Dr Georgia Haseldine is Curator of the V&A East Storehouse (opening 2024), a radically reinvented collections store that will offer visitors unprecedented access to the V&A’s collection of art, design and performance. She led The Question of Clay research project with Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates which included the setting up of a temporary brickworks and performance space in east London and instigating a community-led research and making project in Stoke-on-Trent reimagining Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion. Julia Ellen Lancaster is an artist working with clay and ceramics. Lancaster’s work is driven by a compulsion to respond to emotional intuition, and externalise the impression that a time, or the feeling a space and its contents, provoke. Lancaster works with clay and collected materials, exposing them to heat to alter their make up and structure, and as a tool to suggest and explore scientific, geological and sociological histories. Her current, solo, show 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ at m2 Gallery, London, runs to 20 November 2022.
m2 Gallery Artists: Recent Work 1
ASC Gallery, The Chaplin Centre, SE17 2DG
28th April - 19th May 2022
The first of two consecutive exhibitions featuring the recent work of over 50 artists. A joyous gathering of diverse art forms each contained inside a metre square space. The artists have all previously shown work at the m2 Gallery Peckham and have been brought together here to celebrate the life of Ken Taylor.
Ken instigated the gallery with his partner Julia Manheim in 2003. Supporting artists and bringing creativity out into the public realm is at the heart of the m2 Gallery ethos and so it continues with these two exhibitions at the ASC Gallery.
ASC Studio Artists
Suzi Morris, Betsey Kilpatrick, Victoria Ahrens, Elisabeth Lecourt, Alexis Panayiotou
Exhibition - 4 x m2 Gallery, Peckham
23rd January - 6th March 2022
This is a reciprocal exhibition that runs alongside the m2 Artists: Recent Work @ ASC Gallery
Five artists whose individual works express a quality of synthesis, where fragments and disparate parts come together as interdependent and complete forms.
Please note: We will be having an opening afternoon at the ASC gallery at the same time so come to both!
Robert Cooper & Ruth Franklin - Re Imagining Tools
Exhibition - 4 x m2 Gallery, Peckham
23rd January - 6th March 2022
Re Imagining Tools
Robert Cooper and Ruth Franklin have been great friends and teaching colleagues for as long as they can remember.
Ruth’s 3-D tool forms relate to the diverse professions of her family; tailoring, hairdressing and wig making, whereas Robert’s ceramics are based on structures he made in the 1980’s from corroded metal found in the Thames, which subsequently fell apart.
“Being on the same wavelength in so many ways, including our love of strange objects, our friendship, as well as the ongoing creative support we give each other, continues to be a great joy”.
Dillwyn Smith - Be a Lantern in the Dark
Exhibition - 4 x m2 Gallery, Peckham
21st November 2021 - 16th January 2022
Be a Lantern in the Dark
“Nichiren [Japanese Buddhist priest 1222-82]wrote many letters to encourage his supporters, in three of these, written between 1268-77, he mentions ‘a lantern in the dark’. Covid and Lockdowns seemed an appropriate moment to create something that touched upon this phrase, by adding ‘Be” to the beginning it turned the phrase into an action - Be a Lantern in the Dark - something I hoped would/could contribute directly to the dilemma we were all in, making an artwork that could offer a glimmer of hope to people walking by in the neighbourhood with a light touch.”
Gelato Roma
Ken and Julia offered Dillwyn a second commission to clad or ‘dress’ the gallery pavilion. Taking inspiration from the whimsical seaside stylings of Quay House and his love of Italian ice cream!
Penny Skerrett - Still - Life in Quay House 2021
Exhibition - 4 x m2 Gallery, Peckham
1st October - 14th November 2021
“This series of drawings came out of living in Quay House during lockdown. I have drawn where my gaze landed, corners of rooms, piles of books, a jumper thrown over a chair. The stuff of everyday life.
The house has been both a place of comfort and retreat as well as a place of solitude and loneliness. Looking and observing connects me with life and these drawings helped me to find ease during these months.”
Penny Skerrett
‘Let it be still and it will gradually become clear’
Lao Tzu
Eleanor Suess - The Cube at Scale
Exhibition - 4 x m2 Gallery, Peckham
2nd June - 31st July 2021
This installation was originally made as a response to the physical artefact of the new version of the 4m2 gallery recently constructed at ASC’s Art House Studios in Croydon. The installed work took the physical artefact of the 4m2 gallery – locally titled “The Cube” – as its starting point, interpreting it as a 1:1 model sitting within the double-height space. Its status as both art object and work of architecture is then echoed in the response, and the works housed within it can be similarly considered to be an art/architecture hybrid.
Exhibition by m2 Gallery 'instigator' Ken Taylor at Ken Artspace in Kennington
Marco Kessler - Our Nature
Exhibition - m2 Gallery, Peckham
14th April - 16th June
At a time when the preciousness of nature – and the need to protect it – is more pronounced than ever, photographer Marco Kesseler’s exhibition comes to our Peckham windows from its previous display in the windows of Selfridges on Oxford St while it has been closed.
Ken Taylor - The Outside Coming In
Exhibition - m2 Gallery, Peckham
29th May - 31st August 2020
Fascinated by the idea of retreating from the photograph as a singular object or moment of epiphany, Ken Taylor instead engages his images in a process or conversation. With this, use, rather than function comes into play, and inevitably, time, with the line of language between.
The Outside Coming In is an intuitive, quick series of playful dialogues ensuing from the arrangement of images as diptychs.