Charlotte Edey
Charlotte Edey (b.1992) is a British artist and illustrator. Her work is primarily concerned with contemporary issues of selfhood. Cultural signifiers and personal mythologies inform ongoing narratives through a process of world-building. The politics of space are explored through the lens of identity; how the intersections of identities both shape our interior landscapes and define the structuring that we navigate externally. Her imagined realms are peppered with symbolist motifs that connote the body politic, magic, the erotic, biracialism and gender. Her process combines tapestry, embroidery and sculptural walnut as an expansion of her drawing practice. This journey between dimensions from her works on paper – what is added, altered and even removed by these multiple processes – creates a layered complexity in both material and theme. Mark-making and gesture are explored through hand-embroidery in silk, forging a relationship between drawn line and thread. Her installations reference ritualistic methods of display from altarpieces to shrines, forming portals to imagined otherworlds that offer the opportunity to investigate our present.
Bea Bonafini
Bea Bonafini (b.1990) is an Italian artist whose interdisciplinary practice draws from oneiric visions, overlapping personal and ancient mythologies. Her tactile, intimate worlds centre around sensuality, vulnerability and fantasy, forming swirling scenarios that are fragmented and multi-layered. Figures are evanescent and transcendental, referencing spiritual imagery where fluid bodies collide, disperse, swim, fly and fall. Bonafini’s work expands the possibilities of painting, tapestry and sculpture and their interrelationships. Holistic perspectives are developed in close dialogue with architecture, where space is approached as an extension to the work to envelop the viewer. Acting as protected spheres, Bonafini’s installations are openings to encounters between the earthly and the otherworldly.
