I wanted to visit this exhibition earlier, but the opening hours of the gallery corresponded directly with the hours I worked. I felt terrible, trapped supervising south London’s silliest cafe. Weeks passed. But then, out of nowhere, a free Friday opened up and I leapt on a train heading north. I got out at Warren Street, crossed the road, and walked into an area comprising shiny office buildings and glass-fronted shops. I looked around. I weaved past workers having their lunch towards what was once a cafe and is now Hypha HQ, a gallery space run by a studio company. Inside was Home Is Where The Art Is, a group show curated by Grafters Collective.
I had been invited to review the show by the artist Jennifer Jones. I first came across her work at last year’s New Contemporaries exhibition, after which she agreed to exhibit a few pieces on our cafe’s walls. Since then she has set up Grafters Collective, a network of twenty emerging artists who are either from working-class backgrounds or have faced barriers to the art world. Sixteen of those artists exhibited work in this show, which – as the title suggested – swirled around themes of home, nostalgia, place, family, and the mundane. I worried that an exhibition focusing on mundane things would be… mundane, but not so. Jones’ work I recognised from outside, a photograph of the artist’s grandma printed on textiles. Other punchy works – those that stand clearest in my memory – abounded. On the right, as you walked in, was The Essex by Thomas Holland. A slab of parquet flooring, with the Essex coat of arms carved into it, rested against the wall. I nodded. Nice, I thought. Around a temporary wall was Vernetta Chukwu’s Holding Them Up, in which a net full of footballs and family photographs was suspended from the ceiling. The footballs were slightly deflated, Manchester United-themed balls from the early-2000s, ones I remembered from the playground. I suspected most of the artists in this show were children in the noughties.
Some classic young-artist-exhibition fare – namely: video art, artists’ books, and to-scale painted reproductions of everyday objects – peppered the walls. Halfway through Home is where the art is, a pink television stood on a doily. I looked at the list of works and saw it was Elleanna Chapman’s Kitties Want Communism. The telly was blank when I walked in, but a few minutes later one of the receptionists turned it on. I stood in front of it and watched some kittens play with each other while revolutionary slogans subtitled the action. I walked past it, came to the back of the show, and gazed upon Savanna Achampong’s photographic collages of a messy room and flicked through the accompanying zine. Opposite the pink TV was my favourite piece in the show: Mia Harwood’s to-scale sculpture/paintings of a fridge and a freezer, dotted with magnets. I looked at them and smiled. It reminded me of a piece in a Chelsea degree show a few years ago, a scale painting of a LycaMobile off license covering one enormous wall. What do those two works mean? Do they mean anything? I don’t know, but they’re certainly fun to look at.
There was too much in the show for me to give everything equal weight here. But let me leave you with this: Home Is Where The Art Is is worth seeing. Hopefully it can help to achieve the collective’s aims, where barriers are broken and these artists go on to have careers in the art world. One of the few ways that we, the general public, can help is to visit Home Is Where The Art Is. And there’s only a week or so left to see it.
Home Is Where The Art Is -16th May, Hypha Studios HQ
Friday – Monday, 12 – 6pm
