Discover our selected artists as part of The Platform Graduate Award 2024, showcasing some of the most exciting emerging artists in the South.
Tender Grounds explores the delicate and fragile qualities that connect four artists’ works, both in their materiality and their emotional undertones. The artworks are imbued with a shared sense of tenderness, reflecting themes of vulnerability, sensitivity, and rawness. This group exhibition unpicks connections between the physical and the emotional, referencing notions of youthfulness. Tender Grounds invites viewers to contemplate the complexity of tenderness, its capacity to heal, and the ways in which it connects us to the human experience.
Part of the Platform Graduate Award 2024, Tender Grounds features the new work of Katrina and Luca Dayanc (University of Reading), Ash Goller (Oxford Brookes University), and Jamie Bragg (Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford). Join us in our new Ground Floor Gallery from 2 November to 1 December to discover emerging talented artists. Find out more about the exhibiting artists and the Platform Graduate Award below.
This exhibition is organised and curated in partnership with associate curator, Sarah Mossop.
Listen to the exhibition notes as an audio recording by clicking ‘play’ below.
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Ash Goller is a multidisciplinary artist. Sanctuary is a eulogy to the queer community, both past and present. Goller employs a multitude of mediums to capture the abstract and intimate aspects of this community, from quilting and embroidery to large printed pieces, all adorned on domestic objects. This description only scratches the surface of the work’s complexity. Each object is thoughtfully chosen and interconnected, representing the hundreds of stories Goller incorporates. Goller uses symbols of personal significance as well as motifs that reflect the queer community’s celebration of ‘otherness’ to pay homage to the diverse and vibrant narratives within the queer experience.
Predominantly working as a painter, Jamie Bragg is an artist who seeks to explore the intersection between photographic and analogue modes of image-making. Embracing his generation’s easy relationship with the photographic image, Bragg exclusively works from preexisting imagery, drawing from sources such as family photographs and online sources. His paintings intricately blend quotidian subject matter with personal experience, splicing together individual and collective memories to capture the tender intricacies of everyday life. Through layered and scratched pools of pigment, Bragg explores ideas of desire, heritage, masculinity, and how we as private individuals might be complicit in larger political narratives of exploitation.
What is allowed in? What gets spat out? Katrina and Luca explore the boundaries of material waste and residue—be it sound, found objects, text, or costume—to challenge the functionality of social, architectural, and institutional systems. Their sculptures and performances are constantly transformed by each artist’s contributions, embodying the idea of collaboration as contamination. This approach celebrates the excessive and unassimilable through the processes of layering, reconstruction, and deconstruction. Their methodology utilises the concept of the fold and ornamentation, particularly the pearl (a product of mollusc excrement), as a way to explore their neurodiverse minds. These minds, not easily assimilated into dominant structures, thrive on excesses of time, movement (stimming), and space, allowing them to exist and thrive.
The Platform Graduate Award is an initiative supporting emerging graduate artistic talent to further their practice following graduation. Launched in 2012, the award offers opportunities for exhibitions and professional development. In recognition of the ongoing challenges faced by artists in establishing their artistic practice post-university, this year’s award will provide selected artists from each participating higher education partner with a £500 bursary and six months of mentoring support.
The initiative is led by CVAN South East (Contemporary Visual Arts Network South East) and is currently a partnership between four arts organisations and higher education institutions across the South: Aspex Portsmouth, Modern Art Oxford, Phoenix Art Space in Brighton, and a collaboration between Arts University Plymouth, University of Plymouth and Falmouth University. Following an exhibition and events programme across the participating galleries, an artist from each gallery is nominated for the award.
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