Unveiling Abstractions @ Hypha Studios
Introducing Unveiling Abstractions: a group exhibition which encompassed all-female artists’ distinctive approaches to Abstract Art. Sponsored by the British Land Trust and Amazon Natural Spring Water, long-time collaborators Zoë Goetzmann and Melissa Vipritskaya Topal curated the show from 22nd of February to 30th of March 2024. The exhibition focused on the experimental use of new materials and techniques by the 17 participating artists, creating an abstract dialogue that showcases their multidisciplinary practices.
The featured artists, hailing from prestigious art schools such as the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths, UAL, Ruskin School of Art, and international colleges in Moscow and beyond, presented a diverse range of art forms. From installations to textiles, sculptures to paintings, digital art to performance, the exhibition offered a comprehensive exploration of Abstract Expression. The artists – Baroque Anarchist, Anna Kolosova, Melissa Vipritskaya Topal, Eva Dixon, Ashley Cluer, Annie Trevorah, Eleni Maragaki, Lisa Price, Virginie Tan, Yingfei Lyu, Nina Gonzalez-Park, Florence Sweeney, Karolina Dworska, Damaris Athene, Tasia Graham, Emily Mary Barnett and Lea Rose Kara – drew inspiration from traditional and contemporary mediums, as well as poetic, biological, and scientific influences, reflecting on the past while envisioning a more equal, non-conformist, and sustainable future.
Unveiling Abstractions at Hypha Studios. Installation Shot. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios.
Upon entering the exhibition space, viewers greeted an airy ambiance bathed in sunlight, creating a breathtaking backdrop through its expansive panoramic windows which allowed the artworks to be fully visible from the outside. Zoe and Melissa revealed that their unique curatorial challenges lay in arranging the composition on the first wall, which warmly welcomes visitors upon entry. "Ultimately, we successfully rearranged the artworks’ compositions that effectively showcased the artists' diverse skills across various mediums and techniques," Zoe and Melissa explained.
Zoë Goetzmann and Melissa Vipritskaya Topal, and exhibiting artists during the private view night at Hypha Studios. Photo Courtesy: Idil Warfa Photography
The exhibition generated significant discussion during its Private View and Closing Party on March 28th. MADE IN BED's Thanarat Asvasirayothin spoke with Zoë Goetzmann and Melissa Vipritskaya Topal to gain insight into their key takeaways. “I liked it when artists create uncanny illusions with their materials”, says Zoe and Melissa. They highlighted Annie Trevorah's sculpture Predator 2, which appeared heavy and metallic but was actually lightweight and made from resin and aluminum pigment. They also praised Florence Sweeney's Synapses, which initially gave an impression of weightlessness but turned out to be the heaviest piece in the show. Through their intentional selections, the curators successfully challenged viewers' imaginations and expanded their perceptions of Abstract Art.
Speaking of the Euston community, Melissa Vipritskaya Topal further emphasised the community-driven core values behind both women's curatorial efforts. As a co-curator, she is always looking for new artists with fresh ideas for future projects on Instagram, while also expanding and connecting with her peers from UAL or art residencies that she has previously participated in throughout the years. The curators reached out to additional artists via social media to broaden the selection of selected artists and created an unique community of London-based artists and recent art graduates from diverse cultural backgrounds. This approach ensured a broad and varied understanding of abstract language within the exhibition.
The exhibition explored the interconnections between matter, life, humans, animals, the environment, the body, memory, and technology. Each artist skillfully blended sculptural materials and multimedia techniques, pushing the boundaries of abstraction and merging traditional practices with contemporary elements.
Emily Mary Barnett, Untitled, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios & Idil Warfa Photography.
Nina Gonzalez-Park, taki/tako. Welded Steel Pipe Installation. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios.
Stemming from her background in Neuroscience and Clinical Practice, Recent Central Saint Martins Graduate Nina Gonzalez-Park's Taki/Tako explored the tactility and perception of fluidity through her use of metal. Inspired by the movements of waterfalls (滝, “taki”) and octopi (タコ, “tako”), Nina’s welded steel is transfigured into a creature that could be moved and distorted within the exhibition space, symbolising the fluid nature of identities and her deep connection between Art and Science.
Melissa Vipritskaya Topal, Imaginary Bird. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios
Having worked together previously in their past collaborative exhibition, “Music Connected Us” featured in Made In Bed’s Features, Melissa Vipritskaya Topal and Anna Kolosova showcased their latest abstract works of Art which captures the essence of nature and ephemeral beings through their visual depiction of silhouettes, lines and forms.
