ON THE VERGE OF ITS OWN DISAPPEARING

Savannah Marie Harris (b.1999) is a London based artist. She completed her BA (Hons) in Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts
London in 2020. Harris is currently in her final year of the MA Painting programme at the Royal College of Art and is a recipient of the Basil. H. Alkazzi Scholarship 2021-2023. Savannah Maries practice draws upon themes of symbolism, intimacy and mythology associated with kitsch art. Her Caribbean and Cuban heritage of religious iconography, plastic souvenirs and ceramic sculptures has led to her examination of human desires and emotions. Her work unfolds into an assemblage of paintings that can be read as a stream of consciousness that ebbs and flows into complex environments. Intuitively entangled with colours, light and textures. The act of painting becomes performative as it continuously deconstructs the space unravelling in the moment. Absorbed in the process vibrant colours bleed through, large gestural strokes dilute into muddy stains and what is left is remnants of collapsing surfaces.

Hilda Kortei (b.1994, London) Lives and works in London, United Kingdom. Kortei is in her final year of the MA Painting at Royal College of Art.
“My circumstances feed into my practice. Spirit lives within inanimate objects. I paint with intent––to inject life into symbols and shapes. I give them meaning, and they create their own. I use materials found in my environment––discards by the side of the road, and accept them as gifts from my community. This is a sharing of body and spirit. I question how much to let materials speak for themselves before casting and carving them to our liking, letting gestures of tenderness sit amongst clumps of flesh.
The basis of my practice is play.” HK
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Rosaline Howdle ( b 1997, British/ American ) based in London.Howdle studied Painting at the Royal College of Art (2022), and Camberwell College of Arts, UAL (2019). She has also studied the Rhode Island School of Design (U.S.) and Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Canada).She was awarded the Vanguard Prize in 2019. Howdle attended the RCA as a recipient of the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship (2020-22). She was shortlisted for the Now Introducing Prize 2022 and included in Artlyst’s Ones to Watch 2023.
“ For me, figuration is alive. The metamorphoses taking place in the course of painting seem to mimic the biological processes that underpin my subject matter: evolution, reproduction, and self-repair. I paint things that grow; things that are somewhere between botanical and animal, microscopic and cosmic. I am painting, too, about the human experience of being an organism with scientific knowledge. It’s equal parts exciting and unsettling to witness the determination with which organic matter makes more of itself. It is to witness a self-ongoing orchestration infinitely larger than our individual lives - but underpinning our existence. Through painting I tap into the unconscious undercurrent of survival and perpetuation that links me to the food I eat and the grass I walk on. I’m interested in what happens at this boundary between two entities – in the electric charge of the dividing line, which often splices the painting into above-ground and below-ground, into day and night, into the visible and invisible processes of growth. “ RH