LOCATION: The Bottle Factory, 12 Ossory Road, London, SE1 5AN

16TH AUGUST - 22 SEPTEMBER

Open Thursday - Saturday, 12 - 5pm, or by appointment

The group exhibition VESSEL brings together the works of twenty-two artists at The Bottle Factory, a historic Victorian warehouse on the Old Kent Road,  to explore the myriad ways the vessel is considered and represented as a container: as a symbol of society, as a container of grief, joy, or pain, and as a representation of diversity.

The concept of the vessel, both as a functional object and as a powerful metaphor, has deeply resonated across time, culture, and artistic expression. The artists in this exhibition explore and expand upon the vessel’s symbolic capacity to hold, preserve, and convey human experience—whether through the representation of societal structures, emotional states, or the fragility of existence. Through diverse mediums and perspectives, they reveal how vessels transcend their material forms, embodying the complex interplay of history, memory, and identity. This exhibition not only celebrates the vessel's enduring significance but also challenges us to reflect on the delicate balance within our own lives and societies, much like the vessels that hold our collective experiences.

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THE ARTISTS:

  • (b. 1994, London) Aitken is a ceramic sculptor and draftsperson living and working in London. Their practice is broadly concerned with the lost or unnoticed narratives we encounter in our environment and society, creating work that aims to create eccentric nodes in a pursuit to encourage an audience question and heighten awareness toward the unnoticed and fundamental of their local situation. The themes flit, from the subtle everyday violences and romances to the expansive agricultural landscape; but all lock in an observed, remixed and amplified surrounding. Aitken was the 2021-2023 RCA Griffin Scholar, ROSL 2023 Prize Winner and 2023 CA Resident.

  • (b. 1993, United Kingdom) Albrow addresses themes of the conscious and unconscious mind; thinking of our brain as a machine that manipulates and interprets memories, language and dreams into sensical thoughts. In particular their work explores the ways we attempt to share our dreamed experiences and the difficulties we face in conveying their ephemeral sensations and sentiments. There are gaps in our language that cause us to struggle to articulate these unique and deeply personal experiences and the artist tries to use physical materials to create a new form of dialogue for when words fail us. Albrow studied MFA Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art (2018-21) and BA (Hons) Fine Art at The Cass – London Metropolitan University (2016).

  • (b.1995, UK) Birkin is a London based artist, material exploration is central to her work particularly how materials interact to create a psychophysical response. She investigates the generative potential in the transformation of matter through a variety of material processes such as growing salt crystals and exploring amorphous and decomposing substances. Sophie Mei  graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2021, where she was awarded the Euan Uglow Scholarship for MA Sculpture and an Emerging Artist Award by Sarabande Foundation, she is an Associate Lecturer at UAL and has recently exhibited at The Split Gallery,  Collective Ending HQ, Barbican Cinema, The Artist Room Gallery, Projecktraum Claas Reiss, Saatchi Gallery and Gossamer Fog.

  • (b. 1989, UK) Bliss lives and works in London. She regularly draws on motifs found in historical craftsmanship, myth and folklore to communicate ideas about the modern world, placing an importance of the handmade. Using a wide range of materials such as ceramics, glass and bronze, Bliss is interested in how we navigate the world through alternate states of being. Her work is playful, and she often creates characters which explore the transitory nature of these states. For Bliss, they act as deities or spirits, that build a relationship between the world we know and ruptured states between consciousness or the unfamiliar. Fluidity manifests both physically and psychologically as an important aspect within Bliss’s practice as she explores the expansive space beyond what may be initially seen.

