The Future is Now PT.II: Re/Form~ation showcases seven vibrant Black British artists and explores the themes of worldmaking and legacy. These artists create new worlds and narratives by utilising various materials such as glass, wood, textiles, and tissue paper, pushing the boundaries of form and reshaping perspectives on Black experiences, art, and culture. We are also excited to announce that we will unveil a sculpture entitled ‘Unconditional Love’ by glass artist, Christopher Day, which he has created exclusively for CasildART. Other artists featured are Asiko, Donald Baugh, Othello De Souza, Elaine Mullings, Maggie Scott and Theresa Weber.
The exhibition features the work of Christopher Day (Top Photo), a glass artist who, only four years ago, was working as a plumber. Day has created a bespoke artwork specifically for this exhibition, which will be unveiled at the preview. The glass sculpture “Unconditional Love” is a symbolic and powerful reminder of the most brutal circumstances. During the transatlantic slave trade, children were ripped away from their mothers and sold off to the highest bidder. The most horrific images depict enslaved Africans being auctioned off, with children clinging to their mothers in desperation, unaware of the horrors they would face. The material, therefore, does not merely function as part of the composition but beckons the viewer to engage in a dialogue about Britain’s racial past and present, as well as the tragic legacy of colonialism.
CasildART represents Àsìkò, Donald Baugh, Christopher Day, Othello De’Souza-Hartley, Elaine Mullings, Margaret Scott, and Theresa Weber. Although working across different mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, and glass, what binds these artists together is their love of their craft and a thorough grasp of the material process and form of bringing an idea into being.
Sukai Eccleston, founder and curator at CasildART Contemporary, shares her inspiration for the exhibition: In The Future is Now Pt. II: Re/form~ation, we celebrate the boundless creativity that arises when artists push the boundaries of what is considered art. This exhibition is a testament to the ingenuity of artists who use materiality to challenge what we think is real, finding beauty in the discarded to forge connections across time and layering the work with new meaning and context. The artists in Re/ Form~ation are not just makers; they are storytellers, weaving narratives that bridge the gap between the past and the present, paving the way for us to think about traditional structures and expand the possibilities for a better future now!”
CasildART Contemporary is a not-for-profit gallery dedicated to addressing the underrepresentation of Black artists in fine art institutions, commercial galleries, and museums. CasildART Founder Sukai Eccleston launched the gallery to catalyse change and transform the visual landscape in the UK by inserting Black narratives into the culture. Eccleston believes art can foster connections and initiate conversations about culture and heritage. Through the CasildART programme, she aims to redress the racial and cultural balance within the UK and international contemporary art scene.
About the Artists
Àsìkò
Àsìkò is a self-taught visual artist focused on exploring his African culture and heritage and redressing the beauty standards of being black. He was born in the UK but spent his formative years in Nigeria and his adolescent years in the UK. These multifarious culture codes influence and inform his autobiographical work. His work is explored using mixed media, including photography, sculpture, collage, AI, and Film.
Àsìkòs work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at The Gagosian, The John Randle Centre (Yoruba Museum), Gloucester Museum, 154 Art Fair, British Film Institute, The South Bank Centre in London, and Rele Gallery in Lagos, Nigeria. It has also been featured on the BBC, The Guardian, Vogue, CNN, The Financial Times, etc.
Christopher Day
Growing up in the West Midlands, Christopher Day became Britain’s only black glassblower, or indeed the only one that the artist was aware of. He creates highly personal works in glass and mixed media, and he intends to discuss and investigate the treatment of black people in Britain and the USA. Much of his research focuses on the history of the slave trade in the Eighteenth Century and the events leading up to and during the Civil Rights Movement.
A confessed ‘arts enthusiast’, Day’s creative career comes after more than two decades as a plumber. Initially feeling that his life had taken him on a journey that significantly detoured away from his early love of the arts, Day can now reflect on the fact that many of the skills he has developed in his earlier career have directly transposed to the creation of his artworks.
By combining heating and electrical systems materials into his creations, Day finds he can create the perfect marriage of his artistic path and technical knowledge, which rely on dexterity and high levels of skill and craftsmanship.