Through her distinctive approach, Melissa’s Imaginary Bird hybridises organic and man-made forms found in urban landscapes to reflect the chaos, speed, and noise of London. With a background as a professional musician, sculpting is akin to composing for her - a puzzle-solving endeavour where she meticulously assembles disparate elements into a mosaic of irregular shapes that form a harmonious whole.
Anna described Acid Rainbow as a “chemical explosion of colours and mark-making, cultivating a sensation of inter-dimensional pleasure.” Inspired by indie electronic experimental band SWEAT, Anna's synesthetic paintings are a psychedelic journey of vibrant aesthetics, sounds and energies.
Lisa Price, Free to Wander (Handmade watercolour on Linen), & Elena Maragaki, 99 Landscapes, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Idil Warfa Photography.
Elena Maragaki's 99 Landscapes, a flag book, offered a unique interactive experience. The flat memory of landscapes could be folded into a multi-layered 3D lamp shade, responding to Leslie Brown's artistic practice and her favourite African animals' habitats. Grounded in the materiality of nature, Lisa Price's practice centered around the depiction of natural landscapes, utilising sustainable and handmade watercolours crafted from foraged earth minerals.
Elena Maragaki, The Endless Landscape Puzzle, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios.
Mastering her workings with wool and resin, Lea Rose Kara’s wool wall sculptures, Eye of the Temptress and Growth, blended elements of nature, science, and the enigma of time. These delicate artworks, symbolising fertility and abundance, have been dyed using chrysanthemums and aster flowers, resulting in a subtle change of tone.
Over the past two years, Kara's process of working with wool involves collecting branches, leaves, fruits, and flowers during her walks through woodlands and parks in the UK. These natural elements are then used to dye the wool through a bundle dyeing-and-steaming process. The artist described the meticulous steps and her feelings involved in this journey as “an alchemist, or a witch (or a bit of both), measuring pH levels, breaking down flowers, and carefully considering each aspect.” The resulting sculptures symbolised fertility and abundance, representing the mutability and organic nature of life.
Lea Rose Kara, Eye of the Temptress, 2023 (Left) & Growth, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Lea Rose Kara
Achieving the colour green through natural dyes and the use of purple flowers was also notoriously challenging to Kara. Kara explained that different flowers permeate and settle on different layers of the wool, resulting in varying depths of green in Eye of the Temptress, while Growth exhibits a more uniform green, resembling a rock covered in seaweed due to the resin coating. During the process, Kara entered an almost meditative state, casting the dyed wool in resin and carefully crafting the composition. Fluidity is a key element of her process, allowing the sculptures to organically take shape.
Damaris Athene, Fruiting Body, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios and Idil Warfa Photography.
Blurring the boundaries between the real and the unreal, Damaris Athene's transdisciplinary practice explores the Posthuman and how lived experience mediated through technology offers new ways of viewing the materiality of the body and understanding what the body could be. Posthuman theory has offered her an opportunity to reexamine hierarchies in a post-anthropocentric world, and Athene is drawn to where language fails us but embodied experience does not.
Embodying both fragility and strength, Athene’s glass sculptures Fruiting Body were both liquid and solid, fragile yet strong, transparent yet impermeable – membranes stretch, concealing what lies beneath. Athene's work traversed permeable boundaries, connecting bodies, organic and synthetic materials, and the digital and physical realms.
Karolina Dworska, Nightly Bind. Photo Courtesy: Idil Warfa Photography.
Predominantly working in sculpture and rug-making, Karolina Dworska’s artistic practice provided essential context to the exhibition into her unique exploration of the grey area between dream and reality. “I am inspired by my dreams” says Dworska, a London-based Polish artist graduated from Goldsmiths BA Fine Art. “My piece, Nightly Bind, was an attempt at tackling one of my recurring dreams, in which I am pursued by and attacked by wolves.” Her surreal rugs offered a glimpse into liminal fantasy spaces.
Deeply nourished by (cosmic and body) horror, mythology, science fiction and confusions of corporeal reality, Dworska has hand-constructed pictorial rugs to devise her surreal recurring dreams in connection with mythological allegory, and how the internal dream space can be externalised to connect to contemporary narratives and anxieties. Deeply intertextual, Dworska’s dreamscapes, Nightly Bind, examined the strangeness of inhabiting a body and its fragility, abject horror as well as the euphoria of corporeal existence as a lens to reconfigure the everyday.
