WINDOW ARTISTS
Continuing the brand’s artistic narrative, ROKSANDA provides a creative gallery space to champion the works of female artists and makers, encouraging diverse creativity, and reinforcing our belief in supporting women.
-Eleanor Turnbull -
'So much juice' by sculptor and film maker Eleanor Turnbull, brings together a collection of urban, papercrete casts that ooze, collect and channel liquid despite their bone dry material. A slumping asphalt staircase overflows, despite its plughole, or is it a mouth? Asking you its namesake: “Give me all your bad news”.
In Eleanors work food and water are mediums between detachment and belonging, wetness and dryness, digestion and flowability, desire and repulsion. In confronting the relationship we have with our own bodies and to that of the landscape, we inevitably encounter blockages, stagnation, runoff and flooding. Puddles made from paper show that objects are undone by their own material. Colour and form draw us in like children to sweets, edible pinks, marshmallow, milkshake, juice and messy eating.
- Grace Woodcock -
London-based artist Grace Woodcock combines 3D design software with experimental upholstery to make soft sculptures and creations. For ROKSANDA, she has installed a duo of large-scale sculptures exhibited in the store window - evolving innovative elements that complement the shapes and structures of the collection.
- Julie Nelson -
Ceramic sculptor Julie Nelson brings her unique and elegant hand-built stoneware objects to the ROKSANDA flagship store in Mayfair. Using the materiality of clay as a means to explore naturally occurring patterns and repetitions, Nelson’s ceramic vessels express the regularly irregular forms that interconnect across our environment and placing in the natural world.
Inspired by the coastal setting, random variations are achieved by hand-built stoneware with layers of slip, porcelain and matt glazes that accentuate details within the surface texture. Through a series of evolving ceramics, the artist continues to explore the universal patterns found in nature and allows new interpretations of our connection and attraction to it.
- Maddalena Zadra -
Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, and textile-based installations, the London-based Italian artist Maddalena Zadra touches upon aspects of the tactile and the sensual whilst remaining playful through subtly contrasting vulnerability and eroticism. Referencing a variety of cultures and historical aesthetics, Zadra explores symbolic meaning and storytelling in her practice, creating multi-layered, open scenarios.
Through integrating different ways of mark making and its relationship with surface, the artist explores the limits of collage, drawing and print. For ROKSANDA she brings her piece ‘Under the Shadow’ to the store window, inviting audiences to explore their own understanding around the flexibility of painting, and the possibilities craftsmanship.
- Melania Toma -
Born in Italy and working in London, multi-disciplinary artist Melania Toma center her practice around the exploration of the narrative subjectivity, within historically situated intersecting webs of gender, power hierarchies, ecological degradation.
Inspired by the feminine strength and emotional dedication behind craftsmanship throughout history, the artist is empowered by the poetic elements and symbols that continue to impact her own practice. These intersectional analyses include the often less visible intimate scales, such as concepts of feminine, structures of domesticity, and the possibilities of the transformative power of the self. Through a contemporary take on textile design, Toma brings her explorative sense of wildness into her installation piece ‘Daughters of Paca' to the ROKSANDA Mount Street window.
- Yulia Iosilzon -
Awarded the prestigious Bloomberg New Contemporaries award in 2019, artist Yulia Iosilzon’s paintings are laden with vibrant washes of colour incorporated over transparent silks and cloths. Grounding her works within narrative and anecdote, the artist cites children’s illustration and theatre as sources of inspiration, encouraging her lyrical works to be understood as scenes within a comic strip.
Iosilzon often repeats symbols and motifs throughout her paintings, sculptures, and installations, building up an iconographic arsenal which she uses to comment on personal, social, and political issues. Blending with the artistic oeuvre of the ROKSANDA collection, the artist’s ‘Studio Ensemble’ presents a series of bespoke paintings flourished in the Mount Street window and throughout the store.