and was nominated for Peer to Peer, a curated snapshot of contemporary photography in the UK and China in 2019. His work has been exhibited widely to critical acclaim and is held in private and public collections, including Autograph London. He received an MA in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, in 2011, prior to that studied at Central St Martins, University of the Arts London, and the Royal Drawing School London.

Donald Baugh

Having studied Furniture at both Rycotewood College, Oxford and Middlesex University in the 90s, Donald Baugh has exhibited extensively in London, Tokyo, Paris, Milan and Folkestone. He specialises in simple line and colour to create elegant solutions for lighting, furniture and his sculptural one-off vessels sourced from sustainable wood. Donald Baugh has been building a solid international reputation with his passion for wood over many years, creating elegant furniture for interiors and one-off carved vessels.

Recognising the intrinsic natural beauty of wood, Donald Baugh has created this collection of stunning sculptural vessels and lighting. Baugh's work is both beautiful and precise, a combination of traditional craftsmanship with contemporary design embracing bold shapes and use of colour. Each vessel begins with the careful selection of the wood, drawing inspiration from wood as a living material, highlighting its natural characteristics and history to create unique beautifully crafted pieces. Baugh is passionate about the sustainable practice of harvesting timber, working closely with the Forestry Commission and tree surgeon Dariusz Salarski to source his materials allowing each vessel a story to be told, celebrating the uniqueness of nature.

Since having honed his craft at the world-renowned Rycotewood Furniture School in Oxfordshire, graduating in 1996, Baugh has been working as a bespoke cabinet maker and furniture designer commissioned by private and commercial clients across the world.

Elaine Mullings 

Interrogating the shifting value of ‘things’ is a recurring theme in Elaine Mullings’ practice. She creates sculpture and installations using a range of materials from tissue paper and plastic bags to copper pipe and broken glass – disparate ‘things’ that hover like residual low-level noise in the everyday. Combining and re-contextualising these ‘things’ enables Mullings to consider complex or difficult subjects such as disposability, exploitation and prejudice. She probes the emotions and sensations that seemingly ‘low value’, ephemeral material can provoke to continually raise questions, to unsettle our understanding of the familiar and provoke our responses to the ‘strange’. 

Mullings’ practice is underpinned by an interest in ‘facture’ - a focus on the accumulation of labour and time, materiality, pattern and repetition. She often uses intensive manual, repetitive processes to create her sculptural pieces and installations. This approach is echoed in her use of multiples and fragmentation as a way of scratching at the cosy familiar surfaces of the ‘everyday’.  For Mullings, evidence of the rhythm of labour and time sustained in the making is visibly embedded in the work to retain honest connections between the material, process and form.

The large-scale nature of her sculpture and installations often responds structurally to the works’ environments, drawing our attention to the poetics of simple things, space and texture. Mullings’ practice references the language of Arte Povera, Minimalism and Pop. She draws inspiration from artists such as El Anatsui, Mark Bradford, Leonardo Drew, Theaster Gates, Martin Puryear, Alicja Kwade and Jannis Kounnellis.

Margaret Scott 

Margaret Scott creates art from the particularity of who she is: a black woman, a feminist, a daughter, a mother, an activist and a British textile artist. Her large-scale works draw on the aesthetic and symbolic potential of the process of felting. The hand-felted re-interpretations of photographic images often explore the politics of representation and tensions and contradictions of a Black British identity. Photography and specifically portraiture has played a key role in all her work.  While many of the manipulated images become textiles, each series of work always generates ‘stand-alone’ prints.

Scott’s technical practice is unparalleled in the landscape of contemporary British art, sitting at the boundary of tapestry and digital media, she employs a combination of photography, digital collage and silk in a process known as Nuno felting.  The intensely physical process of felting is followed by hand stitching to emphasise the smaller details of an image. In working with fibre Scott pushes a medium traditionally associated with craft into the realm of fine art. 

She achieved notoriety in 2013 for Zwarte Piet, a body of work exploring the eponymous Dutch phenomenon of ‘blacking up’. Using self-portraiture, she referenced the quaint and offensive Dutch ‘character’ by creating an alter ego for Piet. In the series ‘Big Sister ‘ and ‘ICU’, Scott invites the viewer to re-evaluate Zwarte Piet, no longer the slave or child-like fool, but a commanding adult female presence with a very different agenda.

Born in London, Maggie graduated from St. Martin’s School of Art in 1976 with BA honours in Fashion Textiles and she set up her first studio in London in 1980.  Her professional life as a Textile Artist had existed in parallel with her involvement in gender and race politics. However, her experiment with a series of large, autobiographical textiles led to a bursary award and a one woman show at Leicester Museum in 2012, “Negotiations – black in a white majority culture”.  After the success of “Negotiations” Scott’s works have been exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and internationally, including the USA, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, China and Canada.

Scott is currently working on two projects: Five Times More, a response to the UK government report on Black and Asian pregnancy outcomes; and Fast Fashion and Climate Justice’: The Global North’s Addiction to Cheap Clothing and Landfill in the Global South. Both projects include her trademark large, felted photomontages, installations and prints.

Theresa Weber 

Theresa Weber was born in Düsseldorf in 1996 and lives and works in North Rhine Westphalia and London. Through multimedia installations, sculptures, paintings and collaborative performances the artist seeks to challenge existing power hierarchies and fixed categorisations. 

With a dynamic approach, she refers to ancient mythologies and historical research through collaging cultural materials from an anti-colonial lens. Her perspective as a German born artist with Jamaican, German and Greek background influences her artistic approach. In 2014, Theresa Weber completed her studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she studied in the classes of Katharina Grosse and Ellen Gallagher, from whom she received the Meisterschüler title. She then moved to London for a two-year postgraduate master's degree at the Royal College of Art in sculpture, which she successfully completed in summer 2023. Weber was part of New Contemporaries UK in 2022 and won several awards and scholarships in Germany and the Netherlands. 

Her first institutional solo shows took place at Dortmunder Kunstverein and Moltkerei Werkstatt e.V. Cologne in 2021, followed by several institutional and international shows, as for example at Ludwig Forum Aachen, Philara Collection Düsseldorf, Z33 Belgium, South London Gallery and her first public commission at Somerset House London. This year she had her first gallery solo show at ChertLüdde Berlin, which was followed by her first museum solo at Kunstmuseum Bochum this summer.

'The Future is Now Part II: Re/Form~ation' is open to the public from 26th July - 7th September, 2024 at CasildART Contemporary, 32 Connaught Street, Connaught Village, London W2 2AF.

 For more information please visit: www.casildart.com