As Frieze once again takes over London’s art scene, Sofia Hallström speaks with the city’s most exciting artists about the ideas behind their work, what to expect from their presentations at the fair, and the influence of the city on their practice.
Ebun Sopido at Soft Opening
For London-based artist Ebun Sodipo, sculpture, collage, performance and film become tools to rebuild the archive and make space for what has often been forgotten: the lives, memories, and mythologies of Black trans women. “I think of collage as visual poetry,” she says. “It’s about feeling, sensation, memory. The audience assembles meaning from that.”
For her solo presentation with Soft Opening at Frieze London, Sodipo is presenting some of her most ambitious works yet: a new series of large-scale collages and a series of bronze hand sculptures that expand her ongoing exploration of ancestry and trans embodiment. “They range from about ten centimetres to two by two-and-a-half meters, some of the largest works I’ve ever made,” she explains. “They span a few different trains of thought, from this woman I’ve been researching, Vitoria, to ideas of violence, political repression, love, and romance.” Vitoria is a central figure in Sodipo’s research: an enslaved African transgender woman who lived in sixteenth-century Lisbon, sentenced by the Inquisition to a lifetime of forced labour on the King’s galleys. “She was originally from Benin, and during her trial she said that women where she came from had bodies like hers,” Sodipo explains. “That moment gestures toward a whole other gender system and an entirely different way of relating to the body. Discovering her was transformative.” From that discovery came a long-standing inquiry into what Sodipo calls “the record of presence”, which is the evidence, however fragmented, of trans existence within the Black historical archive. Her practice mines these fragments, assembling them into something tactile and often spiritual. Her collages are vast, shimmering constellations of found imagery that are digitally sourced, then printed on reflective Mylar and coated in resin. “Every image is chosen for its content, its associations,” she says. “By reconstructing and reinterpreting them, I want to restore neglected figures from the past and imagine trajectories for trans futures.”
For Frieze, Sodipo’s bronze sculptures take the shape of hands, as both literal and symbolic tools of making, touch, and survival. “The hand motif runs through a lot of my work,” she explains. “I scanned the hands of different Black trans women and trans feminine people in my life, 3D-printed amalgamations of those hands in different gestures, and then cast them in bronze.” One hand forms a tender caress, another grips tightly, as if holding a stone; the third is halfway between a point and a grasp to hold “a tool, a weapon, or a protest placard,” she says. Sodipo connects these gestures to trans histories on the African continent: “In precolonial African societies, trans women were seen as magical practitioners and held high social positions,” she explains. “These sculptures link back to that. They’re about how Black trans people use history to affirm their existence, to defend themselves, and to make sense of the world.”
Though her work often reaches across continents and centuries, Sodipo’s base in South London roots her practice. “The most exciting part of being in London is my peers and the people around me,” she says. “My trans community is really tight-knit. I’ve found people who’ve helped me survive and continue making work, even in a country that feels increasingly hostile.” For the artist, creating work has always been about holding those contradictions of grief and joy, past and future, vulnerability and power, in the same frame.
Gray Wielebinski at Nicoletti Contemporary
Born in Texas and based in London, Gray Wielebinski’s artistic perspective is shaped by the physical and psychological landscapes of both places. “Growing up in the 2000s in Texas, I had personal experience with gun violence,” he recalls. “At school, it was common to conduct active shooter drills. Some architecture firms now design “gun-safe” schools. My school had lots of windows, ideal for visibility, but now such designs would be considered unsafe. There’s a tension between utopic architecture – spaces designed for learning – and militarised architecture. Bulletproof whiteboards, for instance, create psychological fear.” Wielebinski’s latest body of work, showing with Nicoletti at Frieze London, explores the strange beauty of violence and how violence is hidden inside objects, symbols, and even our built environments. “I aim to create work that’s initially seductive and beautiful,” he explains, “then reveals something off-putting. That duality parallels the design of weapons and architecture, both visually appealing but inherently violent.”