  • (b.1996, UK) Chesterman explores the intricate relationship of human desires, shining a critical light on the themes of greed, hedonism, abstinence and waste. The narrative of Chesterman’s work tends to celebrate a subject while simultaneously denouncing it. It’s an ongoing search for a kind of embarrassed result in which they aim to provoke introspection, challenging viewers to question their own impulses and the consequences of their actions. An evolution in the artists practice has been a growing affinity for paintings as reliefs - a hierarchy of layering, but also of excavation. Chesterman envisages a painting as a kind of stage; a lot of the work is created on separate canvases to where they end up, which isn’t dissimilar to a rehearsal. Chesterman graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2019 and Leeds College of Art in 2016.

  • (b. 1968, UK) Growing up in the West Midlands, Day has become one of Britain’s few black glassblowers, or certainly the only one that the artist is aware of. He creates highly personal works in glass and mixed media and his intention is to discuss and investigate the treatment of black people in Britain & the USA, with much of his research focussing on the history of the slave trade in the Eighteenth Century and the events leading to up & during the Civil Rights Movement. A reoccurring and signature theme are ‘copper cages’ which enclose his glass, representing the restriction of movement both physically and mentally that traders possessed over other human’s lives that were viewed simply as 'commodities'. Day is a recent graduate from Wolverhampton University, Day received a special commendation at the 2019 British Glass Biennale held in Stourbridge, UK.

  • (b. 1968, UK) Growing up in the West Midlands, Day has become Britain’s only black glassblower, or certainly the only one that the artist is aware of. He creates highly personal works in glass and mixed media and his intention is to discuss and investigate the treatment of black people in Britain & the USA, with much of his research focussing on the history of the slave trade in the Eighteenth Century and the events leading to up & during the Civil Rights Movement. A reoccurring and signature theme are ‘copper cages’ which enclose his glass, representing the restriction of movement both physically and mentally that traders possessed over other human’s lives that were viewed simply as 'commodities'. Day is a recent graduate from Wolverhampton University, Day received a special commendation at the 2019 British Glass Biennale held in Stourbridge, UK.

  • (b. 1990, UK) Elves is a multidisciplinary artist who works between the marshlands of north Kent and her studio in Margate. Interested in how we inhabit our internal landscapes and the world around us, she uses the interplay between drawing, ceramics and painting to listen for voices lurking within and beyond things. Cultivating space for chance and the accidental by using the hand-building process to draw clay to the point of imminent collapse, she invites organic structures to unfold. In turn, fleeting encounters with shoreline, cliff-face and dreamscape, captured through drawing, coalesce into strange beings which invite contemplation of growth, decay and repair. In 2016 she graduated from the Royal College of Art, where she received the Gordon Peter Pickard Award to make drawings in Canada. In 2021, she was awarded a British Council Venice Research Fellowship.

  • (b. 1981, UK) With an interest in how our day to day lives and relationships are filtered through technology, Finch’s practice plays with the crossover between painting and digital media, often combining digitally printed imagery with traditional analogue mediums such as oil and charcoal. She pulls imagery from myriad sources - from Terminator and Robocop to double-ended horses, dick pics and the male life model - exploring ideas of sex, power, violence and the places where pleasure and disgust meet. Her more recent work has included a shift toward working with unorthodox supports such as found domestic fabrics, seeking to create an environmentally sustainable practice that is loaded conceptually but light physically.

  • (b. 1982, Israel) Garwood lives and works in London and elsewhere. The first 15 years of her practise focused on portraiture and in developing a language of oil painting through both commissioned work and my own subjects. In lockdown her practice shifted to use new mediums, acrylic and ceramic, to build a world where personal themes could be explored in figuration. These projects aim to show how conflicted the artist feels existing alongside an increasingly disturbing world and to comment on the macabre incongruity of modern life. The works are fragments of the artists memories and imagination, lost between good and bad, part nightmare, part nostalgia. Garwood’s ceramics inhabit the same world where her painted characters live, all using satire to express the despair and compassion the artist feels for the light and dark all around us.

  • (b. 1982, Norwich) Gibbard is a sculptural ceramic artist based in Bristol. Emily's ceramic practice reimagines vessels thrown on the potter's wheel as biomorphic sculptural forms that explore body perception, identity and sexuality. Although her work is grounded in traditional pottery craft techniques, Emily experiments with her thrown forms to create abstract representations of the human body. She draws significant inspiration from her work in female empowerment, her research into prehistoric sculpture and her personal journey of body discovery. Emily is a recipient of Arts Council  DYCP funding and is Founder and Director of Windmill Clay artist-led ceramics studio in South Bristol. 2024 exhibitions include an installation at Collect Art Fair, Alveston Fine Art, Potfest SE & SW and Women in Art Fair London.

  • Gileva is a London based artist fixating on the decorative, historical and ornamental through the medium of sculpture and installation. Elena’s background is  both in ceramics and fine art, having graduated from MA Royal College and BFA  Parsons Paris School of Art& Design. She combines various historical and personal narratives, with hand-built ceramic objects taking centre stage in her practice. Recent exhibitions  and projects include: Elena Gileva.Enso:Coming Full Circle, White Conduit Projects, London 2023 ; The sound of trees walking. Elena Gileva & Jeltje Laborneman. Centre ceramique contemporaine La Borne, France. 2022 ; Kleureyck. Design Museum Ghent, Belgium 2020; Nakanojo Biennial 2019,Gunma, Japan 2019.

  • (b.1980, Czech Republic) Hynek received the prestigious BP Young Artist Award (2007) for his hyper realistic portraits. His paintings are inspired by Old Masters and photographs, which link the past with the future, using modern technologies. He has gained recognition for his dark, haunting imagery that comments on life and death, and engages with historical artistic trends. The painter frequently borrows elements from the Old Masters and situates them in a present-day context. References are also made to literary-philosophical texts and spiritual subjects explored.

  • ( b.1991, Spain) Mora lives and works in London, UK. “From a genuine interest in the depiction of the human figure, I take the male body as a subject and my partner as a model. I place myself in the empowered position of the painter redefining the idea of the “muse” from the first act of painting. I play with the depiction of the body to subtly challenge notions of beauty and masculinity, exploring its representation through the classical painting aesthetics of figuration and still life. Concepts of love, submission, and intimacy come across my practice exploring the boundaries in between comfort and consent, love and control, private and public. Starting from sketches and planned performative poses, I photograph my subject creating the compositional aspects that will be the departing point for the work.”

  • (b.1972, UK) Price completed his degree in painting at Edinburgh College of Art, and then undertook an MA’s in sculpture at Newcastle University before gaining a further MFA in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art. His paintings thus understandably employ a synthesis of different skills and techniques – fusing methods from printmaking and material process into dense and intricate compositional works in oil and acrylic on paper and canvas. Price has exhibited widely in the UK since 2009 when he was selected – as a recent graduate of the RCA – for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. His work is held in significant private collections internationally, and was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the V&A Museum, London.

  • (b. 2000, UK) Reynolds is preoccupied with questions of social history, his paintings explore themes desire, consumption and the tangled legacies of industrialism and empire. Taking cue from material found across photographic archives and social media, Reynolds probes images for their cultural signification, exploring the tensions between the banal and the historic, and between gravity and humour. By examining cultures of consumption and the mechanisms of desire that inform them, Reynolds seeks to draw out and reevaluate the factors that have shaped national and personal identities. Reynolds is a British artist based in London, who graduated from City and Guilds in 2022 with a BA in Fine Art, and has subsequently completed a postgraduate degree in Cultural, Intellectual, and Visual History at the Warburg Institute.

  • (b.1970, UK) Saville’s abstract colour fields in oil resonate and hum, emptied out of hierarchy the colour becomes the form, sometimes generating an overwhelming feeling of intensity and optical calm. She uses layering to build up the paint surface, the brush marks gentle or erased completely giving the impression they aren’t made by hand. Titled in sequences, they have referred to times of the day or the moons of the solar system, great orbital bodies in movement around each other. More recently however, more personal titles have replaced this, the names of the paintings have become exclusively female, the feeling of the colours reminding her of the relationships of friends and family in her life. The figurative work comes from a desire to depict something realistic after a period of working minimally. These images usually follow a sequence, reflections of areas of the artist’s life, extracting mimetic images from culture.

  • (b. 1946, Cumbria, UK) Slee lives and works in London. He studied at Carlisle College of Art & Design (1964–65) and studied ceramics at the Central School of Art & Design (1965–70). He graduated with an MA at the Royal College of Art (1988). Slee’s work attempts to challenge every conventional notion in ceramic art, transcending its utilitarian roots, whilst also sidestepping the self-indulgent aspects of the studio tradition that became ubiquitous in the late twentieth century. His works lie in contemporary debate and reference the current positioning of material specialisations within visual creativity. For Slee, the objects he produces are intrinsically about the domestic interior and a love for the ‘great indoors’. There are fabricated references in the work to the decorative, the ornamental and the symbolic both from past histories and within contemporary culture.

  • (b. 1979, UK) Stark graduated from the Royal Academy Schools, London in 2004. He currently lives and works in Glasgow. Drawing from past painterly traditions within the still life genre and photorealist techniques, Starks nature morte interiors of everyday life seek out a personal poetry within the relationship of things. Although the objects within his still lifes are not intended to be read as symbolic, themes such as presence, memento mori and the transience of life are constantly addressed. Recent Solo exhibitions include; Feed Your Demons, Connersmith, Washington DC 2023 / Witchsploitation Paintings, Invited by Koenig Zwei @ DIT Vienna 2022, and Alcove Paintings, Heike Strelow, Frankfurt 2018.

  • (b.1966, UK) Accomplished glass artist Louis Thompson explores illusion and the perceptions of glass, fascinated by the haptic experience in art and sculpture. He works with molten glass, sometimes sabotaging the material: twisting, creasing, buckling and collapsing the glass. The works have underlying themes of the human body; sensuous, tactile, echoing folds, curves and creases. With simplicity and purity of materials, he plays with the viewers’ comprehension of what is put before them, often creating collections of objects where the dialogue and relationship between each element is as essential as the collective composition. Thompson has exhibited extensively in the UK, Europe, USA and Japan. In 2012 Thompson received two prestigious awards in the UK: British Glass Biennale Winner and the Jerwood Foundation Makers Commission.

  • (b. 1988, UK) Walker is one of the UK’s finest glass artists and in his relatively short glass blowing career, has already become one of the most active and inspiring artists of his generation. After graduating in psychology from Bangor University, a daring decision saw Walker decide to pursue his creative interests instead. With its vast spectrum of colour, texture and ability to mimic other materials, glass provides the ultimate palette for Walker to create his three-dimensional compositions and sculptures. As one of a handful of glassblowers in the world to focus solely on a technique called ‘Massello’, it takes extreme dexterity, speed and precise temperature control to sculpt and master the molten glass. Walker finds his medium captivating and challenging in equal measure; its immediacy and the intense relationship of working with it in its fluid state.

  • (b. 1998, UK) Woods is a Scottish artist currently working out of the Calderdale Valley in West Yorkshire. Graduating from Gray’s School of Art in 2021, Woods current work acts as a love letter to the much-loved establishment the British pub. To Woods the pub represents a state of emotional freedom where the act of dancing, singing and drunken debauchery transcends time itself. The pub is a representation of the inner psyche, the room within rooms that is teetering on the edge of disaster and joy. Faye’s work has been exhibited recently at  Anima Mundi, the Royal Scottish Academy, and Pictorum Gallery. Recently Faye’s work has been very inspired by the concept of ‘the perfect pub’. To Faye, the whole rigmarole that accompanies a night to the pub acts as the perfect metaphysical realm for her joyous albeit grotesque figures to exist.