Installation
Painting / Drawing
Painting / Drawing
Sculpture
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THICK, STRETCHY, STICKY, SPACE 2024
Finding Balance 2020
Bloom 2024
No! 2025
Four videos and four prints installed on squat rack 300 × 500 × 300 cm
Gouache on paper 59.4 × 42 cm
Oil on canvas 120 × 90 cm
Resin 39 × 39 × 38 cm
Fran Hayes _frangry_
Francesca Backhouse francescabackhouse Francesca Backhouse is a London-based fine artist whose practice developed after a background in fashion and illustration. Her pieces balance the absurd and the beautiful, reflecting a fascination with the impractical and the unimaginable. Featured by Saatchi Art and contributing to projects at Frieze London, Backhouse continues to explore what she calls the ‘Art of the Odd’ seeking beauty in peculiarity. Finding Balance was the first painting completed by Francesca Backhouse. The work depicts Crown Prince pumpkins, their distinctive blue skins contrasting with vivid orange flesh and seeds. Pumpkins, the largest fruit in existence, hold countless seeds that symbolise potential, renewal, and the promise of growth. Through this imagery, Backhouse reflects on balance in uncertain times, suggesting that even when individuals feel alone, the world offers grounding and opportunity.
Fran Hayes is an interdisciplinary artist based in London working across 3D modelling, animation, installation, writing and sculpture. Her practice explores damaged ecologies, science fiction and the uncanny through a human lens, grounding the digital in tangible encounters. Collaboration and porous exchange are central to Hayes’s work, which seeks to connect speculative worlds with lived experience and collective care. THICK, STRETCHY, STICKY, SPACE combines digital paintings and video works exploring speculative landscapes shaped by damaged ecologies, science fiction, and the uncanny. Hidden truths appear as luminous images that spill from screens into elastic futures. These entities act as guardians of an unhierarchical realm, their glitching bodies evoking higher beings encased in paper or screen, calling for attentiveness and a kinder awareness of the threads that connect all beings.
Freja Zhang __.freja
Gang Chen
Freja Zhang is a London-based visual artist and designer whose practice spans painting, experimental publishing and installation. Combining ink, calligraphy, acrylic and digital tools such as TouchDesigner and Processing, Zhang explores nature, memory and transformation. Drawing on traditional Japanese rock painting techniques, Freja Zhang layers acrylic textures to create evolving surfaces that echo the resilience of natural life. In contrast to the speed of digital culture, the work meditates on fragility, slowness, and cyclical time. Bloom resonates as a ‘tomorrow’s antique’, inhabiting the undefined space between tradition and transformation.
Gang Chen is a sculptor and public artist based in Beijing. Initially active in Chinese contemporary art, Chen has focused on public art since 2010. Chen’s works are represented in galleries, institutions, and private collections nationally and internationally. Gang Chen’s No! expresses the natural conflict between the outer world and the inner self. A constant sense of discomfort runs through daily life. In the process of adapting, the force of resistance against reality grows strong and heavy, yet it does not change the external world. Instead, it turns inward, quietly reshaping Chen from within.
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