Studio_Leigh commissions emerging artists: Catch them before they skyrocket

Studio_Leigh opened in September 2015. To celebrate the first year anniversary of one of the most innovative emerging art spaces in London, I am dedicating this article to revisit a selection of the gallery’s limited edition commissions. With a sharp eye, Studio_Leigh spots talent that you will be hearing a lot of in the future. Catch them before they skyrocket!

Like an incubator, Studio_Leigh commissions key hand-picked emerging artists to produce a work with the brief to explore use-value; to produce a functional object. Some artists take it more literally than others and the final results border a fascinating line between domesticity, function and futility. By pairing artists with craftsmen, Studio_Leigh allows artists to explore new media and materials and to unearth a potential new side to their practice.

To have a sculptural radiator by Nicolas Deshayes at home means you can get warm in the same way that you would if your plumber installs a conventional one. It also means that art truly slips through into your life. All the way through to the banality of daily routines and mundane objects. There is something profound about art coming down to ground level. The aura of grandeur and the allure of the unreachable collapses. The true revolution happens when, through those ordinary activities and objects performing trivial functions, new possibilities and ideas emerge.

Phillipa Horan’s glassware juxtaposes beauty and abject. The delicate individually sculpted glasses hint at a narrative of the discarded and the throw away. They depict a passing moment with a romanticized view on fragility and vulnerability. My rascal side wants to see these being used at dinner and cocktail parties. The debris and the gloom herald the splendor and the attractive.

Because summer is not over yet, you may want to take Planchette out by the river Thames. This is the most enigmatic work I have seen at Studio_Leigh. Planchette is a pleasure boat which is also interchangeable as a tomb for a domestic cat. It features a working aluminium anchor which is a cast of the artist’s hand gripping a bunch of hammers. Aaron Angell works primarily with ceramics, with a desire on consolidating them within the plastic arts, rather than treating them as a special medium or one that only has certain functions or readings. The lovingly crafted vessel can be interpreted as a shrine to craft itself.

Florence Peake presents a massage tool in the form of a mirrored walled surface comprising 511 rolling balls. Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. She combines created or found objects to place them in relationship to the moving body. This object encourages a direct sensual experience. It is at once a contact movement proposition, a duet with an object and with the user’s mirrored reflection.

A mixture of industrial and lab materials fills this lighting sculpture by Elias Hansen and Blake Hudson with an impersonal quality, yet the title suggests a very piercing intimate situation. I’m not crying because it hurts… offers a contrasting warmth against the unfamiliar aesthetic of the piece. The lab bottles with the goofy coloured glass as well as the corks and the entangled cables give away the eccentric nature of the sculpture.

All images courtesy of the artists and Studio_Leigh.