Eleonora Bourmistrov works in a variety of media ranging from sculpture, painting to site-specific installations and video, exploring issues around transience, instability, time and ruins. Her focus is physical and human worlds at the point, where things break down, collapse and fall apart – the moments that demonstrate most powerfully the finality of all things. By means of simulacrum, illusion, parody of building processes, the mixture of genuine and imitated materials, deconstructive techniques and light effects, the artist creates a work that is dark, dramatic and disorienting. It reveals the power of ruination and inevitability but also the beauty of the flux of time and of transitoriness.

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London www.eleonorabourmistrov.com

Sasha Bowles explores the ways that memories can ebb and flow from one thing to another. Memories can be called up deliberately or rise up involuntarily from a trigger. Memory that is re-remembered gives us a new meaning in a new context. Each re-visitation leaves a trace, a layering of traces; leaving a representation or image of something that is displaced and refers beyond itself. The rubbing out, removing and wearing away allows for the trace to be overtaken by new images.

MA Fine Art, Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London http://www.sashabowles.co.uk

Nicholas Cheeseman uses materials to investigate process, change and value. Objects and materials are manipulated through cumulative and destructive acts. Layers of paint and wax are formed over extended periods of time through dripping and pouring. Other materials are reduced through more controlled interventions that destroy their original integrity.These contrasting methods of laboured and instinctive means of production provide a sense of deterioration.The resulting juxtaposed forms are imperfect, incomplete and impermanent. The sculptures question how we assign value when the outcome has evolved from its original form.

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London https://nicholascheeseman.co.uk

Kelise Franclemont’s work is focused on identity, memory and conflict, particularly, on the immutable line between Other and Self. In a widely multi-disciplinary practice, she often appropriates cultural artefacts of the Other. Using story-telling tactics and subtle humour, Kelise re-makes a situation based on some kernel of truth, while allowing viewers to create their own narratives from these discrete elements.
This small stone was once part of pleasing mathematics in tessellated patterns… a fan, a leaf, a flower. It remained in that belonging for nearly 2000 years until one day, it was dislocated from its home. In this instant, this fragment was transformed from artefact into another kind of ruin. A relic, this souvenir now belongs to no more than a memory, a resurrected existence in minutes and megabytes, and thus has become something much easier to destroy and to forget.

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts, London http://www.kelisefranclemont.com

Ruth Hentsch’s central concerns are the concept of time, passage of time, transformation, natural materials and surface. Ruination of initial forms, distortion, dissolution and reversal of ruination are integral parts of her work. Beginning with a human figure or face, Ruth allows time and materials (such as salt, water or earth) to intervene in her work, gradually erasing the familiar outlines. The outcome is often an alienated, disoriented image that shows signs of finality and death, though still somehow connected to the past. At the same time, from the ruins of the past new, unpredicted forms arise that bear a mystery within and give hope beyond the image. Ruth’s works are to be seen as a metaphor for human existence in its transience and renewal.

Postgraduate Diploma, Fine Art, Academy of Fine Art, Bochum, Germany http://www.ruthhentsch.de

Monika Kita’s recent art practice is concerned with the subject of loss, with a strong emphasis on space, time and history. Memory as a psychological journey inwards adds an important dimension to her work. The artist explores fractions of past moments, which often elicits a study of the place and a recording of the passing of time. This allows her to ‘freeze the present’ and to contemplate upon its relationship with the past. This process has its extension in the mind. She is particularly interested in derelict buildings in the context of historical events, such as atomic power stations and disused military objects. Alongside the rather personal nature of such inward contemplations about time and loss, Monika’s works could be also viewed as time documents that record, remind and warn of the dangers of global alienation and destruction.

MA in Fine Art, Camberwell College of Arts/ Chelsea College of Arts http://www.monikakita.com

Anna Levy’s work is concerned with the concept of space as psychological construct. She understands space as an entity experienced with the outline of our skin as a borderline to the whole outside of our body. Scrutinizing the inner workings of the ‘conscious’ and the ‘unconscious’ is as important to the artist as exploring the notion of psychological and physical time-spaces. In particular, she interrogates how they relate to each other and influence our perception and conceptualization of the world, especially with regard to time and place. Light, whether changing, deteriorating or increasing, is very important in Anna’s videos, and can be viewed as a metaphor for the passing of time.