A recurring and signature theme is the ‘copper cages’ that enclose his glass. These represent the restriction of movement, both physically and mentally, that traders possessed over other human lives that were viewed simply as ‘commodities’. These are created from simple copper tubing and wire but to dramatic effect. The glass, by contrast, Day compares to the human spirit, attempting to break free despite the restrictions that hold it in place.
An emerging artist and a recent graduate from Wolverhampton University, Day received a special commendation at the 2019 British Glass Biennale held in Stourbridge, UK. He has not only become a leading voice within the contemporary British art-glass scene but also with the continued conversation surrounding Black Lives Matter and racial inequality, giving his time for numerous interviews for both.
Othello De’Souza-Hartley
Othello De’Souza-Hartley is a London-based mixed media artist who explores aspects of human expression in contemporary society.
The paintings celebrate inner growth and outer imperfection, honouring the resilience, beauty and history embedded in our bodies and spaces. They are an invitation to search and find beauty every day and appreciate the fallible journey of life.
De’Souza-Hartley merges personal experience into visual investigations of prevailing quandaries and contradictions by applying minimal gestures to maximum effect. Working predominantly in photography, moving images, drawing, performance, and painting, the human body is at the core of his practice, either directly as a subject or indirectly, via the marks and layers applied to canvas.
Inspired equally by the subjective gaze of classical paintings and notions of non-duality in Eastern philosophy, the geometry and texture of Modern architecture and improvisation in experimental music or contemporary dance, De’Souza-Hartley’s practice is not confined by medium or genre.
His Masculinity project has received extensive press coverage and was nominated for Peer to Peer, a curated snapshot of contemporary photography in the UK and China in 2019. His work has been exhibited widely to critical acclaim and is held in private and public collections, including Autograph London.
He received an MA in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, in 2011; prior to that, he studied at Central St Martins, University of the Arts London, and the Royal Drawing School London.
Donald Baugh
Having studied Furniture at Rycotewood College, Oxford, and Middlesex University in the 1990s, Donald Baugh has exhibited extensively in London, Tokyo, Paris, Milan, and Folkestone. He specialises in simple lines and colour to create elegant solutions for lighting, furniture, and his sculptural one-off vessels sourced from sustainable wood.
Baugh has built a solid international reputation with his passion for wood for many years, creating elegant furniture for interiors and one-off carved vessels.
Baugh has created this collection of stunning sculptural vessels and lighting, recognising the intrinsic natural beauty of wood. Baugh’s work is beautiful and precise, combining traditional craftsmanship with contemporary design, embracing bold shapes and use of colour.
Each vessel begins with carefully selecting the wood, drawing inspiration from wood as a living material, highlighting its natural characteristics and history to create unique, beautifully crafted pieces.
Baugh is passionate about the sustainable practice of harvesting timber. He works closely with the Forestry Commission and tree surgeon Dariusz Salarski to source his materials, allowing each vessel to tell a story and celebrating the uniqueness of nature.
Since having honed his craft at the world-renowned Rycotewood Furniture School in Oxfordshire, graduating in 1996, Baugh has been working as a bespoke cabinet maker and furniture designer commissioned by private and commercial clients worldwide.
Elaine Mullings
Interrogating the shifting value of ‘things’ is a recurring theme in Elaine Mullings’ practice. She creates sculptures and installations using various materials, from tissue paper and plastic bags to copper pipe and broken glass – disparate ‘things’ that hover like residual low-level noise daily. Combining and re-contextualising these ‘things’ enables Mullings to consider complex or challenging subjects such as disability, exploitation and prejudice. She probes the emotions and sensations that seemingly ‘low value’, ephemeral material can provoke to continually raise questions, unsettle our understanding of the familiar and provoke our responses to the ‘strange’.
Mullings’ practice is underpinned by an interest in ‘facture’ – a focus on the accumulation of labour and time, materiality, pattern and repetition. She often uses intensive manual, repetitive processes to create her sculptural pieces and installations. This approach is echoed in her use of multiples and fragmentation to scratch at the cosy familiar surfaces of the ‘everyday’. For Mullings, evidence of the rhythm of labour and time sustained in the making is visibly embedded in the work to retain honest connections between the material, process and form.
