Articles

Interview with Renee So, Compton Verney

It is the second time in three months that I have come to interview an artist at Compton Verney in Warwickshire and, walking over the elegant bridge and between the beautiful redwood trees, I am thinking that any artist with the opportunity to exhibit here is extremely lucky. An Art Fund Museum of the Year 2025 finalist, the stately home is set in 120 acres (486,000 sq metres) of beautiful gardens, with a wide variety of trees and dotted with contemporary sculptures. Renee So was delighted when Compton Verney approached her to exhibit a few years ago, but it wasn’t just for the beautiful surroundings. “It felt really good, and personally relevant to me, because I have an interest in artefacts,” So tells me, walking up the stairs to the exhibition, due to open that evening. “And also a bit daunting.”

‘I had to address my own identity, which I think I have been avoiding so far’

So wants to show me some of the museum collection first, and especially the Chinese galleries. Owned by several generations of the Verney family, the stately home had become almost derelict by 1993, when Sir Peter Moores took it over under his Peter Moores Foundation and brought his eclectic art collection, among which were some Chinese bronzes. The collection grew and now comprises bronze ritual vessels and other artefacts from the early Shang Dynasty (c1500 to 1050BC) to the Tang Dynasty (AD618-906). So has always been interested in historic objects from different cultures, elements of which she transforms into her own unique sculptures and textiles. “This exhibition is building on things I was already thinking about, but it changed the direction to China,” So explains. “I had to address my own identity, which I think I have been avoiding so far. Being born in Hong Kong, I am Chinese and I am not Chinese. Hong Kong was a British colony, and that brought good and bad elements. On the one hand we had a democracy, on the other hand colonisation.”

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Interview with Emma Talbot, Studio International

I meet Emma Talbot at Compton Verney a day before the official opening of her exhibition How We Learn to Love, her largest UK exhibition to date. Talbot moves between studios in London and Italy, and has a simultaneous solo exhibition in Copenhagen Contemporary and a solo presentation at Centraal Museum Utrecht. I imagine she must be busy, but she generously shows me around the entire exhibition before we sit down to talk on a bench outside.

The exhibition brings together more than 20 new and recent works, including her trademark installations comprising paintings, fabric sculptures on colourful plinths, animations and a new series of drawings. In Talbot’s work the same figure appears, a stylised female with long, sleek hair. “She is an idea of how I imagine myself from the inside,” Talbot says. “That is why she never has a face.” Talbot paints on silk, the process resembling drawing in its fluency and immediacy and resulting in a luminosity and vibrancy of colour that is distinctly hers. The female protagonist makes her way through richly imagined landscapes of colourful patterns, interspersed by bubbles of text. The playful, child-like handwriting betrays its profound philosophical and emotional content, inspired by extensive research.

Read my interview at Studio International


Interview with William Mackrell for Studio International

Whitechapel Gallery’s The London Open Live 2025 is, excitingly and for the first time, focused fully on live art practices. William Mackrell is one of the 15 selected artists who will be performing on dedicated days between now and September. The preview image of Mackrell’s performance Breaking a Dance (2025) shows the artist in a shiny, glittery suit, in what looks like gold sequins on a blue fabric. His blurred face and contours suggest a wild, abrupt movement. It made me think of a rave, or a participant of Eurovision trying out a sports manoeuvre.

Visiting Mackrell in his studio in north London, however, I am struck by a sense of light and calm. There are works on paper on the walls showing abstract, swirling forms in a coppery gold colour. Two large papers are pinned to the wall like mirror images, forming a wall-sized image of a palm tree, its leaves spread out like angelic wings. There are dried sunflowers on stalks, without petals, their heads a cobalt blue. The sound of a train passing gives the space a soothing rhythm.

