Jerwood Survey is a major biennial touring exhibition that presents new commissions by 10 early-career artists from across the UK, providing a distinctive snapshot of current artistic concerns and approaches in the visual arts. It spans a wide breadth of disciplines and takes a non-institutional approach to selection by inviting leading artists to nominate the most outstanding early-career artists making work today.
The artists exhibiting at Collective for the final stop on its tour are: Che Applewhaite, Aqsa Arif, MV Brown, Philippa Brown, Alliyah Enyo, Sam Keelan, Paul Nataraj, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Ebun Sodipo and Kandace Siobhan Walker. The artists’ works wrestle with complex subjects that are inextricable from the concerns of our time through the lens of photography, installation, sound, moving image and sculpture; addressing themes from colonialism, climate change and healing to gender, sexuality, folklore and spirituality.
Marking the first time this project has come to Scotland, this exhibition at Collective follows Jerwood Survey III’s tour to Site Gallery in Sheffield until 26 January 2025, g39 in Cardiff in Summer 2024 and its launch at Southwark Park Galleries in London in Spring 2024.
The Artists
Kandace Siobhan Walker is a writer and artist of Jamaican-Canadian, Saltwater Geechee and Welsh heritage, living in London. Her practice explores the intersections of personal history with wider social movements and systems. Dreams, displacement, belonging, care, community, spirituality and justice are recurring themes in her work. Walker’s domestic bedroom installation built of montaged footage and poetic spoken word reflects on medieval esoteric traditions, futurology, and Afro-Atlantic-Indigenous spiritualities in order to challenge Western discourses on the climate crisis. Walker was nominated by gentle/radical.
Ebun Sodipo, based in London, makes multidisciplinary work for black trans people of the future. Guided by black feminist study, with a methodology of collage and fabulation, her work locates and produces real and imaginable narratives of black trans women’s presence, embodiment, and interiority across the past, present and future. An elegant, hybrid brass sculpture will be presented in Jerwood Survey III, which fuses scanned images of hands from several of her loved ones across the black trans women community. Sodipo was nominated by Sin Wai Kin and Evan Ifekoya.
Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh is an artist, researcher and Gaeilgeoir from Derry, living and working sporadically with chronic illness and the legacy of post colonialism. His mixed media practice explores the complexities inherent in inherited memories, ecological decline, the embodiment of personal loss and lived experience. Through collaborations (often in informal economies), he explores how we might consider loss in relation to intergenerational trauma. These entanglements are explored in Ó Dochartaigh’s works for Jerwood Survey III through a series of sculptural healing tools in glass, ceramic and wood, and diagrams linking medical modifications of the body with local Irish history and lore. Ó Dochartaigh was nominated by Locky Morris.
Paul Nataraj is a sound artist, researcher and educator, from Blackburn, Lancashire. His research and sound art practice explores the South Asian diaspora, sound, memory and sonic materiality. Repetitions of 108: Counting almost nothing is an installation of nine modified vinyl record players and records that interrogates the complex relationship between colonialism, diaspora, spirituality and the navigation of mixed-race identity. Nine 9 is used as a fraction of 108, which has special significance across many religions, myth, cosmology and ritual. It is mobilised here to question tensions inherent in temporal and spatial movement of diverse epistemologies and spiritual discourses. Nataraj was nominated by Nicola Singh.
Sam Keelan, based in London, uses his work to tell gay surreal narratives, primarily executed through photography, moving image and writing. Taking ideas around individualism, care and community from the collective consciousness, he creates queer doppelgängers of dominant middle class ideologies, often reinserted back into domestic spaces. Keelan’s work presents a silent durational film of a tender and surreal scene of two male figures — one human, one a human-sized hot water bottle — embracing and sleeping in simple, somewhat absurd, domesticity. Keelan was nominated by Lindsey Mendick.
Glasgow artist Alliyah Enyo’s interdisciplinary practice gravitates towards embodied and meditative processes. She harnesses song, somatics and sculpture to create ‘sonorous myth’ installations and performances. The bedrock of her research investigates myths, folkloric tales or science fiction stories concerning queer and feminine ecological perspectives and histories. Enyo’s multi-layered sonic and ceramic performance installation for Jerwood Survey III takes influence from ancient Greek mythologies and Scottish folklore to echo a futuristic deep sea apocalypse. Enyo was nominated by Hanna Tuulikki.
Philippa Brown lives in Cardiff and is a multidisciplinary artist looking through portals and hovering between enlightenment, fantasy and bogus wisdom. She makes sculptural forms, installations and paintings as a means to explore the ambiguous, magical and sometimes fragile interconnectedness between histories, materials, beliefs and bodies of all kinds. Brown’s vibrantly painted architectural sculpture for Jerwood Survey III is bound with symbolic objects and images that reference individual and collective divination, spirituality and spaces of transformation. Brown was nominated by Davida Hewlett.
Rooted in performance, Glasgow based MV Brown’s practice uses the human body and new technologies to explore tensions across embodied subjectivity, the body as spectacle and socio-techno constructs of gender and sexuality. Drawing on cyberfeminist, glitch-feminist and transhumanist approaches; they investigate avatars, prototypes, ‘false-self’hoods and the fallacy of the ‘IRL’. For Jerwood Survey III, they have created a karaoke performance to camera installation generated through 3D body scans, AI and CGI software. Brown was nominated by Hanna Tuulikki.
Aqsa Arif is an interdisciplinary artist working across film, installation and poetry in which she explores identity disruption, migration and the process of healing through archetypal narratives. As a Pakistani refugee to Scotland, now based in Glasgow, she experienced life with the split of two cultural identities, a polarity underpinning her work. Arif takes her dual heritage as a standpoint to explore two female archetypes in South Asian folktales — the heroine Marvi and the ghost-witch Churail — in a new moving-image installation. Arif was nominated by Alberta Whittle.
London based Che Applewhaite is an artist, filmmaker and writer who facilitates critical engagement with ongoing histories borne of territory, ideology, and documentary. His work has been exhibited internationally at film festivals, museums, galleries, and sites of study, recently selected for the Aesthetica Film Festival 2023. Applewhaite will present a photographic paper sculpture for Jerwood Survey III which forms a fragmented narrative around an auto-fictional character. Images taken from his personal archive, express ideas of the diasporic home and queer familial connection in the context of colonialism. Applewhaite was nominated by Sin Wai Kin.