The large-scale nature of her sculptures and installations often responds structurally to the works’ environments, drawing our attention to the poetics of simple things, space and texture. Mullings’ practice references the language of Arte Povera, Minimalism and Pop. She draws inspiration from artists like El Anatsui, Mark Bradford, Leonardo Drew, Theaster Gates, Martin Puryear, Alicja Kwade and Jannis Kounnellis.
Margaret Scott
Margaret Scott creates art based on who she is: a black woman, a feminist, a daughter, a mother, an activist, and a British textile artist. Her large-scale works draw on the aesthetic and symbolic potential of the felting process. The hand-felted re-interpretations of photographic images often explore the politics of representation and tensions and contradictions of a Black British identity. Photography, specifically portraiture, has played a vital role in all her work. While many manipulated images become textiles, each series of work always generates ‘stand-alone’ prints.
Scott’s technical practice is unparalleled in the landscape of contemporary British art; sitting at the boundary of tapestry and digital media, she employs a combination of photography, digital collage and silk in a process known as Nuno felting. The intensely physical process of felting is followed by hand stitching to emphasise the more minor details of an image. In working with fibre, Scott pushes a medium traditionally associated with craft into fine art.
She achieved notoriety in 2013 for Zwarte Piet, a body of work exploring the eponymous Dutch phenomenon of ‘blacking up’. Using self-portraiture, she referenced the quaint and offensive Dutch’ character’ by creating an alter ego for Piet. In the series ‘Big Sister ‘and ‘ICU’, Scott invites the viewer to re-evaluate Zwarte Piet, no longer the enslaved person or child-like fool but a commanding adult female presence with a very different agenda.
Born in London, Maggie graduated from St. Martin’s School of Art in 1976 with BA honours in Fashion Textiles, and she set up her first studio in London in 1980. Her professional life as a textile artist existed parallel to her involvement in gender and race politics. However, her experiment with a series of large, autobiographical textiles led to a bursary award and a one-woman show at Leicester Museum in 2012, “Negotiations – black in a white majority culture”. After the success of “Negotiations”, Scott’s works have been exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and internationally, including in the USA, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, China, and Canada.
Scott is working on two projects: Five Times More, a response to the UK government report on Black and Asian pregnancy outcomes, and Fast Fashion and Climate Justice’: The Global North’s Addiction to Cheap Clothing and Landfill in the Global South. Both projects include her trademark felted photomontages, installations and prints.
Theresa Weber
Theresa Weber was born in Düsseldorf in 1996 and lives and works in North Rhine Westphalia and London. Through multimedia installations, sculptures, paintings and collaborative performances, the artist challenges existing power hierarchies and fixed categorisations.
With a dynamic approach, she compares ancient mythologies and historical research by collaging cultural materials from an anti-colonial lens. Her perspective as a German-born artist with Jamaican, German and Greek backgrounds influences her artistic approach. In 2014, Theresa Weber completed her studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she studied in the classes of Katharina Grosse and Ellen Gallagher, from whom she received the Meisterschüler title. She then moved to London for a two-year postgraduate master’s degree in sculpture at the Royal College of Art, which she completed in the summer of 2023. Weber was part of New Contemporaries UK in 2022 and won several awards and scholarships in Germany and the Netherlands.
Her first institutional solo shows took place at Dortmunder Kunstverein and Moltkerei Werkstatt e.V. Cologne in 2021, followed by several institutional and international shows, as at Ludwig Forum Aachen, Philara Collection Düsseldorf, Z33 Belgium, South London Gallery and her first public commission at Somerset House London. This year, she had her first gallery solo show at ChertLüdde Berlin, followed by her first museum solo at Kunstmuseum Bochum this summer.
“The Future is Now PT.II Re/Form~ation” CasildART at 32 Connaught Street, Connaught Village, London W2 2AF Until 7 September
Top Photo: Christopher Day
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