Molly Astley

Driven by a deep exploration of sensory experience and vibrational relations, Molly Astley’s work is centred on the porous boundary between body and environment. Through sound, performance, drawing and text, she explores the connections between personal, environmental and collective health; attuning to both the ephemeral (memory, sensation, image, voice) and the tangible (body, stone, river, branch) in close engagements with specific sites. Over the past year, she has brought together singers for deep listening and vocal improvisation with the Thames and its river stones. Through written scores, the ensemble explores sonic/somatic memory-making and embodied engagements with sound and water pollution. As ongoing work, Songs of Silt has produced a multi-channel, spatialised sound installation and site-specific performances. These compositions weave the sonic ecosystems of both place and vocal improvisation – emphasising a mutual, non-extractive listening, and the forming of reciprocal relationships between place and singers. Guided by somatic investigation of the vibrational networks that envelop both body and place, Molly’s practice tends to waves as both sound carriers and liquid phenomena, offering forms of caring attention to waters, sites and human/non-human collaborators.

Molly has participated in residencies at Cove Park, Cultivamos Cultura, JOYA and Prah Foundation. She is a member of Musarc choir and has performed in spaces such as the Camden Art Centre and the ICA, where she has also shown text-based work. She runs Silt Ensemble, who have recently performed at Project Octagon (2024). Molly was selected as a judge for Artists Project Earth’s Eco-Anthem (2024) competition and short-listed for Culture Recordings New Voice in Poetry prize (2020). She holds a BA (Hons) in English Literature from Sussex University and has trained in the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, Anna Halprin’s expressive arts therapy programme.

mollyastley[at]gmail.com


@molly.astley



avrgbbs
avrgbbs is the collaborative practice of Mischa Perelmuter (they/them) and Julia Payton (she/her), based in London, UK. Influenced by a shared background in fashion, the pair use a systems-oriented approach to confront the ways in which garments are rendered into commodities under the dominant Fashion system. Considering materials, tools and environments as vital collaborators, they explore the potential of making together as a way to evoke the affective and relational possibilities of garments. These themes are investigated in their ongoing project Garchetypes by utilizing a design methodology that imagines the agential and animate capacities of garments. Beginning as a collection of five modular garments for the various makings of life, the project has evolved to incorporate a book and a digital platform that considers the chaotic and interconnected ways that garments cover and seep into our very selves and one another.

avrgbbs[at]gmail.com

avrgbbs.com


@avrgbbs

 

Paola Bascón
Paola Bascón's visual and performance work engages with histories of extractivism and the potential restoration of affective relationships with the more-than-human world. She is particularly interested in the intersection of handcraft, poetic practices and collective memory as attempts to challenge modern-colonial narratives. Weaving historical accounts and archival material with speculative storytelling and somatic activations, her work unfolds across various mediums, including textiles, ceramics, painting, video and sound, as well as participatory and pedagogical formats. The participatory works, which range from workshops to sonic experiences, engage in material and sensorial explorations hosted by landscape, objects, and bodies.

Paola's work has been shown at Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge, Berlin (2024); Nunhead Cemetery, London (2024); Brücke Museum, Berlin (2023), PACT Zollverein, Essen (2023); 80m2 Livia Benavides, Lima (2023); South London Gallery (2022); Spreepark Art Space, Berlin (2021); radialsystem, Berlin (2020); HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (2020); Kiosko Galería, Santa Cruz de la Sierra (2020); Uferstudios, Berlin (2019); Alliance Française, La Paz (2017), Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz (MNA) (2009), among others. Prior to joining the MA Art & Ecology program, she graduated from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) with a degree in Communication Design and Media Art (Diplom/MA).

paolabascon[at]gmail.com

paolabascon.com


@paolabascon



Kai Edwards
Kai Edwards’ Fungal Queerdom is a speculative practice that embraces degeneracy, decays gender and sex binaries, and imagines possible futures of flourishing queer fungal kinship. In intimate collaboration with fungi, Edwards’ interactive sculptures are grown and presented alongside ceramics, animation, sound and storytelling that centres hope in the face of climate nihilism. Their ongoing science-fiction project The Caretaking Outpost for the Mycelial Young explores how interspecies fungal kinship could plant seeds for non-utopian futures of vibrant, thriving communities. Impelled to move away from the inhibiting climate apocalypse narrative, Kai’s practice asks how fungi can aid us in nurturing a radical and gentle cross-species system of community care.