Bringing together sculpture, installation, and wall-based works, Wielebinski incorporates bulletproof ceramic tiles, the same silicon carbide and alumina plates used in body armour. “They’re eerily beautiful,” he says. “One almost looks like ivory or bone, another metallic, creating an unusual visual effect. You can see fingerprints on them, my hands or others, emphasising their human touch and consequence.” Arranged in rhythmic sequences, the tiles evoke both the curve of a torso and the silhouette of a tombstone. “When a symbol is more than the sum of its parts,” Wielebinski explains, “it becomes totemic and evocative.”
That tension, which is at once formal, bodily, and political, runs throughout Wielebinski’s practice – connecting the tiles’ material history to ideas of abstraction and commodified violence. “Minimalism explores the essence of objects,” he says, but “knowing these tiles are bulletproof changes that perception. The tiles’ scale relates to the body, and their function is protective or violent.” In another series, Wielebinski has hollowed gun grips into vases, filling them with silk flowers and rulers. “This relates to school shootings,” he explains, “and the psychological impact of architecture and public spaces on identity.”
Though Wielebinski’s work remains deeply engaged with America, he speaks warmly of London. “The city has had a huge impact on me personally and professionally. Living here has given me new vantage points, new communities. London’s art world feels adaptable – people mix genres, experiment, collaborate. There’s a generosity here.” Alongside his Frieze presentation, Wielebinski is debuting two new performances: one at Somerset House Studios’ AGM during Frieze Week (October 17) with Manuka Honey and Augustine Zegers, featuring custom scents designed for the space; and another with Raheel Khan at London Performance Studios on November 18. “Frieze feels like a back-to-school moment for the London art world,” he says with a smile. “I like to celebrate with friends and people I admire. Walking to Frieze in Regent’s Park with leaves falling gives me mixed feelings: excitement, vulnerability, and overwhelm.” At Nicoletti’s booth, Wielebinski’s work is a meditation on what it means to build safety in a world that’s constantly breaking.
Eunjo Lee at Niru Ratnam Gallery
“I don’t think of the world as fixed categories,” artist Eunjo Lee tells me, speaking ahead of her solo presentation with Niru Ratnam Gallery at Frieze London. “It’s a web where beings, objects, and even concepts are alive and connected.” Working primarily with moving images and digital environments, Lee constructs intricate worlds in 3D moving images, where the boundary between human and non-human dissolves into something both mythic and intimate, that captures wind through stone, sunlight across ruins, the quiet shimmer between breath and machine. They are built from real-time 3D environments, layered with sound, voice, and animation to create a sense of living atmosphere. “I want to move away from representing nature as a backdrop or subject and instead work towards creating environments where the non-human truly participates,” she says. “Each work should feel like an ecology in itself, where sound, image, matter, and breath interconnect like organisms in a shared habitat.”
At Frieze, Lee will showcase a trilogy, titled Lullaby of the Ruins, Forgiving the Sunlight, and Before the Shadow Taught the Sun, that traces a girl’s journey through decay and renewal: “Her journey is not linear but circular,” Lee explains. “She sees death, forgiveness, and transformation in different guises. The trilogy meditates on how life renews itself through decay.” The three films will merge into a single immersive environment. Rather than a narrative with a beginning or end, they loop continuously, allowing viewers to enter at any point and still feel, as Lee puts it, “the rhythm of return.” Within these shifting digital landscapes, she models ruins, temples, and recurring motifs of wings, hands, water, stone, wind. “These repetitions are like ritual refrains,” she says. “They suggest kinship among beings and continuity between life and matter.”
Her interest in these themes stems from early childhood experiences. “As a child, I spent most of my time outdoors, in the mountains and fields,” she recalls. “I remember feeling the movement of stones, reading to the wind or the trees… I even once felt I had lived as a mountain in a previous life.” What others might call fantasy, she calls perception. “For me, that wasn’t fantasy, it was simply how I related to the world.”
Through her ongoing collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and LAS Art Foundation, Lee is experimenting with artificial intelligence and biofeedback systems that respond to human presence, such as heartbeats, breath, and voice. “I want to investigate how technology might listen rather than simply calculate,” she explains. “I’m fascinated by the possibility that a digital environment could behave like a sentient landscape – one that shifts its atmosphere according to human presence.” This desire to blur the divide between human and non-human extends beyond concept into process. Lee often works collaboratively with sound artists, poets, and performers, describing these relationships as “spiritual gestures.” “Collaboration dissolves authorship,” she says. “It creates shared resonance. That’s what I want my work to be: a space that feels alive both biologically and metaphysically.”
