Early Career Programme exhibition at Kupfer, Groundwork
Kupfer, 3 Scrutton Street, London EC2A 4HF
PV: Thursday 14 November, 6-9pm
Exhibition continues until 30 November
Monday - Friday 10am-5pm, Saturday 2-6pm
Groundwork marks the culmination of a year-long residency as part of Acme’s Early Career Programme, featuring the works of Sam Meredith, Anouk Verviers, Joseph Ijoyemi, and Anna Malicka. Spanning three levels of Kupfer, the exhibition presents site-specific interventions that respond to the building’s architecture, rooting each artist’s practice in a shared space while carving out distinct identities—reflecting their experience of sharing a studio over the past year.
Groundwork evokes ideas of beginnings, foundations, and the often-unseen labour that underpins the creative process. It suggests roots planted for future growth, acknowledging the acts of making, collaboration, and personal development that propel artistic practice. In this exhibition, groundwork becomes both a metaphor for artistic origins and a tangible exploration of materials, bodies, and social histories, embodying acts of creation that influence and are influenced by each artist’s labour.
Drawing from his background in both fabrication and fine art, Sam Meredith integrates sculptural and archival elements, blurring personal and professional realms. Within his ground-floor installation, Bread & Butter—a large wooden structure that is part bed frame, part storage unit—suggests the layered nature of domesticity and creative labour central to his practice. Infused with a cohesive yellow palette, Meredith’s works—Noggin Shelf, Spreadsheet (Reflect & Clarify), and Bowtie—evoke textures of daily life, with objects and forms drawn from routine and work environments. Together, they playfully suggest that being an artist is inseparable from the hidden labour of everyday existence. In drawing from shared spaces and daily environments, Meredith’s work highlights the collective and individual efforts that sustain creative life, representing the act of groundwork within a shared studio space.
In the basement, Anouk Verviers’ video installation We Gather at Dawn (I Have Discharged You from Our Care) extends the idea of groundwork to the body, exploring the resilience and resistance of women living with endometriosis. Through a feminist science-fiction lens, Verviers invites us into a dystopian world where a group of chronically ill women create, dismantle, and rebuild columns from cob—a traditional blend of clay, sand, and hay, mixed by their own stomping feet. Their labour, marked by cycles of construction and deconstruction, is both a rejection of societal demands for productivity and a ritual of kinship. It embodies the constant negotiation of endurance and fragility. Verviers’ pavilions—delicate structures of plywood, survival blankets, and insulation—stand precariously in this space, pointing to the fragility of the body while evoking the quiet defiance inherent in working against its limitations. Here, groundwork represents collective survival, where physical labour challenges bodily limitations and embraces mutual care.
On the first floor, Joseph Ijoyemi’s installation Echo engages with groundwork as a return to origins, weaving together themes of cultural memory, migration, and identity. Through the use of Nigerian newspapers—collected since 2020—he incorporates archival materials as symbols of cultural continuity, each paper acting as a bridge to his heritage. Ijoyemi blends past and present, merging Nigerian and British cultural elements, while exploring the resilience of the African diaspora. His Circulate sculptures, cast from original alumbro metal salvaged from the Cutty Sark boat, and sound performance Fragments, capturing the rhythms of traditional craft processes, create a space where storytelling, fiction, and sound experimentation intersect. For Ijoyemi, groundwork is both a literal and metaphorical return to his roots, anchoring his practice in cultural histories that inform his present while welcoming new narratives for the future.
Anna Malicka’s installation bby yellow 105, gonster junction, occupies the other side of the first floor, redefining groundwork as an inquiry into space. Using fiber embroidery on unexpected surfaces like plywood, Malicka disrupts traditional associations of craft with femininity, domesticity, and invisibility. Her work reimagines domestic labour, layering the space itself with stitching and construction to examine how space is occupied, controlled, and transformed. Responding directly to the gallery’s architecture, Malicka obscures windows with plywood and transforms a boiler—which she likens to fungi that invade and decay wood in domestic spaces—by wrapping it in thread to create a sculptural form. This intervention exposes hidden layers of control and questions the very foundations of space and ownership, blurring the line between ornamentation and occupation.
Together, the artists explore how laying foundations is a continuous act of building upon past experiences while forging new paths forward. In conversation with one another, they create a shared space of collective resilience, where the act of establishing foundations becomes a collaborative force, nurturing both individual expression and the evolution of their creative practices.
Written by Nastia Svarevska
Anouk's installation has been supported by The Exhibitions Hub, Department of Art, Goldsmiths. Anna's work in the exhibition has been funded by State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia.