In conversation with Early Career Award artists
Stepping out of a Master’s programme and into the art world can be an overwhelming experience. With the structure of academic life no longer in place, many artists face the challenge of building a sustainable practice while navigating an industry that can often feel impenetrable.
Acme’s Early Career Programme supports emerging artists to bridge this gap. Over the course of a year, four award recipients work side by side in a large studio at Acme's Warton House, where they refine their individual artistic practices and build new bodies of work.
This year’s cohort’s exhibition Groundwork at Kupfer is a culmination of this year-long journey, showcasing the individual and collective progress made by the artists and highlighting how Acme’s tailored mentoring and supportive environment have helped shape their practice.
Ahead of the exhibition, we caught up with the four 'groundworkers' – Sam Meredith (Adrian Carruthers Award), Anouk Verviers (Goldsmiths MFA Award), Anna Malicka and Joseph Ijoyemi (Helen Scott Lidgett Awards) – to discuss their inspirations, creative processes, and how the programme has influenced their work.
Anna, Anouk, Joseph, Sam, it’s great to speak with you today. Before we get into your experiences in the studio and the upcoming exhibition, can you share a little about your artistic background?
Anna: I'm a multimedia artist from Latvia. I came here after finishing my master’s at the Art Academy of Latvia, and in my practice right now I work with textiles, drawing, audio, visuals and performance. Now I'm focusing more on textiles, which is what I'm going to showcase in the forthcoming show. So, a lot to do with scribbled abstraction, ornamentation, building imaginary spaces and just having a plethora of stuff within everyday aesthetics.
Joseph: My journey as an artist has been an interesting one, because I've only just got back into it about four years ago, when I went back to art school. I'm a recent graduate of the MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, and that's how I was awarded the Acme studio award. My current focus is looking into migration and societal issues. I'm very interested in community and how it can contribute to various topics and issues that go on. I'm also interested in collection and archives, and I like to experiment on how to spotlight archival items that have been abandoned and bring them out to light. My medium ranges from sculptures to installation, to painting.
Anouk: I'm an interdisciplinary artist, performer and researcher. I'm interested in systems of power and looking into how they affect bodies and the relationships we have with each other and the materials around us. Right now, I'm looking into chronic pain experienced by female and non-binary bodies, and into exhaustion as a space of care and resistance. I'm creating what I call ‘feminist science-fiction experiments’, which take the shape of performances or video-based work. I also work with installation, sculpture, photography and sound.
Sam: I’m an early career artist, although I have had a studio practice for a long time. I've come from a background of doing painting at Brighton University, then having a gap, and then going back to doing sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art. I think the transition into sculpture comes through a lot of fabrication work and work I’ve done for other artists. This year, I’ve been able to write a lot more, and a lot of the sculptural works are rooted in writing. But now I’m dealing with that as a kind of medium, or how that leaks out or is displayed.
What do Acme’s Early Career Awards mean for you and your career?
Joseph: The award was especially important to me because, being a family man, it allowed me to really continue building my practice, you know? Without the studio space and the support that Acme provided, I wouldn’t have been able to develop my practice in this way. It came at the perfect time. It also connected me with other artists in the studio. We work in a space where we respect each other’s work, and there’s a relationship between what we do that informs and inspires our individual practices. Being surrounded by other artists' work and engaging in conversations pushes you to continue developing your own. I think that’s what makes it unique, especially when you’re kind of lost after graduating and it’s hard to find opportunities.
Anna: A lot has been given to us through this programme, not only in a tangible sense but also in terms of time, headspace, physical space, and the attention we've been provided with. For me, coming from abroad, having a whole year is a significant amount of time. I agree with Joseph; it's a ‘moment’, especially after Master’s studies, that serves as a push to develop your practice. You have this momentum, in a way.
Sam: At first, I found it difficult to transition from doing a big [graduation] show with lots of physical work to suddenly being in another studio and thinking about making a new body of work again. But the people I’ve met here have helped me think about how to frame my work or approach it differently. That shift has been freeing. I needed space for my materials, to organise them, and for my ideas to sit and take shape over time. The studio dynamic is lovely as well.
Anouk: It's been a very significant year. Because of the studio space and Acme’s support, I was able to make a whole new body of work. I was very happy to have the time and the resources to really dive into research and experiment with new things, materials and mediums. I'm super grateful for the grant from Acme’s Goldsmiths MFA award. I think, for me, the mentorship has been quite significant. The Acme team has done an amazing job of pairing us with people from the London arts scene. I’m also very grateful for the way that we've worked alongside each other during this year, and how we've been able to create this sense of calmness and groundedness in the studio.
Do you think that being in such proximity to each other and creating this shared environment in the studio has influenced your individual practices?
Anouk: Definitely. I think it's about the works and how they influence each other, because they're in the space and you have their presence. But, also, it's about seeing how others work and the decisions they make, and the small conversations when you're stuck on something or unsure of something. It's about discussing the behind-the-scenes: applications to grants and funding and all that stuff. I think it's quite important and it's been quite significant to be able to have that space to talk about it, to navigate the post-Master’s world together.
Anna: Before this, I had a studio with close friends in Latvia and we had similar art practices and directions. I think here, you can see that each one of us has a completely different mode, content or style. There’s quite a lot of diversity, and I think that’s healthy for your own work, especially since I’ve come away from my context from Latvia. It’s always refreshing to get out of your bubble. It's a blessed moment to see diversity, not only in the studio but also in London as a whole.
Joseph: I think there's a lot of diversity in the space itself, as well as in the works and the practices but, somehow, they connect to one another. Even as we sit in the studio space now, the works that we've placed around the space as part of the open studios respond to our journey for over nearly a year now. I think initially, when we first came into the space, we had sort of old works, but they have evolved and transformed together. But also, I’d like to talk about the space itself, because it’s enough for everyone to work in. In my previous studio, we had a small bench and a little corner, and then we had to really work in that space. But within this Acme studio, there’s enough space for all of us to really explore and expand our work, and I think that helps you to think openly, rather than in a box.
Sam: Each of us has an individual practice with different content and frameworks, but there are moments where things overlap organically. The upcoming show is the culmination of that – where we can showcase what we’ve been working on and thinking about throughout the year.
Your upcoming show at Kupfer is titled Groundwork. Can you tell me more about the title and the inspiration for the exhibition?
Sam: Groundwork is about laying a foundation for the next step, positioning us to think about how we want to take our practices forward.
Anna: We wanted to frame the show towards the everyday within art practice and the fact that we’re here for an award. We were looking for a thread between our practices and felt like the word ‘groundwork’ has many ways in which it can be translated – either at this moment in our practices, but also as a way of thinking about how our practices take up space and are shared.
Anouk: I agree. It’s about giving space to each of our practices, showcasing what we’ve built over the year and, as Sam said, it’s a starting point for something new. This year has been transformative – our work has changed a lot. If you compare what we're going to show to what we would have shown a year ago, there’s a sense of evolution and change. It's quite beautiful to see.
The exhibition seems to bridge both the past and the future, which is an interesting approach. Can you tell me more about the kind of works we can expect to see?
Joseph: I think when we spoke about the topic, and the narrative of where we're going with the exhibition, we spoke about, you know, research. We spoke about fundamental things in our practices. For me, personally, Groundwork really ties in very well to my research and my work that I want to explore and share. I've been doing a lot of research this year, visiting Nigeria and Sweden as well, to really undertake different groundwork. Really, it's about exploring that. It's about unveiling some of the information and works that I've seen and trying to look at it from my own perspective as an artist and building my own practice from it.
Anouk: Through the year, I've been doing a lot of research and science fiction writing, because I think that, sometimes, the experience of chronic pain and chronic illness when you exist within female and non-binary bodies feels like science-fiction. I’ve also been doing a lot of archival research into how these illnesses have been pathologised through many centuries. So, my work is going to be in the basement of the space, which feels very sci-fi to me. It also relates to the title of the show, the groundwork, and the fact that in my work we’re working with clay, building and destroying things.
Anna: There have been some fixed things I've been researching, such as white linen works and the materiality of embroidery techniques. I’ve been trying to merge drawing and textile together and see some kind of vision through the materiality. And I've been exploring it in the forms of site-sensitive installation, while researching ornament and ornamentation and how they connect with a body within space. So, I’m going to make curtain installations at Kupfer. One key aspect of the exhibition was that we knew the space from the start and had a lot of time to explore it and its particularities. And I think that has also been like a key element of Groundwork - that somehow, we have a sensitivity to the space.
What are you looking forward to after the show?
Sam: The element of pushing the writing has been nice, and I’d like to consider doing a longform, or continuing some research and writing some funding applications. I had an experience working on this away job and met the fabricator of all the original Donald Judd plywood work. He lives in New York. I’ve been in conversation with him, and I’d quite like for that to manifest as a project to do with these kinds of interrelations of objects and the people involved. This has been quite a fixed space for a while, but it has allowed me to think about making work that can move around or be done from different places, which is a slightly different position to having all my tools and equipment permanently in one fixed place. I think now I’d like to be a bit more mobile and lighter on my feet, in a way. So, I think this year has allowed me to think about making that transition.
Anna: I guess this experience has been such a long one, and there's been more time for reflection on my current situation. So, I think it's a good context to figure out how you can sustain a practice in this type of setting. This year has been a good grounding moment for that, just to figure some stuff out. Other than that, I have a big show in Latvia at the start of February. It's also has been a great opportunity to have a full year, basically, of studio practice. It's a blessing.
Anouk: I'm looking to keep working on this new body of work, so I'm already writing the second chapter of the work and I'm excited for that to take shape. I'm going to be quite busy, so I'm very grateful for it. I can't really say because there's things that haven't been announced, but I'll have two quite important solo shows, which I'm really looking forward to, and then two commissions that are coming to an end in 2025.
Joseph: You know, for artists, it's very hard to find studio space that is not too expensive. I think for me, I'm just going to let God handle that, in a sense, and just allow myself to continue to explore my practice and look deeper into some of the research that I've done this year, because it's been very back-to-back. I'm just going to continue to develop my practice and, you know, take it easy. So, I'm looking forward to the future but, also, I need to look forward to the present. Sometimes, as artists, we forget to enjoy the present and allow it to take you into the future.