Like the imprints of sunflower seeds captured inside the copper-coloured swirls, seemingly floating in the wind, Mackrell’s work has moved seamlessly through different media – painting, photography, sculpture, sound and performance – but also through different tones and registers. His most complex performance was the Arts Council-funded Deux Chevaux in 2014, in which the artist staged a procession of two horses pulling a two-horsepower Citroen 2CV car through central London. At a Launchpad residency in France in 2019, the “performance” was fully carried out by nature. Mackrell was struck by the rows and rows of petal-less sunflowers, about to be cut at the end of the summer harvest, and took some into his studio like companions, though not sure at that time what to do with them (many of Mackrell’s works start with close attention to an object or material). Eventually, he left the sunflowers on photographic paper under a rooflight in his studio, lit by moonlight flooding in. The resulting rayograph, Rage Rage Against the Dying of the Light (2020), has a haunting, yet mesmerising quality.

Last year, Mackrell’s Lipstick performance work Divine (2024) was acquired by Muzej Lapidarium Croatia, where it was recently re-presented at the museum in its show Museum as Muse. Mackrell’s exhibition Exposed Tender is currently showing at Lungley Gallery in London, his third solo exhibition with the gallery. Larger and smaller Lipstick paintings are paired with two “Sleep Pieces”: lightbox installations of a mattress and pillow, carrying imprints of his body in sleep. The gallery is bathed in a warm red light, suggesting danger and desire at once.

Studio International spoke with the artist in his studio before the opening of The London Open Live, where Mackrell will be performing his new work Breaking a Dance.

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Ed Atkins, Tate Modern

Ed Atkins’ exhibition starts with a large, white embroidery, not unlike a screen at a Japanese temple, spiritual and serene. But don’t be fooled – Atkins is not returning to the handmade in an attempt to counter our ever-more digitalised world. In fact, the work incorporates an acoustic device and takes in the sounds of the videos on the reverse. Or as Atkins words it, the embroidery is “putting out silence”.

Ed Atkins, The Worm, 2021

Atkins’ words are used as labels throughout the exhibition. It is a device Tate Britain has used before and the curator, Polly Staple, tells me it proved popular with audiences. “Ed is a writer, as well as an artist who is living and breathing his voice, so it made sense to have him write the labels. It questions the authority of the museum text,” she says. Atkins also uses a more objective voice in the form of wall labels by a fictional art press. “In 1905, the composer worried. Would parents still sing to their children? If they could press play on a song with the same ease that she applies to the electric light …?” one of them reads. Here we are, more than a century later, still worrying. Will artificial intelligence take over the world? Will humans become extended computers, chips implanted in their bodies?

Read the full review at Studio International

Rafal Zajko - The Spin Off, Focal Point Gallery

Rafał Zajko likes bread. It appeared in ceramic form at his show at Public Gallery in 2021, where I first encountered his work, and it was the thing that stuck with me then as the antithesis of art – basic, edible, perishable. So, I was happy to encounter the bread again at this exhibition at Focal Point Gallery, like a welcome gift, a spin-off of sorts.

Introducing the exhibition in the first gallery, which is painted a sugary pink, Zajko ignores the six modest, ceramic kaiser rolls resting on the shelves of one of the Larders (2025) – cabinet-like sculptures with relief sliding doors. Instead, he grabs a glass pot filled with pickles (which also contains ceramic miniatures of earlier sculptures), then walks to the large floor-based sculpture in the centre – eight modular parts on wheels, arranged in an ellipse. Each module has an apple-green base and an elaborate relief pattern on top, like the tiled murals you find at underground stations or entrances to public parks. The circular shapes turn out to be lids, and Zajko lifts one lid carefully in order to put the gherkin in its place (gallery staff will be reconfiguring the installation daily). It is captivating to watch, a mix of art performance and the banal gestures usually associated with shopkeeping. Zajko seems at ease in this mysterious realm of art and domesticity, of manufacturing and consumption. Born in Poland in 1988, the year before the fall of the Berlin wall, he came of age in an era when consumer goods still had something of a magical aura.