Influenced by her readings of Hieronymus Bosch and St. Anthony’s fire or ergot poisoning, the convulsing and twisting appearance of the figure in Nightly Bind gave it the appearance of a flayed skin, which was also evident in her second piece, Flayed Man, as she stated in an interview: “I wanted to create a piece which encapsulated a quite pathetic submission to one's fate, with the flayed man smiling stupidly as his loose skin hangs off the wall.”
Uncanny and mysterious, Dworska invited audience to immerse into her dreamlike tunnel of illogical forms and dismembered bodies, elements that were incorporated as part of her mythological imagery and agitated dreams in her everyday life.
Yingfei Lyu, Bruising Leg (Left) & Baroque Anarchist, Medusa, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios
Sophisticated yet organic, Yingfei Lyu’s Bruising Leg was made by hand that visually well-documented her meticulous process of threading the skin and knee forms to reflect her notion of memory, pain, attachment, and desire through paint, embroidery and crochet onto a hessian fabric piece. Similarly, Baroque Anarchist’s Medusa captured the vulnerability and strength of the body through her traditional painting methods influenced from the Baroque epoch and its parallels with the contemporary moment. Through these colourful range of fine and vividly distinctive in layered techniques of paintings, both anatomical imageries were representative of the breath of artists’ personal experience and the present body, reflecting their abstract craftsmanships that were visually meditative to watch.
Annie Trevorah, Totem 4, 2023. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios.
Glancing through the human-animal-organ-like Totem sculptures, the thematic shift from an anthropocentric position to a broader ecological panorama is a recurring motif in Annie Trevorah’s work. Past histories and shared destinies of human and plant life has intrigued Trevorah’s practice, as does our treatment of nature and insistence that as humans we are higher beings with an exceptionalism in which we are predators but never prey.
“The works in this show represent a significant turning point in my artistic development and exploration of human-plant interconnectivity”, says Annie Trevorah. An emphasis on connectivity, entanglement, and mutation led her work to play with the notion of metamorphosis, choosing a palette of bright colours and an array of materials including clay, resin, glass, vegetation, fabric, metal, and stone.
Tasia Graham, Untitled, 2023.Video Installation. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios.
Virginie Tan, It’s Winter, 2023. Video Installation. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios.
Abstract art can also manifest itself in digital and written forms, as exemplified by Tasia Graham and Virginie Tan's works showcased in the exhibition. Virginie Tan's latest addition to her ongoing series called ScreenPoetry, titled It's Winter, combines poetry and digital art to invite viewers to reevaluate screensavers and embrace the idea of stillness amidst the constant flow of information.
In creating this piece, Tan aimed to replicate the unique digital texture that emerges when capturing images of a screen. Using a visual programming tool called TouchDesigner, she generated a mesmerising infinite loop of lines. The accompanying soundtrack blends field recordings from various outdoor locations, capturing the ambient sounds of nature during winter. This composition, together with an AI-generated voice reciting the poem, completes the audiovisual experience.
It's Winter served as a reflection of the challenges we face in contemporary society, where screens and feeds consume our attention, often rendering us entranced. Tan described her intention behind the installation, emphasising the decision to place the screen on the ground rather than on a pedestal. This placement symbolises our intimate relationship with our phones, which are typically held vertically and kept close to us, whether in our pockets or by our beds. The presence of LED lights behind the screen represents the notifications we receive on our phones, offering a “comforting presence, even in the darkest of winter.” said Tan.
Unveiling Abstractions at Hypha Studios. Installation Shot. Photo Courtesy: Hypha Studios.
Kaleidoscopic yet contemporary, “Unveiling Abstractions” emphasised the intersectionality of Abstraction, highlighting the contributions of women artists that invited a physical and immersive experience through multidimensional abstract forms of art. Each artist's abstract perspective delves into the aesthetics and dynamics that exist between nature, technology, and society, exploring the impact these elements have on humans’ behaviours. Through their work, the artists revealed the state of hypnosis and engagement with the natural world that has become an extension of ourselves.
‘Unveiling Abstractions’ was on view at Hypha Studios until 30th March 2024.
For more information on Hypha Studios and the exhibited artists, visit their website or connect via Instagram.
Thanarat Asvasirayothin
Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED
