Small is Beautiful

42nd Edition

David Hepher (b 1935)

For over six decades David Hepher has centred his practice on the urban landscapes of south London, where he lives. Exploring the scale and 'austere grandeur' of the expansive modern social housing estates built in the 1960s and 70s, Hepher was attracted to the formal beauty of their grid-like structures and by the physical and emotional traces of their many inhabitants. As Hepher replicates a builder's application of textured and deteriorated facades, pushing his paintings to the brink of abstraction, his multivalent work has both celebrated and mourned modernism in modes that are futuristic and nostalgic, utopian and entropic. These smaller works with details from an estate at Elephant & Castle, London, distill Hepher's reflections further.  

David Hepher studied at Camberwell School of Art and then the Slade School of Art, London, where he later became Professor and Head of Painting. His work is held in public collections including Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

Alexandra Searle (b 1992)

Alexandra Searle is a London-based sculptor. After studying Fine Art at Newcastle University graduating in 2015, she went on to complete an MFA in Fine Art Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Drawing upon the intersection of medical themes and the human condition from personal experiences with anxiety and hypochondria, Searle manipulates and exploits the behaviour of materials in order to physically depict moments of stress, tension and expectation. Primarily working with mouldmaking and casting, she captures soft or malleable materials put under pressure, just before the point of collapse, as a way of playing upon the delicate and temporal nature of the corporeal existance. Her works expose familiar fragilities and aim to dig into the soft tissue of the materials she uses.

Laurence Noga (b 1961)

London-based Laurence Noga is an artist, curator and writer. He graduated from Byam Shaw, Central St Martins 1991. He was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2018 and exhibits widely. Noga lectures for the University of the Arts London (UAL) and belongs to the APT community of artists in South London. 

Noga’s approach explores a personal iconography and phenomenology. Using found objects in his father’s garage, such as washers or sheet music, help make the choices of colour and structure (his father collected hundreds of packets, washers, door- knobs, sheet music, menus, wood shapes, or tools). The choice of colour and structure often comes from his memory of his childhood - left sitting in smoky jazz clubs listening to his mum sing, or visits to his dad’s work, restaurants such as Le Caprice.

Noga is drawn towards the intangible and intimate nature between painting, collage, and assemblage, exploring and utilizing unexpected combinations of multi-level colour and surface construction. Physical processes fluctuate between instinctive decisions (often with collage) collisions of geometry and the unpredictability/predictability of colour relationships.

Mercedes Lucy

Mercedes Lucy's practice centres around her passion for ceramics combined with drawing from life and illustrative work, expressed in vigorous brushwork and mark-making. Recurring themes include domesticity, feminism, motherhood, grief, and identity, often with tongue-in-cheek humour. ​​​

The slow process of ceramics compliments my innate urge to rush, whilst creating artwork that is ‘useful’ relieves the female guilt of creating something that, arguably, in its’ truest form may not be considered necessary.

Mercedes Lucy lives and works in Margate, Kent, UK, where she is a studio holder at TKE Studios.