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Interview with Olivia Bax for Studio International

When I visit Olivia Bax on a chilly but sunny Friday afternoon in her London studio, she has barely had time to catch her breath: teaching in Cheltenham, at the University of Gloucestershire, on two consecutive days, then getting the train to Sheffield to attend the opening of These Mad Hybrids, the exhibition she curated at the Millennium Galleries of Sheffield, then back to London and her studio. Busy is a natural state for Bax: last year alone, she had four solo exhibitions, in the middle of which was the opening of the first manifestation of These Mad Hybrids at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA). I ask her how it felt, seeing the exhibition come together for a second time in a different space.

It was really humbling,” she replies. “The show looked excellent at the RWA, in a traditional room with classical architecture. The Millenium Galleries in Sheffield presented the exact opposite – a 1990s construction, just one big white room with a grey floor. It was interesting to see how well the sculptures could adapt to a completely different architecture. I was having a conversation this morning with John Summers, one of the artists, and he said walking into the Millennium Galleries it’s like the first time you see or smell something – the works have this raw, primitive quality.”

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Mohammed Z Rahman - Remember to Live

When I enter Peer half an hour before the opening of Mohammed Z Rahman’s exhibition Remember to Live, I encounter the gallery’s director, Ellen Greig and guest curator and trustee Eliel Jones sitting nonchalantly side by side on one of Rahman’s upturned wood crates, chatting. It perfectly sets the scene: Rahman’s work is fuelled by conversations. Between friends and family, between people and animals, between reality and dream, with the self.

Rahman, a self-taught artist with a degree in social anthropology, is getting noticed: their painting Divali was purchased by the Government Art Collection last year and Tate’s Frieze Fund enabled the acquisition of two paintings: The Lovers and The Spaghetti House. Through the multiple arched windows of the yellow Spaghetti House people can be seen eating; piles of spaghetti stacked up in front of the house and on the roof, and dangling off a giant fork like an edible streetlamp. Rahman’s paintings always contain something slightly mysterious, absurdist and humorous.

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Lauren Halsey, Emajendat, Serpentine Gallery

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Writing about this show is a little like writing about hip-hop, a cultural movement that prides itself on its nature of being indefinable. Or, as Greg Tate said in his 1996 spoken word performance, What is Hip-hop: “Hip-hop currently resides beneath the noise … You know hip-hop when you see it, you may not see hip-hop before it seizes you. Hip-hop is not what it is today but what it could be tomorrow … Arguing with hip-hop about the nature of hip-hop is like arguing with water about the nature of wetness … Hip-hop flows right through ya … Hip-hop is black Prozac.”

Halsey has created a multicolour, candyfloss, shout-out vision of a universe, a Gesamtkunstwerk that is maximalist yet hyper-specific, a meta-commentary on what it is to be part of something, to have a past and a future, to believe and to thrive, to make a mark. I leave the show upbeat and a little confused, in all the right ways.

Interview with Anna Perach for Studio International

Anna Perach is one of the lucky ones. She was hoping to get a studio space at Gasworks in Vauxhall for a while, and in 2021 one became free. “Studios are so hard to come by in London, and there are only five spaces here,” she tells me while making me a coffee in the Gasworks kitchen, where a large table is set for a lunch to welcome the new artists in residence. “But then I got a call that there was one available. I thought I was coming for an interview, but instead they showed me around and welcomed me straight away. I was beyond myself – it was a huge step up for me. For the first time, I had enough space for professional equipment and yarns so the space itself really pushed my practice forward. And it feels like family here.”

Her studio is spacious, with three big east-facing windows. On one side is a large tufting frame, a machine she bought when she moved into this larger space; the tufting gun she used to make her fabric pieces is dangling from it. Next to it, on the other wall, is a shelving unit full of coloured yarns, faced by the final result – one of Anna’s wearable sculptures. I sit on a chaise lounge in the corner, facing Anna at her desk, the sunlight streaming in. A large book lies open. Perach’s work has always been research heavy and I am curious about what she is currently reading.

Read the interview at Studio International