Leyden Gallery is pleased to present their fourth Platform for Emerging Arts show. On this occasion the exhibition features a fantastic & Eclectic Group of five emerging artists each selected from a diverse range of backgrounds and practices.

Ant Pearce

Pearce explores the fragility of life, often drawing upon psychoanalytic concepts. His main focus is on the notion of outside restrictions, which are imposed upon us by an external authority from childhood. His work explores imagery depicting subjects as diverse as fashion and art icons, the artist himself as a child, and abstractions of the human form. These ideas are presented as a series of drawings using thread on paper, line drawings on paper, and syringe paintings.

Emilia Moisio

Emilia Moisio’s practice is guided by a post-modernist interest in exploring and questioning the role of photography in society. Her work is mainly conceptually based, and strongly focused and founded on using images as a tool to explore, analyze, develop, and illustrate the structured framework of thought. The on-going Vieraalla Maalla (In a Foreign Place) project is induced by personal experiences of cultural misunderstandings that affect the way we perceive images and the world around us.

George Hale

George Hale graduated from The University of Brighton in 2010. His paintings have developed their particular style by engaging with the psychological phenomenon called pareidolia. Pareidolia offers us the illusion of perceiving recognizable shapes in otherwise obscure stimulus. His paintings occupy the complex terrain of humorous and sinister offering an ambiguous and playful set of relations.

Rose Stuart-Smith

Rose Stuart-Smith studied Painting at Chelsea College of Art and Central St Martins. In recent paintings she creates abstract spaces that are imagined, complex and vibrant. Without a conventional focal point the works have a sense of continuous movement. Paintings in this exhibition explore a colour palette of brilliant blues and greens that refers to the natural world, but with a hint of artificiality.

Lauren Jetty Howells-Green

Obsessiveness and multiplicities run through Howells-Green’s choice of iconic imagery as well as the processes used. Her fascination with multiples can be considered in relation to the idea of a pixel - using variants of the same in order to create a whole. She does this through the art of sewing. Sewing has strong gendered historical connotations, particularly as part of the regulation of appropriate feminine behaviour and the division of the sexes. Howells-Green posits that it is still difficult, if not impossible, for a woman artist to be known as an Artist without the requisite ties of gender.