Platform for Emerging Arts #23

Leyden Gallery presents the 23rd Platform for Emerging Arts Exhibition, a mixed-media exhibition showcasing the work of eight home-grown and international artists in critical early stages of their careers. The artists in the Platform for Emerging Arts Exhibitions are selected for their innovation and skill by the curatorial team at Leyden Gallery. With the development of each of Leyden Gallery’s Platform shows there is a fabulous opportunity for the public to both see and buy contemporary art. It promises to be a dynamic display from talented emerging artists in one of East London's most vibrant art spaces.

Participating Artists:
Annalisa Merrilees | Bill Bevan | Karen Christensen | Lorna Pridmore | Mary Sullivan | Melanie Kenyon | Mike Fullarton | Orsina Pasargiklian

• Annalisa Merrilees

Annalisa Merrilees's vibrant, thick pigmented impasto paintings derive from an interest in the mental limits of the body and the subsequent physical effects. Delicately painted over a long period, the work appears at first to be mechanically made but reveals itself to be the product of a careful hand. The use of a random number generator to allocate colours to the base grid allows the painting to take on a life of its own. The random and deliberate actions come together to create a sufficient formal balance within the work.

• Bill Bevan

Bill Bevan's Music Video Brain Films is a multimedia project aiming to use music videos to teach people about the brain. The latest production, Emotion’s Brain SECTIONS overviews the 6-7 basic emotions and includes a simplified introduction to some components of the neural networks underlying emotion. The exhibit also showcases a framed print referencing his first non-student brain film production (My Queen), which presents an introduction to the neural circuitry of reward within the context of a vampire revenge drama.

• Karen Christensen

Karen Christensen is a Danish artist working mainly in mixed media and sculpture. Mostly self-taught, Christensen uses a variety of materials to create her work, often reclaimed bits and pieces found in skips or picked up in the area where she lives. Drawing inspiration from the interactions and relations between people, places, and objects, Christensen creates dream-like miniature tableaux that inspire the viewer to see each component in a new light and experience a parallel universe of magic, love, pain, humour, hope, and absurdity.

• Lorna Pridmore

Lorna Pridmore’s work involves the transformation of found objects and materials into thought-provoking, sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing, new forms. The works are often made from inconsequential 'stuff' such as drawing pins, nails, cling film, hair grips or synthetic materials. Thinking about the commonplace things we tend to disregard without thought or significance; Pridmore is interested in raising a question about that which is seen to be without merit.

• Mary Sullivan

Mary Sullivan has been developing a series of research projects and performances in different abandoned military sites on Beara Island. These sites are potent reminders of the colonial history and the types of political regimes that have existed on this island. Paralleling the domestic and the military, Sullivan's work draws out the repetitive nature of domestic chores with the drill and precision of military discipline. Attending to the function of dressage, she highlights the subtle performativity of uniform in the classification of roles and sensibilities in society.

• Melanie Kenyon

Melanie Kenyon currently lives and works in Marseille and has taught English Culture and Communication in an art and design school in France since 1990. Using a variety of media – collage, engraving, ceramics, oil, watercolour, acrylic, crayon and graphite - many of Kenyon’s abstract pieces have a circular or zig-zagging drawing as their point o