Our New 2024 Haggerston Artists Have Arrived!
14 new artists in residence have joined us at our HQ in Haggerston, and we can’t wait to introduce them all to you!
First up, let’s meet Koby Martin. Koby's paintings delve into the shared human journey, navigating the realms of emotions, memories and thoughts. Koby addresses the intricacies of identity and social injustice. By using emotive figures and symbolic elements such as Adinkra symbols from Ghana, Koby captures the nuanced interplay of courage and sadness. For Koby the canvas is a space to convey the profound impact of significant moments.
Meet multidisciplinary artist Darcey Fleming. Darcey engages with sculpture, photography, and performance, often featuring the human body. Darcey’s practice, transcending fashion and fine art, embodies a dynamic interplay between the lighthearted and the formal, concealing a deeper emotional undercurrent of loneliness and isolation.
Using traditional techniques and discarded materials, her work reflects both a joyous compulsion to create, at times causing physical strain, and a contrasting relief found in minimal black-and-white video stills as a response to the intensity of her sculptural pieces.
If you can’t tell…Darcey is already very well settled into her new studio!
Introducing jewellery designer Shola Branson. Shola creates future artefacts which combine the bold minimalism of the contemporary with rich textures and silhouettes from antiquity. Shola’s design philosophy draws on the cultural legacy of early civilisations, forming a style that is both modern and deeply rooted in history. Each piece is meticulously handcrafted using only the finest materials, with items created and finished individually or in very small batches.
Welcome Arron Esh to the Sarabande community! Born and raised in East London, the brand references visual identities and attitudes of inner city London. Through classic craftsmanship and construction, the brand takes hallmarks of luxury tailoring, fabrication and finish, and reimagines it through a London lens. Aaron is a NEWGEN award winner, debuting at London Fashion Week in September ‘23 and was recently nominated for The Foundation Award at the 2023 Fashion Awards.
You can now also shop for Arron Esh online or in-store at House of Bandits.
Meet visual artist Almudena Romero. Almudena’s practice sits at the intersection of art and science, exploring ways of representing, seeing and understanding. Almudena exposes plant leaves, watercress seeds, and poinsettias to varying amounts of specific light rays to produce art that grows, fossilises and then disappears.
Meet Matija Čop, an artist exploring the transformative potential of ‘translation’ as ideas, structures and their component materials pass between encapsulating frameworks. Matija’s works invite reflection on the tensions between order/disordent, manufacture/craft and unit/system. Matija’s visual language constructs itself from selected unit elements which are iteratively combined, reconfigured and dissolved in accordance with self-contrived, project-specific logics.
Meet Jo Grogan, fascinated by our shared cultural history and the natural world which surrounds us, Jo’s work is a celebration of two of her greatest passions; craftsmanship and nature. Examining the space between the past and present, Jo combines ideas from her past as a fashion designer with her present transition to a wood carver. Working directly across multiple materials from the drawing, modelling, and carving stages, each piece is painstakingly created, manipulated, and sculpted by hand.
Welcome Dean Hoy to the Sarabande family - Dean is a visual artist, working between soft sculpture, film, and photo. His soft sculpture work is under ongoing project ‘Bears Who Care’, where Dean births new life into hand-me-down soft toys by inverting them, attacking them, and stuffing them with love. Given the sentimental nature of the material used, Dean’s making process is vulnerable and child-like, forming a spirit-like personality with each piece 🌟
Dean has collaborated with Marc Jacobs where he worked on 20 exclusive bears that were accompanied by a campaign shot by himself, to then be sold in-store and online. Now comfortably settled in his new studio, we can’t wait to see his creations!
Introducing Banita Mistry, an artist with roots in the world of jewellery, now delving into the intersection of technology and identity through a jewellery point of view.
In Banita’s perspective, technology has become nearly imperceptible in our daily lives. Through abstraction, her artwork endeavours to reintroduce the visibility of technology, utilising design as a medium to engage in vital conversations about contemporary issues. Banita's pieces touch upon urgent narratives surrounding our engagement with technology, exploring themes such as identity, materiality, surveillance, and the environmental impact of deep-sea mining.
Introducing interdisciplinary artist Lulu Wang, Lulu uses visual art and performance to explore human experience and identity, using mediums of drawing, mixed-media installation and movement-based performances, Lulu employs a minimalist aesthetic with intricate details.
The work symbolises the enigmatic nature of change and celebrates imperfection, acting as a safeguard against human fragility whilst exploring the complexities of emotional conflict and societal dynamics, seeking questioning the sense of belonging.
Welcome AV VATTEV to the Sarabande family. Antonio Vattev, founder of AV VATTEV, works with a commitment to elevating fashion into a storytelling medium by reflecting a harmonious blend of his Bulgarian heritage and the eclectic culture of London. By exploring the intersections of culture, history, and style, Antonio celebrates the modern, urban man, embodying a distinctive style that resonates with contemporary sensibilities.
Get to know photographer and filmmaker Rachel Fleminger Hudson. Rachel employs a multi-disciplinary approach by incorporating art direction, set design and costume into her practice, aiming to create work where the research process drives and defines the characters and their spaces.
Through her work, Rachel explores the deconstruction and codification of identity and society, exploring identities through costumes, which are then staged and captured through photography and film.
Meet Stephen Akpo, multidisciplinary artist who uses drawing, painting and fashion to create works on the process of self healing. Stephen is dedicated to exploring life’s unanswerable questions, a quest he embarks upon with each stroke of his paintbrush. His artistic journey is rooted in the profound experiences of grief and the loss of cherished ones, an exploration of his melancholic introspection and unwavering optimism, mirroring the dualistic nature of existence itself.
Welcome Martina Kocianova to the Sarabande community! Martina is a jewellery artist known for creating fantastical and playful pieces inspired by the world of magic and mushrooms. Inspired from childhood memories spent mushroom foraging in the forests of Slovakia, Martina uses gem carving, hand engraving and stonecutting to transform these memories and her passion for mycology into vibrant and conceptual jewellery pieces - blurring the boundaries between nature and art.
That's all of the new artists who have joined us at our HQ in Haggerston, but stay tuned, we might just have some new faces to show at our new site, Sarabande High Road!