3 New Artists: Anna Suwalowska, Stuart Deasley and Charlie Yates

For Stuart Deasley, maps are more than tools for locating our way. They’re full of stories, chance narratives, and hold the potential of future life-changing journeys. Like the context of our individual lives, maps become the canvas in which new conjoining structures and patterns might be drawn. Deasley uses grid intersections dictated by the roll of a dice, and trigonometric point locations, to create geometric compositions that jump off each map. With a harlequin sensibility – yet also mirroring the natural formations of geology over time – each angular, sprawling structure is a visual abstraction of chance, movement, and the prismatic colours that light the way. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Deasley’s architectural training is visible through his pieces that build on refined and developed methods of revisioning Ordnance Survey maps.

Charlie Yates: We all know memories fade, but what does the breakdown process look like? In Charlie Yates’s work, all stands still just long enough for us to peer at the semblance of time amid its washing away. In muted and blurring colour, old photographs sourced from the 50s to 70s are recreated in new ways, often redolent of sun-bleached holidays, busy communal establishments, and an air of wistful delight. In “Café del Mar” (2019), an interior coagulates almost like bleach spots on dark fabric, with pale blues and yellows glowing amidst waves of brown that hold the painting together. Faceless figures become part of the infrastructure itself, peeping out as both anonymous but integral to the formative scene at hand. Elsewhere navy intersects with red in the dramatic “George Street” (2020), nodding to historic urban painting and the chronicling of a city’s history.

Royal College of Art graduate Anna Suwalowska is deeply interested in the psychological language of self-awareness and sense perception. How do we convey our emotions to each other, purely through the body? And through our eyes? There’s secret desire that is so overwhelming, a person can barely look up. Or there’s intolerable experiences that cause emotion to shoot out through stricken eyes. Each comportment tells its own story, and Suwalowska works to bring this to life in her painterly, figurative work. She uses a theatrical metaphor to describe these ‘scenes’ that: “depict a stage where figures like actors remain focussed on playing their own roles, independent yet aware of the others”. Dreamlike in tone, her work depicts creatural figures with an almost prehistoric nature as a they are woven and engaged with each other, whilst seeming to be acting in their own interests. Ink, pastels, and watercolour coalesce to create a smoothness that becomes just as intoxicating as the human condition itself.

Encounters in the garden by Anna Suwalowska