Material Interest

Laura Porter is based between North Devon and South London, and is the founding director and curator of Studio KIND CIC, an artist-led space in Barnstaple. Having obtained a BA in fine art from Middlesex University and an MA in sculpture from Camberwell (UAL) Laura has received funding from The British Council, Arts Council England, A-n and has exhibited across the country. 

Intrinsically grounded in the traditions of craft and textiles, and the histories of fibre art activism, Laura’s practice pushes back against an automated, digitised world and hierarchies of labour and material, instead placing value in slow, low-tech processes performed by the body. Using her own body as a site of action and a renewable energy source, she undertakes these labour-intensive tasks in order to critique ideas around productivity, women’s work, and the experiences of female bodies in man-made spaces.

Working with discarded clothing – a material that carries with it cyclical histories of land, worker, consumer and waste – Laura breaks down the fibres to create a textiles pulp that is re-formed into solid structures. The labour-intensive process pays homage both to the bodies that made the garments, and the bodies that wore the clothing, whilst also creating a cyclical, renewable art material that can be re-hydrated and re-applied infinitely. 

The sculptures become a proposition for a post-human world, where a new material language is formed from their previous bodily interactions. The sculptures re-imagine our material world as neither rigid nor organic - straddling the space between biological and artificial; rural and urban; lived and inactive. Exploring the in-betweenness of repurposed materials and built environments, Laura imagines consciousness as an energy that is absorbed by these over time, and hints at a new life form; one evolving from man-made materials into a quasi-living entity. 

Drawing on the parallels between painting and our relationship to photographic images and processes, Helen Kincaid’s work explores ideas around our anchorage on past and present, meaning and absence, fragmentation and erasure. She’s interested in the increasingly elusive notion of a whole, of seeing the complete picture and the idea that we are only ever dealing with fragments, traces, disconnections and gaps.

Kincaid works with images of soft furnishings, curtains, wallpaper, upholstery – elements that often boundary our interior spaces. She is interested in how these ‘coverings’ act as a form of screen or veil, a protective but inhibiting barrier to what is beyond view, how their recesses, folds and surface become psychological spaces, timeless micro landscapes, where perspective shifts and the figurative becomes abstracted.

Kincaid’s process involves working with multiple images, cutting, tearing, folding and reassembling the photographic fragments; looking for a collision of ill fitting parts that might suggest transformation or new meaning, the familiar on the verge of becoming something else, what Blanchot described as ‘unrevealed yet manifest’. Using a series of thin oil glazes the paintings are rendered with as little paint and as few brush marks as possible, reinforcing the idea of a fragile layer of pigment over a blank surface, just as in the construction of a photograph. This parallel with painting highlights for her an interesting contrast in scale between a physical thing and an idea – a literal and symbolic proximity of something and nothing.

Helen Kincaid is an artist and curator based in Stroud, Gloucestershire. She was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize 2023 and the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2022. Selected exhibitions include When the Curtain Falls at Blueshop Gallery, London , Hopscotch at Bonian Space, Beijing and ART021 in Shanghai, China in 2024; JMPP 2023 at The Walker Gallery Liverpool; CBPP at Huddersfield Art Gallery and Thames Side Studio Gallery, Gestura ll at Marie Jose Gallery London and A Generous Space at Hastings Contemporary in 2022; the 2019 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; Delayed Rays of a Star at the Hardwick Gallery, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, 2018 and DATA at The Contemporary Art Society, London.

Penelope Brook is a New Zealand-born, Oxford-based artist whose abstract, mixed-media works are born of her habit of meandering walks, and her love of nature’s small and unexpected beauties.  She is particularly interested in lichens, mosses and fungi: the way they soften a gravestone or a log pile; the way they charge the grey of stone, the grey of winter with improbable and seductive colour; their persistence; their vulnerability to our disregard.  She takes inspiration from the journeyers in Chinese landscape paintings, small in the immensity of nature.  From Durer, stepping down from a stagecoach to be smitten by a patch of grasses.  From the floral marginalia of late-medieval tapestries.  She describes her work as both a way of holding and sharing the joy of slow, quiet observation, and as an invitation to care - believing in the fierce power of love and wonder in sustaining activism to sustain biodiversity.

Grids stitch across much of Penelope’s work, but she resists a simple metaphor.  (She quotes Agnes Martin: “When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees.”)  Her grids were born of walking: echoing footfall, keeping time, marking out space and attention. Hand-stitched rather than drawn or painted, they at once float across and pierce the surface of the work in attachment and detachment, in conversation between front and back.  Sometimes they carry echoes of the biologist’s quadrat grid.  Sometimes they are a gathering net that might hold a fragment of fibre of colour, that might hold the eye.  Always they carry a memory of warp and weft, of the cloth that holds safe.

Penelope made the pieces in the current exhibition during and following a month at Ós Textile Residency in northern Iceland in April 2025.  They are born of Iceland’s confounding landscapes (large and small), of basalt and quartz, cliff and fissure; of the shocking brightnesses of alpine lichens; of late snow on last season’s grasses; of the discombobulating coincidence of lengthy light and deep cold; of the seeming infinity of northward sea.

Penelope graduated MA (Textiles) from the Royal College of Art in 2023, specializing in mixed media.  She has exhibited in in the UK and Europe, including as a Will Gompertz selection at the 2024 ING Discerning Eye exhibition, and undertaken art residencies in Scotland and Iceland.

These paintings are part of an ongoing series exploring the drapery of garments, and the power of clothing to define a mood, relate to culture, or act formally within the pictorial space.