Kai’s recent exhibitions include: ‘Cheers To Spring; To life; To a Growing Soul’ (2021), Link Gallery, Manchester; ‘Digging Exhibition’, (2021) ,TCU Texas – Online; ‘Made It’, 2021 (2021), HOME MCR, Manchester; ‘Collateral’ (2021), British Textile Biennial; ‘Baking Bread’ (2022), On The Rag Gallery, Manchester; ‘Limp Exhibit’ (2022), Deaf Institute, Manchester; ‘Rewild Ilford’ (2022), Ilford, London; ‘Alpha’, (2022), AIR Gallery, Altrincham, Manchester; ‘Winter Solstice’ (2022), Fronteer Gallery, Sheffield; ‘Fin-De-Siècle’ (2022), On The Rag Gallery, Manchester; ‘Opiđ Hús’ (2023), Fjördbraut 8, Skagaströnd, Iceland; ‘Pride & Joy’, (2023), Old Parcel Office, Scarborough; MA Art & Ecology Degree Show (2024), Goldsmiths, University of London; ‘Symbiont: collective threads of Ecological study’, Hypha Studios (2024). Artist’s residencies include: NES Artist Residency, Skagaströnd, Iceland (2023); Wilderness Residency, Kurt Schwitterz Merz Barn, The Lake District (2022)

kaiedwardsart[at]gmail.com

www.kaiedwardsart.com


@kaiedwardsart



George Harris
George Harris’s work centres itself within an eco-feminist perspective that connects the lives and histories of weeds to the histories of women. George is an artist working with a range of media including plant materials, ceramic sculptures, painting, weaving and written text to re-align our perspective on the hierarchy of certain plant species. Working mainly with invasive species such as Japanese knotweed, she discovers the inherent links between the demonisation of plant bodies and women’s bodies across multiple histories, as well as the strength and resilience shown through the growth and adaptability of plants and women alike. The work attempts to deconstruct the traditional perceptions of the female body within artwork from one of floral femininity and fertility, to one of strength and power. George does this by constructing installations that display resilient properties of plant attributes such as root systems, while linking them to histories of women’s labour through traditional modes of making such as weaving with plant materials.

georgiaemail4[at]yahoo.com

@sweetweeds_




Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway
Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway’s practice is a quiet exhale, a dreaming body. Using analogue photography and moving image, she creates performance-based, site-responsive and durational works that hope to offer somatic, slow and gentle modes of interacting with the more-than-human world. Rosaleigh’s work gestures towards a ‘radical gentleness’ with place: an embodied, feminist and queer practice that seeks to quietly subvert the reductive binaries and drives to productivity within extractive relationships to land. In doing so, she attempts to utilise the intangible, liminal and fluctuating nature of the sites she works with as spaces for reimagining, dreaming and becoming-with place. Rosaleigh’s current work encompasses a long-term collaboration with an area of London’s marshland, wherein the shared fluidity of body and marsh becomes both her subject and medium, as they curl around one another in a permeable, shifting and boundless embrace.

Rosaleigh is a visual artist based in London. She has exhibited internationally, participated in residencies with institutions such as Tate Modern and Artscape Toronto, and created several commissioned works for arts festivals in the UK. Her photographic work is also held in collections in the UK and internationally. Prior to joining the MA Art & Ecology, she was awarded a BA in Fine Art Painting from Edinburgh College of Art.

r.harveyotway[at]gmail.com 

www.rosaleighharvey-otway.com

@_rosa_leigh




Isobel Humphrey
Isobel Humphrey’s visual and installation work plays on popular media for insect ends. She is investigating how humour, cuteness and familiar media can work with the ‘grossness’ and unknowns of insect lives, to facilitate engagement and enchantment with bugs during a time of ongoing capitalism-inflicted insect loss. Curiosity around the myriad worlds that insects build and inhabit, and the wish for others to share in these wonders, lead her practice. Isobel’s work has included the site-specific outdoor installation Radio Patio (2021), as well as Lovebug (2024) - an interactive human-bug ‘dating app’ and comfortable bedroom-like space designed for sprouting new dynamics in interspecies relations.

hi.isobelhumphrey[at]gmail.com

 isobelhumphrey.hotglue.me



Urte Janus
Urte Janus is a sculptor whose work centres on the transformative properties of reactive substances such as salts, acids and, more recently, tears. Her chemically active sculptures decompose over time, embracing fragility and decay. Janus critiques the capitalist paradox of preservation and discard, alongside the toxicity of its indestructible byproducts, while reflecting on the temporal and fragile nature of the planet, body and mind. Born in Lithuania after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Janus grew up amidst the violence of multigenerational and ecological trauma caused by war, occupation and systemic repression. This experience shaped her practice, making art a means of illuminating the vulnerability of living systems. Her process is driven by rigorous material investigations, examining substances through chemical, cultural and geological lenses. Janus also works with dreams, seeking to enter inaccessible spaces such as salt mines and deep storage repositories to explore the parallels between the Earth’s strata and the underworlds of the mind.

