2 day course: Translating Painting into Sculpture (Ceramics & Drawing)

Nour El Saleh’s dream-like works explore notions of place, belonging and selective/relative memory. Working instinctively, without creating studies, figures with exaggerated features appear out of the bodies of larger figures replicating and morphing on the canvas—interacting with the denizens of the artist’s selective conscious. Awfully relatable but not quite human, the characters that inhabit those worlds appear to be nightmarish with their sagging skin, dry lips and often-malicious glares. However they still evoke feelings of comfort and nostalgia based on the context in which they are often placed.

El Saleh utilizes western European religious paintings as reference while she creates her own visual lexicon. Surrounded by sumptuous skies, archways and a paradisiac light, grotesque cherubs and malevolent faery-like creatures corrupt the larger, more naive figures. The artist uses hyper-dramatic compositions while creating her own archetypes. Playfully exposing family dynamics and going back and forth between the gossip and the hospitable martyr, the paintings become a satirical performance. 

Nour El Saleh was born in Beirut, Lebanon, grew up in the United Arab Emirates and currently resides in London, UK. El Saleh received a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the UCL Slade School of Fine Art in 2019, and completed a Postgraduate at the Royal Drawing School in 2022.

Gregory Stevens is an interdisciplinary artist working in printmaking, ceramics and painting. Currently living and working in London, he graduated from the Royal Drawing School in 2022 and Kingston School of Art 2019. His work attempts to capture a detritus of memory alongside the observed as it moves anarchically between the abstract and the figurative, he is interested in ordering the chaotic. From an animation background his pictures and sculptures contain a kinetic sense of forms in movement, pulsating within an unstable choreography. The subject is drawn from a merging of observed imagery and a more imagined inner psychological landscape. Often using printmaking to provide a further way to develop surface marks and create some element of chance. Attempting to avoid and subvert sterility, the fluidity of the mediums he uses help to pursue an instinctiveness he feels is necessary for the anxiously intense, often violently colourful images and objects he creates.