As part of my research, I visited a theatre costume and props warehouse. The packed rows of clothes, worn by different bodies over the decades, muffled the sound. I explored the corridors of cotton, crinoline hoops and netting, dresses of all eras, fibres full of stories, but empty of person.

I imagined the actors playing their parts, rehearsing to empty seats, entertaining full houses, hoops being fitted, bodies squeezed in, layers of make-up, and spot lit stages highlighting the drama.

My eye catches the rhythms of the varying waistlines, the trims and embellishments on jostling sleeves, the pared down utility uniform, restricting boned Victorian undergarments, and the theatrical layers of the flamenco attire.

The characteristics of the garments emerge during the process of painting, where the handling of paint is used to create movement, tempo, depth, and sometimes a suggestion or trace of the body.

The cropped arranged garments may also represent more formal aspects of colour, shape and pattern within the paintings.

Tamara Dubnyckyj has an MA, Painting from the Royal College of Art, 2007 and a BA (Hons) Fine Art at Middlesex University. She lives and works in London.

Tamara was recently selected for the BayArt Open 2025, and the Beep Painting Prize. In 2024 she exhibited in group shows; Uncertain Objects, Part 1 in Somerset, A Room of One’s Own, Irving Gallery, Oxford and It Rose and it Fell, Terrace Gallery, London, and was selected for the ING Discerning Eye exhibition.

In 2023, she was selected for the RA Summer Exhibition and Wells Art Contemporary, A Generous Space 3, Huddersfield Art Gallery. She exhibited as part of Dungeness 5th Continent, Folkestone Art Gallery, and Stage, curated by LLE gallery, Kingsgate Project Space.

Previously, she has exhibited in many group shows and solo shows across the UK, Europe, and Columbia.

Rachael Causer is an artist working with sculpture and drawing. 

Her practice explores physical encounters with objects and memory. Working primarily with a direct engagement with materials and processes she negotiates the slippery ground between knowing and not knowing what something is. Causer plays with negative space and

the unpredictability of working with fluid materials like plaster, as a means of exploring

abstracted forms, familiarity and perception. She constructs one-off casting ‘situations’, often from unconventional materials, pre-lining moulds with fabrics, fibres, dust, tape and other materials to explore intriguing contrasts of surface, imprint and internal structures. Through the additive and reductive processes of constructing and peeling back, filling and sanding, hiding and revealing, she explores a material conversation, creating surfaces that embody their processes of making and give the viewer clues as to the ways in which they were made. 

Her work explores process, time and material remains, focussing on traces relating to touch, repeated activity and labour embodied in everyday objects around us. With a contemporary, archaeological slant her practice questions how objects and spaces can be imbued with history, revealing something of the ways in which they’ve been used, inhabited and retain vestiges of their past. She is fascinated with places of work and daily activity - tabletops, workbenches, desks, sheds. Her interest lies in the evidence from processes - the crumbs, drill holes and cut marks left behind, seeing these spaces as familiar but often overlooked landscapes, charting the ways we impact upon our changing environment and fragile ecologies over time. 

Causer is particularly interested in tiny microclimates such as mosses and lichens, that live in coexistence with other ecosystems in complex and sophisticated ways. She is fascinated by the way they cloak or encrust upon surfaces, inhabiting edges or boundary layers and forming a sense of a covering or a skin. They exist in both fabricated and organic situations, and it is this space of overlap, between the manmade and the natural environment, that intrigues Causer and informs much of her work. 

Rachael Causer (born 1970, Somerset, UK) is a British artist living and working in London.

She works in education at the V&A Museum and in various schools and colleges, the NHS and the community. She has an MA in Fine Art from UAL and was a member of MASS Sculpture mentor programme from 2021-23. She is a member of the Changeable Beast Sculpture Collective. She exhibits widely, including recently at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in Penzance and in a solo exhibition Thatch, at M2 Gallery in London.

Sun Ju Lee’s practice explores the intersection of place, situation, and transformation

through intermedial artworks. Drawing on shadows captured in photographs, she

reimagines these fleeting traces through layered processes involving print, drawing,

glass, and textiles. The outcomes blur the boundary between the real and the

reinterpreted, the sensed and the constructed.

Her approach is nomadic and research-based, often developed through residencies

and field projects. Immersive encounters with each place guide her material choices

and making processes. In gathering resonant materials and engaging with context-

specific techniques, she cultivates new ways of sensing, mapping, and articulating

spatial experience.

Her ongoing project, a Practiced Place, reflects this methodology. It explores the

relationship between lived experience and constructed memory, weaving narratives of

place through tactile forms. Whether working with the transparency of glass or the

layering of textiles, Lee’s practice invites viewers to consider how we inhabit place

physically, emotionally, and imaginatively and how the ephemeral can be reactivated

through material form.

Sun Ju Lee is a London-based artist working across drawing, printmaking, glass, and

textiles. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Royal Academy of

Arts (London), Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf), National Glass Centre (Sunderland), Cité

internationale des arts (Paris), and Seoul Olympic Museum of Art (Seoul). Since 2012,

She has held four solo exhibitions and will present a solo exhibition at The Muse at 269

in October 2025. Her practice is shaped by residencies and projects, supported by

Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Arts Council England, a-n Artist Bursaries, the

Arts & Humanities Research Council, and Arts Council Korea.

Lee’s awards include the Jutta Cuny-Franz Foundation Talent Award, the National Glass

Centre Residency Award, the Create Space London commission, and the Tim and

Belinda Mara Award. Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Glasmuseum

Hentrich, the National Glass Centre, and the Royal College of Art. She earned her MA in

Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 2010 and a practice-led PhD at the University of

Leeds in 2022.