Small is Beautiful

41st Edition

MOVANA CHEN (b 1974)

Movana Chen's works are from a recent collaboration project with her body sculpture of knitted maps, Questioning the Line.

This new body sculpture transformed from old maps to a new body, a new skin, a new identity. Feeling safe inside the sculpture, like a cave of 'home'. Where is home, where we are belonging, entering to a new door, to our world, a living land for us, there are no lines.

Exhibiting at the Thailand Bienniale in 2023-2024, Movana Chen will also present an installation at M+ Museum in Hong Kong in early 2024, Knitting Conversations, reflecting on female labour, personal and shared memories, material transformation, and time. 

Chen is based in Hong Kong and Lisbon.

MERCEDES WORKMAN (b 1988)

The piles of food in these works represent being a woman. Ripe and ready, and then overripe and rotting. Women serve. We are devoured and then discarded in piles to rot. There is a fine line between the two.

Mercedes Workman’s work is a response to her overactive mind; she works both fast and determinedly. Recurring themes include relationships and interactions, perceptions, judgements, idiosyncrasies and clichés, particularly around womanhood, motherhood and identity. Her practice centres around her passion for ceramics combined with drawing from life and illustrative work, expressed in vigorous brushwork and mark-making. 'I hope to create something familiar and comforting, with an energy that’s easy to live with,’ says the artist, who enjoys taking on domestic commissions.

Mercedes Workman lives and works in Margate, Kent, UK. She recently had a solo exhibition, ABC of Me, at TKE Studios, where she is also a Studio Holder.

VICTORIA CROWE (b 1945)

I begin with acute observation. Then imagination and association transform objective reality into a complex personal dialogue, evolve layers of meaning elaborated by personal memories, set against the vastness of historical time.

Working between painting, drawing and printmaking, with each discipline informing the other, the inner structure of Victoria Crowe's work is often concerned with memory and association, timelessness and fragility, moving towards a metaphysical understanding of the nature of experience, as well as nature itself, real and transmuted. A profound quietude embodies her work, as her subjects, whether formal sitters or trees in a dusk winterscape, resonate Crowe's own continuous, layered journey of discovery, at once muted and illuminated.

Based in Scotland, Victoria Crowe's work is held in public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, London, National Museums of Scotland, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Danish National Portrait Gallery, Chatsworth House and the Royal Academy. 

KIM BOOKER (b 1983)

I use figures in my work like language to describe personal experiences. Multiple figures represent the plurality of lived experience; how feelings can be complex, and conflicting emotions can be felt simultaneously. The works in 'Small is Beautiful' are about a time of physical and emotional change, moving from the status quo into something new and uncertain. 

Kim Booker completed a BFA at City and Guilds of London Art School in 2019, and has since exhibited widely in the UK, and abroad, including South Korea, Paris and Cologne. Rooted in the tradition of modern painting, Booker’s work shows the influence of German Expressionism, idiosyncratic British painting, such as the work of Roy Oxlade, and American abstract expressionism - combined with a contemporary perspective on identity and relationships.

JOSEPH DUPRÉ (b 1987)

I love the idea of making a beautiful object complete with all the gold pomp and ceremony of a piece designed for the altar of a cathedral, to be adored and worshipped by pilgrims and admirers, this time in the holy white walls of the gallery.

Joseph Dupré is an artist and medical doctor, living and working in the UK. He studied at the Royal Drawing School, and explores a wide range of media, including ceramics, bronze and printmaking. 

Dupré based Reliquary of St Tudor, 2023, on a 13th century French chasse, or reliquary, a container for the relics of saints. Recreating and modernising this idea, making a ‘modern relic’, the decoration includes allegories pertaining to the umbilicus, such as two cherubs joined by a prominent umbilical cord. 

STUDIO LENCA (b 1986)

Jose Campos (aka Studio Lenca) is an artist that doesn't belong anywhere apart from the world he creates. Going by the name Studio Lenca, 'Studio' refers to a space for experimentation, a laboratory for praxis; 'Lenca' links the artist to the Mesoamerican indigenous people of eastern El Salvador.

The artist was forcibly displaced as a consequence of El Salvador's violent civil war, one of the first wave of child migrants moving to the USA. Travelling illegally with his mother, the family lived as 'illegal aliens', cleaning houses with no fixed address.

Lenca's allusions to materiality and the depiction of regal figures seek to decentralise the collective idea of Salvadoran identity. Proud, courageous and visible. All the things that a young Studio Lenca couldn't be. The subjects stare out from the canvas, holding our gaze. Sharply dressed in colourful outfits and hats, confidently taking up space. The situation is often ambiguous, are they dancing to traditional Cumbias Salvadoreñas or running from homeland security? The work playfully references a combination of biographical anecdotes, personal reflections and folkloric iconography. Visual cues are recalibrated to reclaim autonomy over a fragmented history.

Campos lives and works in Margate, Kent, UK.