From the Inside Out

20 September – 11 November 2018

Nilbar Güreş, Marie Jacotey, Athena Papadopoulos, Emma Talbot 

From the Inside Out is a group exhibition of female artists who utilise expanded forms of drawing to navigate a passage from personal experience to the outside world. The exhibition explores the capacity of drawing to convey the complexity and diversity of female experience.

These artists utilise the immediacy and directness of the drawn line to document experience, lived or imagined, giving form to memories and private thoughts. Taking inspiration from literature, popular culture and folklore, the artists use drawing to tell stories about age, sexuality, gender and politics. The works incorporate assemblage and collage, testing the boundaries of drawing as it moves into three dimensions. Traditional craft techniques, such as embroidery and quilting, are employed as a conceptual strategy with which to explore the construction of female identity. Exploring states of being, both interior and exterior, the artists tell stories that are as personal as they are universal.

The works of Nilbar Güreş place everyday life realities in theatrical settings. Telling stories of the invisible and inaudible, her works discuss ideas of gender, sexuality, race, class and the systems that sustain oppression and control.  Employing a diverse range of media such as drawing, embroidery and appliqué, her works are imbued with a poetic and humorous inventiveness as well as a critical and political underside.

Marie Jacotey portrays contemporary relationships and conversations in drawings interspersed with text in a comic-strip form.  Working across media and scale, she is inspired by social interactions and the stories of friends, strangers, literature and popular culture. Drawing functions as a means to tell highly personal and self-reflective stories.

Athena Papadopoulos uses autobiographical references combined with images and text appropriated from popular culture, historical and contemporary literature. Bringing these materials together in the form of collages, she weaves herself as subject into a narrative thread that explores issues around contemporary gender politics and social relationships.

The works of Emma Talbot refer to interior psychological space. Using a highly stylised figure motif to describe the self, she articulates internal personal narratives as visual thoughts of her own experience, her memories and psychological projections.  Her drawings, made in watercolour, pencil and ink on paper or silk, often incorporate her own writing and other sources that describe her sense of the world. 

Curators and artists' tour: 19 September 6pm
Private view: 19 September 6.30-8pm

For further information and press images please contact Suzie Jones, [email protected]

A full colour exhibition guide with essay by Jacqui McIntosh will be published to coincide with the exhibition.  Public engagement projects include tours, talks and performances with exhibiting artists, curators and an art historian. There will be a free music event by Ubu Ensemble, Guildhall School of Music & Drama that responds to the themes within the exhibition. 

Nilbar Güreş (born 1977, Istanbul, Turkey) lives and works in Istanbul and Vienna.  Recent solo exhibitions include: OVERHEAD, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz;  Jumping Bed and Female Lovers, Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin, 2018; Heartache of a Stone, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna, 2017; Open Phone Booth, The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, Israel, 2016. She studied Fine Art at Marmara University, Istanbul, 2000 and Fine Art at Malerei und Grafik, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna in 2002.

Marie Jacotey (born 1988, Paris, France) lives and works in London. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Ballon Rouge, Paris, 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include: Morning Defeats, Hannah Barry Gallery, London. Recent group exhibitions include: Architectural Ethnography, Japan Pavilion, Venice Biennale; Watery, fluid, Cloud cuckoo land, London, 2018; You see me like a UFO, Marcelle Joseph Project, Ascot; Assemble: How We Build, Architekturzentrum Wien, 2017. She graduated with a MA Printmaking from the Royal College of Art, London in 2013.

Athena Papadopoulos (born 1988, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Smurfette, Emalin, London; Belladonna’s Muse, CURA Basement, Rome, Italy, 2017; Wolf Whistles, Shoot the Lobster, New York City, USA, 2016. Forthcoming group exhibitions include: Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), CA, Los Angeles; The Marvellous Cacophony, October Salon, Belgrade, 2018. She graduated with a MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2013.

Emma Talbot (born 1969, UK lives and works in London). Recent solo exhibitions include: Nicolas Krupp Basel; Caustic Coastal, Salford, Manchester; Woman-Bird-Snake, Galerie Onrust Amsterdam, 2018. Recent group exhibitions include: John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Journeys Through The Wasteland, Turner Contemporary, Margate; Solitary Pleasures, Freud Museum, London; Rumpy Bees and Pumpy Blooms, Klosterpresse, Frankfurt; Virginia Woolf, Tate St Ives touring to Pallant House Gallery, Chichester and Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 2018. She graduated with a MA Painting from the Royal College of Art in 1995.