Spring Crit Club 2022

We are delighted to be starting Crit Club again for 2022, and are pleased to announce the participating artists are Alex Parry, Bettina Furnee, Hannah Al-Shemmeri, Johanna Bolton, Nisa Khan, Rhiannon Evans, Tess Radcliffe, …kruse. Artists will come together every six weeks to share new work and ideas, whilst sharing any changes in their practice and offering support to one another. 

Alex Parry is an artist currently doing a practice based PhD exploring about how art workshops act as a form of world building and speculative fiction – in terms of ideas, social relationships and materials produced. She has an interest in group dynamics, and creating inclusive structures for group work and is currently part of Studio Yea with Eva Freeman and Youngsook Choi who are a group of artists exploring how to support each other in these precarious times. Alex has an MA in Contemporary Art Practice: Public Sphere course from the RCA, and a BA in Social Anthropology and Media from Goldsmiths University. She often makes participatory artwork in public spaces and has worked with organisations including the Pumphouse Gallery, Hardwick Gallery, FACT, and Hackney Council.My multi-disciplinary art practice includes text-based installation, print, moving
image, performance and public art.

Bettina Furnee‘s work features wordplay, text and sound, absurdity, the everyday, slippage, displacement and fear of no-return. She often collaborate with artists, writers, musicians and audiences on longer-term projects and public art schemes. Bettina has been commissioned extensively, exhibited in solo and group shows, and awarded residencies and grants in support of self-initiated projects. Most recently she was selected for Syllabus VI (2020/21) and in 2019 toured collaborative and participatory choral performance work Even You Song. Based in Cambridge (UK), she is a studio artist at Wysing Arts Centre.

Johanna Bolton is a Swedish artist living in London. She works across sculpture, installation, photography and performance to build up archives of human presence and movement left behind in material form. These can take the form of discarded elastic bands, scrunched up paper or the fabric folds in clothes. Johanna received the 2021 Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors, and a residency at metal fabricator Benson Sedgwick in 2022. Previous projects include a residency at Kew Gardens Herbarium, a commission for the Bomberg Archive at London South Bank University and exhibitions at Gerlesborgs Konsthall in Sweden and Edicola Spoleto / MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy. Her first solo show was in 2018 at Borough Road Gallery, London South Bank University.’

Nisa Khan is the recipient of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 award. As part of the award, Khan’s work Have you been sat there plucking your fanny hair? has toured Firstsite, Colchester and South London Gallery. Khan holds an MA (Distinction) in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, where her work The Browns Head Out of Town was shown at Tate Britain’s: Late at Tate (2020). Khan’s work from rags, to bitches to riches (Sir Ochterlony & His Bibi’s) was part of Saatchi Gallery’s London Grads Now. 21 exhibition. Khan’s multidisciplinary practice unpicks multiculturalism by investigating embedded cultural codes. She is interested in exposing unpleasant, crude, familiar and unfamiliar elements of her working-class British-Pakistani heritage. Khan particularly draws from early conversations with her mother, whose colourful language contrasted with the strict social codes she attempted to enforce. She is interested in humour and its role in representations, using it as a tool which simultaneously lures the viewer and translates these experiences.

Rhiannon Evans work focuses on the creation, mediation and transmission of personal and collective archives – physical, digital and embodied; and the relationships within and between these. Her practice has been primarily socially-engaged, creating intimate events that celebrate and create private and collective contemporary folklore; often using simple constructed or everyday objects with actions, conversation, coincidence and chance to explore private and public relational space: working with happenstance audiences within local and on-line landscapes, encouraging contingency, spontaneity and playfulness. Her material practice explores re-mediation; re-forming documentation and archival images, using drawing, photograms, auto-ethnographical text, small-scale 3 D collage and glass sculpture.

Tess Radcliffe is a digital artist based in Walsall in the Black Country, working with film, moving image, audio, and photography. Her work explores landscape in its broadest form and particularly where nature/wildlife intersects and interacts with local suburban, urban, and industrial spaces, and places.  Tess is interested in changing light effects (natural and electric) and movement through, and within the landscape, contrasting with the stillness and geometry of architectural forms including utilitarian street furniture.  Music is also an important part of her practice, and she take inspiration from the production processes and visual culture of electronic music (editing, sampling, layering, remixing) when creating her work.

…kruse is an artist and writer who works with digital media, drawing, text and performative practices. …kruse had a rural upbringing and engagement with the environment and landscape informs all her work. She often undertakes long distance walks or pilgrimages immersing herself in nature, exploring the connections between place and myth, landscape and the body. In recent years, alarmed and grief stricken by the effects of climate crisis on the natural world, …kruse has been working on a multidisciplinary, speculative fiction project, which explores how climate change may affect human and more-than-human communities. In conceptual collaboration with AuTCRONE, a semi-fictional cyborg from the future, themes including temporality, transhumanism and biophilia emerge. Recent commissions include a seven day silent retreat for Meadow Arts’ All Alone project in 2021 and a text published to mark Artists Newsletter’s (a-n) 40th anniversary, published in December 2020 in collaboration with Black Hole Club.