Nectere: MARIA, Hannah Morgan, Ding Ruyi and Sabīne Šnē | In collaboration with Acme

MARIA’s practice eviscerates and reassembles the intersections of chronic illness, language, race and notions of transformation through pain. Her video and sculpture installation, YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE, featuring original sound by artist Samuel Barbier-Ficat, is influenced by the potential of constructing new bodies: digital, earthen, and weaponised through the lens of chronic illness, race, and gender and sexuality. She explores combining sculptural and digital media forms that take cues from art history, anime, high femme mindset, weaponry, and deconstructed club beats.

Ding Ruyi’s practice focuses on a series of social issues, including surveillance, consumerism and power relations. Ding’s installation print(“Hell World!”) is catalysed by the artist’s job as an accountant and examines the precarious capitalistic economic system. Her recent work What do you do for a living as an artist? further questions the value of labour and aesthetics by subverting the historical conception that art and work are opposing factors.

With practices spanning digital media, sculpture, and sound, each artist presents their unique vision into their shared space of research exchange over the course of their year-long Acme residency.

 

Acme’s early career programme provides artists in their first five years of practice with a variety of support structures, including bursaries, rent relief, professional development, mentoring and exhibition opportunities. The programme aims to make a significant intervention at critical moments in artists’ careers. Recipients work from shared studios in order to encourage an environment of peer support and critical dialogue. 

The Goldsmiths MFA Award is a partnership between Acme and Goldsmiths, University of London, generously supported by Jane Hamlyn. The Adrian Carruthers Award is a partnership between Acme and The Slade School of Fine Art, funded by Acme and the Adrian Carruthers Memorial Fund. The Helen Scott Lidgett Award is a partnership between Acme, Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London), Art Academy of Latvia and the family of Helen Scott Lidgett.

MARIA (Goldsmiths MFA Award) is an aggressively high femme Latine/American writer, performer, and artist who can usually be found at her local karaoke bar or serving her hot takes on pop culture. Based in London, she makes sculptural installations, performances, video and sound that eviscerate and reassemble the intersections of chronic illness and race, and systemic powers by using herself/body as a conduit and muse. She combines natural and digital materials to engineer environments that create radical bodily connections between cyber and organic networks. Currently, she is exploring pain (body, emotional, communal, spiritual) as a grounding for transformation and transmutation of the bodymind into an equitable and liberated future. She has exhibited internationally with shows at Copperfield Gallery (London, 2022), PWA (NYC 2023), Beeler Gallery at CCAD (Columbus, OH) and ArtRotterdam (2023). Her work is supported by the Goldsmiths Exhibitions Hub. 

Hannah Morgan’s (Adrian Carruthers Award) practice is sculptural installation. Working across audio/video, sculpture, and text to create material components that consider decay and emergence in underland spaces. Using excavation as an entry point, Hannah examines geographic entangled states of matter and organisms within caves and mines across the UK. In this, Hannah addresses grief, acts of pilgrimage, and the radical potential of the subterranean as a speculative landscape. Hannah was awarded the Prankerd Jones Memorial Prize 2019 for excellence in fine art at the Slade School of Fine Art, the Adrian Carruthers Award 2022/23 where she has been in residency in Stratford. Hannah recently completed a residency at Cove Park, Scotland in 2023, and a solo presentation with Xxijra Hii Gallery, London, earlier this year.

 

Ding Ruyi (Helen Scott Lidgett Award) a London-based artist working in installation, moving image and performance. Inspired by her nuanced observation and experience of the surroundings, most of her research and practice focus on a series of social issues, including surveillance, power relations and consumerism. Through the use of found materials derived from everyday life, her interactive installations allows the spectators to experience, question and criticize the ideologies that we take for granted. 

Sabīne Šnē (Helen Scott Lidgett Award) explores the intersections between culture and nature and is particularly interested in the relationships between humans and non-humans. By weaving together scientific researchc , contemporary theories, and fiction, she creates worlds that highlight entanglements in ecosystems and multi-species intelligence. Šnē has a broad interdisciplinary practice that combines video, 3D animation, sound, sculpture, and drawing. Sabīne moved to London from Riga after receiving the Helen Scott-Lidgett Studio award (2023)  post graduating from the Art Academy of Latvia. She has had two solo exhibitions To Be We Need to Know the River (Lot Projects, London, 2023) and Partner, Parasite (Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Rīga, 2022), and has participated in various group exhibitions in the UK and Europe. 

London-based charity Acme has been supporting artists in need since 1972. Over this time, they have provided thousands of artists at all stages of career with affordable studios, work/live space and a programme of artist support through residencies and awards. Acme supports the development and production of art by reducing the practical challenges that artists face, increasing their ability to take creative risks.

 

Acme is the single largest provider of permanent affordable artist studios in England, supporting over 800 individual artists across 15 buildings in Greater London each year.

 

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