Denny Kaulbach is an artist who graduated this year from Goldsmiths BA Fine Art, where they received the Neville Burston Award for Painting 2024, and the Hamad Butt Memorial Prize 2023. Denny utilises painting and drawing to trace and honour connections between the human and non-human, engaging with themes of connection, care, sickness and wellness. They have recently been selected as one of the winners of the prestigious Freelands Painting Prize 2024 and will be exhibiting with them later this year.

“’Thorazine’ is an imagined portrait of the first person administered Thorazine (Chlorpromazine) – an anti-psychotic medication first trialled as an anaesthetic and antihistamine – for behaviour modification.

He is described in ‘Health Communism’, in a chapter covering the policing of difference through psychiatric norms, as a 57-year-old male labourer who had been admitted ‘for making improvised political speeches in cafes, becoming involved in fights with strangers, and for … walking around the street with a pot of flowers on his head preaching his love of liberty.’”

Frances Pinnock (b. Bristol, UK) lives and works in London. She studied BA Modelmaking at Arts University Bournemouth (2014) and received her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (2023). Following her BA she developed her studio practice alongside a career in bespoke leatherwork. Recent group exhibitions include This Country, Crafts Council Gallery, London, UK (2024); TEFAF Maastricht, NL (2024); Hung, Drawn & Quartered, Standpoint Gallery, London, UK (2023); Material Beings, Cromwell Place, London, UK (2023) and FOG Design + Art, San Francisco, USA (2022).

‘Light Sleeper’ shifts between sculpture, painting and drawing, employing leather both as a material for creating form and as a surface for painting. Two panels have been hand stitched together with horsehair and then worked into with tools, leaving gestural impressions in the surface. Iron sulphate has been painted in layers and sealed with shellac lacquer. The inky, abstract and looping marks recall a nocturnal space of sleep and dream.  A brass ball balances in a small indentation on the top edge – a movable proxy for the sun and for wakefulness.

“My works explore temporal and material junctures and act as a place for reflection and revisitation – blending impressions from personal narrative, memory, emotion and dream. Through making I experience the interplay between states of focused attention and reverie, and sculptures often engender tension between movement and stillness.  Working compositionally with organic materials including leather, vellum and horsehair, I use found objects and metallic elements in juxtaposition. Technical processes of pattern cutting and hand stitching underpin my making and works draw from a breadth of reference including art history, literature, puppetry, music, dance, and garment making.”

Saint Takyi (b. Amsterdam, Netherlands) is a British Ghanaian artist based in London. They graduated in MA Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2024, supported by the Sir Frank Bowling scholarship. Their most recent group exhibition, Come by Here, a collaboration with RCA BLK and curators Jarelle Francis and Louis Chapple, explored the artists’ desire to commune and imaginatively story tell.

Saint uses the colour blue as a base, leaning on blue’s rarity in nature to create environments with ephemeral humanoids that symbolise the narratives from their daydreams, memories. Their practice fuses elements of Ghanaian folklore and worldbuilding with anthropological photography. Their journey as an artist began with a fascination with portraiture, and desire to paint hidden aspects of a person – capturing the unseen.

“I am interested in the metaphysical world and am drawn to symbolism from my Ghanaian heritage, using imagery from colonial anthropological archives of African people and transmuting them into narratives. I present concepts and stories using humanoids spirits and offer the viewer different ways of looking, through the eyes of a visitor, as an anthropologist, and native to the worlds I create. Through the use of painting, drawing and a blue palette, my work presents dualistic meanings and perspectives.

This painting was born out of my desire to connect with my unknown ancestors, and has emerged from my search through the archives of anthropologist R.S. Rattray who documented Ghanaian folk through photography and fieldwork in the 19th century.”

Tami Soji-Akinyemi (b. London, UK) is an artist living and working in London. She received her BA in Fashion Design, University of Creative Arts, Epsom (2014) and MA in Painting, Royal College of Art (2022). Recent exhibitions include: Painting (at the moment) (group), 0207 Gallery (2024); Stretching the Light (group), Rele Gallery, London (2024); Premise (group), Queen Alexandra’s House, London (2024); To Find, To Hold, To Share (group), Hockney Gallery, London (2024); Subject to Change (group), Swivel Gallery, New York (2023); A.Passage (solo), Commonage Projects (supported by the Eaton Fund), (2023).

“My work explores the agency of marking-making in relation to the shifting contexts of image, language and material through time. The enactment of the dominant puncture motif speaks to the aesthetic and philosophical poetics of individuation, and the complexity of relation that underpins my research. I take on a multi-positional role as builder, connector, ruiner, fixer – exploring covert allegories which reference unstable dynamics and fragmented histories. The practice becomes a matrix of interfaces to mark, make and measure.

‘Middling’ proposes the chemical process of a cyanotype as a puncture in itself. The text puncture formations emulate the conditions of this change. It takes the agency of the documentary use of cyanotypes, and light as an image maker to explore notions of ephemerality, positionality and processes of becoming.”

2024 Founder’s Award