MA Fine Arts, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London http://www.annalevy.co.uk

Milena Michalski’s practice interweaves place and perception, site and sight. Through layering, light, transparency and abstraction, she reflects upon multiple aspects of memory and trace; what is seen, what is unseen, what is preserved and what is destroyed. One of her ongoing projects, In/Visible War Crimes Sites, deals with the past and the present and, in many cases, where the two meet in functioning buildings, or preserved ruins. She works in various media, including printmaking, photography, film and video, paint and sculpture. Her work also combines these to create installations, as well as her Perspextive series of layered, mixed media pieces (print, plexiglass, paint, found objects).

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London http://www.milenamichalski.com

Despina Olbrich-Marianou works in a variety of media ranging from performance, textile-work, land art, installation to drawing. Alongside more general, socio-critical reflections, she sees her works as a possibility for getting to know herself. They are part of the artist’s personal strategy of coming to terms with the past, of accepting that the present will become the past tomorrow, and the fact that everything is finite. Through her works, the artist gains a purifying strength, which sets her mind and spirit free and eradicates scars left by time in her soul.

Despina’s performances, such as ‘Tales’, ’Farewell’ and ‘Transient’ refer directly to the theme ‘Ruins of Time’, emphasizing the passage of time, ruination and healing through redemption and renewal. The artist invites the viewer to be involved in her performances by taking part in the destructive and rebuilding processes aimed at liberation from time and pain ultimately.

Postgraduate Diploma in Painting and Mosaics, Academy of Fine Arts, Athens; Postgraduate Diploma in Painting and Graphics, Academy of Fine Arts, Munich http://www.myway.de/despina

Everything in nature follows a specific rhythm, a recurring cycle. Brigitte C. Reichl’s works are concerned with tracing these cycles and rendering them visible. In her site-specific installations, the artist activates a space by transforming it into an atmospheric place that transports us to another, inner world, beyond that seen by the physical eye. A world, where time seemingly stands still and where just the silent witnesses of time have outlived transience.

MA Fine Art, Chicago Art Institute, USA  http://www.karton@art.de

The work of Rosa Quint refers to locations in space and time. She uses diverse media to explore her subject and concentrates on the recording and articulation of subjective impressions and personal experience. Images, which in their layered stratification allude to a multitude of aspects and features of a geographic location, have the purpose of a personal cartography going beyond physical space and time. Her approach corresponds to the heterotopic properties of space, a concept which Foucault uses to describe the complexity of spatial and temporal relations.

PhD, Fine Art Sciences, Ludwig-Maximillians University Munich, Department of Art Pedagogy http://www.rosaquint.de

Jonathan Slaughter‘s site-specific work explores ideas of boundary and transgression. By boldly imposing into the exhibition space, the work forces an encounter with the viewer. Relationships with interior and exterior space are further explored and reinforced by the choices the viewer makes as he or she navigates the work in the exhibition space. Jonathan’s recent work explores the problematic of the ruin, by subverting the proposition and creating the conundrum.

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London http://www.JonathanSlaughter.co.uk

Carin E. Stoller’s medium is painting. On vividly coloured and loosely painted backgrounds, she develops spatial structures meshed with abstract, sometimes flat, elements in such a way that the lengthy painterly process and the occasion of painting become a thrilling unity. Time and space represent themselves in multilayered compositions. However, colour, composition, brush stroke and contrasts play a greater role than the representation of the “occasion of the painting” and that of the process. The paintings have no titles, and this is on purpose, as the artist doesn’t want to tell stories or stimulate imagination. Rather, the audience is invited to enter the interwoven work of free painting and memories of familiar spatial situations and associations.

Postgraduate Degree, Painting, Academy of Fine Arts, Munich http://www.carinestoller.de