Flora Bradwell is an artist whose playful practice revels in the generously grotesque. Flora has exhibited internationally and collaborated in curating site responsive projects, performance events and exhibitions across the UK. Curatorial roles include co-director at Bad Art, curator at Inland Project and a member of the icing room collective. In 2011 Flora co-founded Greenhorn Short Film Festival, an annual London-wide event celebrating emerging film making talent; producing five editions of the festival. Flora runs artist residencies from her shed in Walthamstow: Gaff Space. Flora has also undertaken teaching placements at Kingston School of Art, Camberwell College of Arts and City and Guilds of London Art School.   www.florabradwell.com

Maddie Yuille is a visual artist living and working in London. She works with paint to explore human embodiment and how we relate to the world around us. Since graduating with an MA in Fine Art from City and Guilds of London Art School (2019), she has been shortlisted for the Ashurst Emerging Artist Award (2020) and the Contemporary British Painting Prize (2019), and has taken part in numerous group shows, including with Berntson Bhattacharjee, Subsidiary Projects, The Tub, Warbling Collective, and The Auction Collective. Prior to pursuing her art practice, she completed a BA in Human Geography and worked in documentary production for a number of years – a background that informs her practice today.

Specialising in Oil Painting but also likes to experiment with installation and sculpture as well. Her practice revolves around the externalisation of personal emotions, in various fictional characters that she asserts are all a part of herself, radically taking the idea of self-portraiture beyond the self. She examines the social and political nature of these themes; scrutinising the ordinary aspect of daily life and transforming, and transporting it into a new reality.

My current work seeks to broaden existing narratives around the paintings of black people. As well as challenge the social and political weight that often overwhelms and overshadows the uniqueness of the black experience. Through humour and moments of absurdity, such a figures wearing polka dots thongs, or a semi nude figure riding a bike I hope not to diminish the inherent and necessary conversations attached to painting the black figure but to offer alternative narratives and discourses.

I make oil paintings that are large in scale and that have a very immersive quality, not only surface. Painting is a way of exploring the world around me and of using my imagination and sense smallest and biggest of details. I am also interested, on a more conceptual level, in tensions and binaries and where things simple and complex, abstract and figurative, painting and drawing, micro and macro, lands on. I like playing with these opposing values in my work, giving it an ambiguous aura that a depending to the viewer’s lived experience.

My painting process works with intuition, colour, rhythm and movement setting up a space for my memories of the tropical to appear. From this, feelings of nostalgia and longing become present. As this space unfolds I go in search of specific sensations and affects such as the sentimental, celebration, joy and euphoria. This process generates questions that relate back to nature. From this position a transformation occurs that creates fictional spaces, which employs a celebratory method of painting. As such I am searching for repetitive motifs that can consistently reproduce this celebratory method. As a result further sensations of vibrancy and the feminine begin to unravel and produce meaning.

  www.goiamujalli.com

On the hunt for social situations that cross between the surreal and “ordinary”. I link image, sound and video clips that I have captured from around the world. Piecing together a fictional reality, whilst connecting the disparate elements.

My focus is drawn to the meeting points at random, the idea of simultaneous possibilities co- existing allows me to explore and connect “different worlds at the same time”. The reconstruction element within my work often gives reference to the complex layers of history, of movement of people and goods, and cultural displacement. I have taken much of my inspiration for the development of my work from the Rhizome concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari. "A Rhizome has no beginning or end" I develop my research into identity through a non-starting point, pushing the Connections and multiplicities that evolve within the work.

  www.chinatree.me

My concern is the contested territory between the natural world, rational science and what is human. This relationship informs how we understand ourselves as actors within our environment.

My work combines layers of drawing, painting and collage. A mathematically composed base image provides the conditions for pareidolia to occur. Over-drawing encourages human error, individual interpretation and idiosyncrasy.

Visceral glimpses of spaces, objects and creatures. Motifs and snapshots are superimposed onto one another. Worlds emerge at both macro and micro scales. The pictures delight in the atmospheric qualities of space. Akin to being lost in the deep forest, time and space are ambiguous. Mystery and disorientation is encouraged. Parts meld into each other, location and dimension are unclear.

Jack Sutherland is the third New Contemporaries alumnus to be offered an Elephant Lab residency Paintings about the human condition. Frustrating, humorous, nihilistic, silly moments taking place within the theatre of the absurd. Explorations of bodily anxiety and trepidation are paired with fizzing and playful use of colour to create work that prods at the soft underbelly of the uncanny and grazes the softly stubbled cheek of contemporary masculinity. Cartoonish bodily abstraction, wordplay, cropping as a compositional tool, and vulnerability are all given high precedence within the paintings, with scale being used to either intensify or undercut the imagery. Rarely is the full human figure depicted; the viewer is given a multiplicity of body parts across many paintings for them to assemble and disassemble the body as they so please. Myth and fiction play their role, but commonly shared experiences are the fundamental foundation for the work - a warped reflection caught in the bent mirror of a lift, faces glimpsed in peripheral vision during a late night walk, or the absurdity of a brain controlling a hand to paint a picture of a brain. It is my brain and I will tell it what to believe and it will tell me what to tell it to believe.   www.jacksutherland.co.uk

I am interested in notions of memory and not-knowing as methods for approaching painting. Critical to this thinking are predetermined actions set against the potential of active eruptions of moments at which the activity stretches into a space that is not-known, where actions are affected by the activity of painting. Momentary gestural action delivers a timeless desire that becomes one with another, sought within an instant through intuition and improvisation. The sensory apparatus makes this possible, makes textural surface and surface of emotional sense an extended moment of absolute proximity and distance, all at once. Within this method, I utilise motifs as a precursor to the indeterminable, through which the real, or that is to say reflections of the real, become entangled within abstract environments embedded within the surface. This all happens through the activity of painting and constructs a liberated space of complexity; I would determine this as a space of familiar unfamiliarity.