While her work operates in a universal register, the dual geographies of London and Seoul form her artistic approach. “London gives me a sense of vastness and intellectual freedom,” she reflects. “It’s a place where experimentation is encouraged. Seoul grounds me in emotional instinct – there’s a density of time and intuition there that I find deeply nourishing.” Moving between the two, she says, is “almost ritualistic. London teaches me how to build structures; Seoul reminds me how to trust silence.” Asked what keeps her creating, Lee pauses, smiling softly before replying: “Astonishment. That the world continues to speak, even through its ruins. I’m moved by the small signs of life that persist – ashes that glitter, stones that hum, winds that remember. I create to listen back to that murmur.”
Cato at Harlesden High Street
When I meet Cato, he’s in the middle of glueing the last pieces of his paintings together. “My friend Daniel came round the other day to help me glue everything down,” he laughs. “I paint all my work first and then glue it all together at the end.” Cato’s canvases begin as fragments; his figures are sometimes rendered with their features oversized, painted on unstretched linen, jute, or rough-weave cloth, before being assembled into textured, composite surfaces, often placed in a domestic interior. His works hover somewhere between painting and collage. “I tend to realise what they’re about towards the end of the process,” he says. “I start by taking or finding photos, then recreate them, building a scene around the expressions I’ve painted.”
The results are vivid, emotionally charged, and very personal scenes. “The final works reminded me of my childhood,” he reflects, “sort of half memories, half imagined situations that connect to my family. I’ve got relatives in both England and Jamaica, some family I’ve never met, and I think the Caribbean side comes through more in these works.” His recent solo show at Harlesden High Street built on a series of paintings inspired by colour portraits by Carl Van Vechten, a Harlem Renaissance photographer whose archives Cato discovered while visiting the Schomburg Center in Harlem. “One man I painted twice looked just like my granddad, ‘Bad Guy,’ who I only met once,” he says. “Those portraits just hit me, they felt like family.”
At Frieze London, showing again with Harlesden High Street in a solo presentation, Cato expands that personal mythology into a kind of domestic installation: paintings, a small sculpture, furniture he’s collected (and occasionally painted), and a short moving image work that together form what he calls “a subtle living-space arrangement… We wanted the booth to feel more personal, not just white walls,” Cato explains. “We’re pushing the layout a bit, making it feel like somewhere you could sit and stay for a while.”
Cato’s works from both archives and his own Polaroid photographs, chasing the immediacy of seeing something as instantaneously as when he shoots it. “Photography helps me build scenes and find gestures,” he says. Those gestures, of hands, faces, the curve of a foot, dominate his compositions. “Those are the parts of the body that communicate the most,” he says. “I was always fascinated by that old scientific diagram, the homunculus, where the body parts are sized according to sensitivity. The face and hands are how we remember people, how we read their emotions.” This attention to touch and communication ties his work to a lineage of figurative artists who stretch and reshape the body to reveal something emotional underneath. “I’ve always been drawn to artists who distort, like Picasso, Botero, and especially Romare Bearden,” he says. “His collages were a big influence when I was developing my own language.”
Born in Brighton and based in South London, Cato has built a creative life that feels collective by nature. “It’s really important to be surrounded by people who are creating.” His studio in Peckham doubles as a social gathering space: “We host poker nights, screenings, that kind of thing. It’s the lifestyle I always wanted.” Cato is also a musician. “I’ve got two band projects, one called The Playfoot and Parade,” he says, smiling. “Playfoot’s kind of no wave, post-punk with jazz influences. Parade’s a bigger collective. I play bass, and it started as a way to pass the time, but now it’s turned into something we’re building an audience for.” His two worlds in painting and music intertwine through rhythm, gesture, and collaboration. “It’s about getting into that zone with people. Painting’s solitary, so music balances that out.” He grins: “We’ve also got a Parade gig the day after Frieze at The Greyhound in Peckham.”