Urte was selected for the Emerging Artist JCDecaux Art Prize, Vilnius (2023) and is an alumna of the Alexander McQueen Sarabande Foundation, London (2023). Her work has been exhibited at Editorial Projects, Vilnius (2024); Arts SU Gallery Space, London (2024); The National Gallery, Vilnius (2023); and The Alexander McQueen Foundation, London (2023) among others. She also curates Project Octagon, an outdoor art initiative at the Anglican Chapel in Nunhead Cemetery, London. 

urte[at]janus.studio 

www.janus.studio

@urte.janus




sarah koekkoek
sarah koekkoek is an ecology-focused multidisciplinary artist working with movement, dance, flora and biomaterials from Tkarón:to (Toronto). Her research examines movement as a language that can help cultivate greater understanding and compassion within our relationship to self, others and the earth. Often her movements are generated by nurturing the reciprocal relationships of humans, and humans with more-than-humans, through embodied offerings such as dance, text and flora collaborations. Since 2017 sarah’s work has been exploring our punctured relationship and existence within the abused and exploited natural world, developing a physical expression of emotions surrounding climate change and the anthropocene.

sarahkoekkoek[at]gmail.com

sarahkoekkoek.com

@trickyruth




Kirsty Robinson
Kirsty Robinson’s practice is a phenomenological interweaving of living relationships to the land, earth-based tradition, modern life and spiritual healing, attempting to answer questions of our human belonging in the web of all things. Local to the UK and on the doorstep of modern capitalist culture, wealth imbalance and a mental health epidemic, Kirsty’s art illustrates a practical engagement in the communities of human and more-than-human kin responding to modern crisis through reconnection to land-based spiritually curious ways of being aimed at unwinding generational trauma and cultivating togetherness. Taking form in poetry, film, performance and sculpture, Kirsty’s work is born through subtle processes of listening and responding to somatic, spiritual and community experiences. Kirsty wishes to encourage others who are called to deepen land connection as a means of re-belonging and to inspire partnership with the wild natural forces that connect all things.

kirstyapsarakaur[at]gmail.com

@deerwalkingwoman




Juliette Suchel
French multi-disciplinary artist Juliette Suchel explores the intersections and overlaps between image-making and activism, documentary and fictional narratives. This interest developed out of her witnessing and photographing local activist actions in France and the UK. She is currently working with colonial material from her own family’s archive in order to re-frame and deconstruct the power and violence such materials otherwise perform. Imaginary cartographies suggest speculative connections between the present and the past in order to enact practices of reparation, care and togetherness. Juliette is based between the UK and France.

juliettesuchel.cargo.site

@juliette_suchel




Jiatong Yuan
Jiatong Yuan is an artist based in London and Beijing. Her work explores themes of domesticity and wildness, gendered bodies and power dynamics, employing the concept of ‘becoming’ to challenge the traditional binary frameworks rooted in her own cultural background. She examines spatial features of domestic dwellings, often presented as a place of safety, as sites of capitalist and patriarchal control.  Her creative process draws on embodied experience, observation and reinterpretation, utilizing materials and imagery from daily life to reshape familiar symbols into tools for critique and imagination. Through fluid, dynamic painterly gestures and text, her work invites audiences to reconsider the hidden tensions between social expectations, freedom and identity in the contemporary world.

Jiatong’s work has been shown internationally in exhibitions including ‘In Days of Heatwave II: Among the Hydrocommons’, Safehouse 2 (2024), London, UK; ‘Symbiont: collective threads of Ecological study’, Hypha Studios (2024), London, UK; ‘I am rooted, but I flow’, Mey Gallery (2024), Los Angeles, USA; Luxun Academy of Fine Arts Art Museum, Shenyang, China; and FujiFilm x-space, Shanghai, China.

yuanqianxi34[at]gmail.com

@2819yjt







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