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2027 OPEN CALL
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under the lid
by lyuda kalinichenko5 - 22.11
PV: 5.11 / 6-9pm
Over a hundred years ago, my great-grandfather made a small wooden box, decorating it with a floral pattern made from straw. My grandmother kept her toys in it, and later my mother used it to store her
make-up and lipsticks. The box was passed down through the women in my family, and now it belongs to me.
But what lies beneath its lid?
In 2022, art historian Svetlana Usoltseva wrote a text for my last solo exhibition in the Urals. She compared the exhibition space to a keepsake box filled with jewellery, buttons, pieces of fabric and photographs, and human relationships to stitches that connect through threads, forming intricate patterns.
Four years later, here in London, I am literally bringing this metaphor to life: transforming the gallery into a keepsake box and inviting visitors to step inside.
*For the exhibition's opening night, perfume house EX IDOLO has created a bespoke scent inspired by memories of my family's keepsake box — the smell of old wood, the objects once stored inside it, and my mother's lipstick. We have also hidden another scent inside one of my sculptures.
homemaker
by Saskia Takens-Milne11.12 - 17.01
PV: 10.12 / 6:30 - 8:30pm
Made bespoke for Outhouse Gallery, a cast of the gallery's interior has been knitted in full scale and lies, slumped across the gallery floor. It is as if the bare structure, like an idealised mother, has manifested the vestiges of home. But Outhouse Gallery is too cold to open through the winter, so the work is inaccessible, seen only through the glass.
Homemaker is a reflection on the homelessness crisis, and short-sighted strategies that treat accommodation as if it were the whole solution. In particular, it draws on the experience of mothers raising children under conditions of poverty and systemic disadvantage, where they are expected to create the trappings of home - a nurturing, stable environment - despite barriers such as insecure work, low pay, limited support for those fleeing violence, and other structural inequalities.
Following the exhibition, the piece will be unravelled and re-knitted into blankets, distributed to homeless people in London through Craft Forward's Blankets for London.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of workshops TBC