TondoCosmic is now in residence at Making Space, 48 Aberfledy Street, London E14
Welcome to TondoCosmic. We present holistic art projects and events in lesser used premises and unusual sites to maximise the potential of the artists and bring them to new audiences. We focus on artists who have shown dedication to their practice that has resulted in developed works in both skill and concept. Please get in touch: email tondocosmic@gmail.com
NOW OPEN
THE POPLAR BESTIARY
Kirsten Glass, Kris Lock, Eleanor Moreton, Tamsin Morse, Casper Scarth, Nahem Shoa, Jennet Thomas, Jeanine Woollard, Zatorski + Zatorski
Curated by Tamsin Morse and Jennifer Thatcher
15 March – 12 April 2025
Thursday - Saturday 12-5pm
Press release by Jennifer Thatcher
The Poplar Bestiary takes inspiration from bestiaries, those ‘books of beasts’ popular in mediaeval Europe, to explore how contemporary artists use animals as metaphors today. A compendium of descriptions, allegorical stories and illustrations of animals, both real and mythical, the bestiary blended natural history, religious doctrine and moral teachings. The creatures of bestiaries often represented moral virtues or vices, while their origin stories often echoed those from the Bible – such as the lion, who is born dead but has life breathed into him by its father on the third day, evoking the Resurrection of Christ. Famous British examples include the Cambridge, Ashmole and Aberdeen Bestiaries.
But what do animals represent for us today, in an age of post-human thinking in which we fear losing that which makes us human? Our relationship to animals encompasses the contradictions of human morality: we eat, hunt and fear some animals, while we tame, pet and revere others. The depictions of animals in The Poplar Bestiary carry traces of their ancient religious, mythological and moral symbolisms, mixed with modern hopes, fears and desires. Animals in art are often used as a stand-in for human emotion, and even the artist themselves. Anthropomorphism offers a means of representing those aspects of human behaviour and experience – the violence, sadness and joy of human life – that we struggle to articulate. In this, depictions of animals symbolise the human quest for survival at its most primal. Yet there is a cartoonishness about many of the beasts in The Poplar Bestiary that acknowledges the fine line between allegory and cliché, as with the wise owl, faithful dog and noble lion of countless children’s stories and cartoons.
Like ancient bestiaries, the lexicon of beasts in The Poplar Bestiary draws from real, fictional and imaginary sources, displayed here in the form of painting, drawing, collage, sculpture and props from a post-apocalyptic film.
Guest co-curator Dr Jennifer Thatcher is an art historian, critic and public programmes curator. She is currently a British Academy post-doctoral fellow, researching the history of artist interviews. Her co-edited (with Dr Lucia Farinati) volume, Theorising the Artist Interview, was recently published by Routledge. She co-curated the 2023 Folkestone Book Festival; the public programmes for the Folkestone Triennial (2014, 2017) and the Whitstable Biennale (2016); and was Director of Talks at the ICA, London (2003–10).
EXHIBITING ARTIST : Kirsten Glass
Kirsten Glass’s work has evolved through various phases over the last 30 years. Always, though, there is an interaction between a particular type of image (used as a host or a vessel) and the more abstract energies of her painting activity. In past work the image-types she has employed have included: children’s play stencils, magazine models, pop lyrics, friends’ shadows, structural conventions of abstract painting, sacred geometry, stock silhouettes and most recently the appropriation of characters from colouring-in pages. In The Dreaming, a line painting of a cartoon sleeping cat from a colouring book is superimposed on the messy, free-wheeling oil painting under-layer (a sort of landscape from memory turned sideways and at the same time a primal female body). The underlayer both colours the dreaming cat and exceeds it. Or does the domesticated image-type dream of the outside (of that which exceeds it)? Of her 2022 exhibition, Night Scented Stock, she wrote: ‘I am an artisan and the paintings are dreaming.’ Emerging from her background interests in magic, altered states of consciousness, alchemy and animism, Glass writes of her playful, collage-like paintings: ‘In the end each painting has to somehow harmonise its elements so it doesn't need me any more.’ www.kirstenglass.com
EXHIBITING ARTIST : Kris Locke
Kris Lock looks to the extraterrestrial imaginaries of watery places and microcosmic geographies, from container ships and hydroponics farms to islands and ponds, as places of peculiar harmonies and dissonances. The fabric of these places bend under the relativities of the agents that populate them, like marbles on a spandex sheet. Kris works through painting and writing. Kris is also a founding director of Well Projects, a contemporary art gallery and publishers based in Margate. www.krislock.net
EXHIBITING ARTIST : Eleanor Moreton
Eleanor Moreton grew up in Berkshire and studied painting at Exeter College of Art and Chelsea College of Art. She studied Art History and Theory at the University of Central England. She works in Poplar, East London. She has had solo shows with Ceri Hand Gallery; Jack Hanley in New York; Maya Frodeman Gallery (formerly Tayloe Piggott Gallery), Jackson Hole, USA; Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh and London; Phoenix Exeter, and has been in numerous group shows at home and internationally. Her work can be found in The Anomie Review of Contemporary Painting (2018) and Picturing People, by Charlotte Mullins (2015) She says: ‘My paintings are about how I find being in the world. They weave together ideas about family, gender, history, folklore and politics, all overseen by a psychoanalytic eye. Restless, non-fixed, pushing and pulling, dissolving and reforming, they move between the world we “know” and the less stable world of our imaginations.’ In relation to her Octopus series, she writes: ‘Grotesque, sad and noble, the octopus has a feeling brain in every tentacle. These works come from a different place, a more interior place. While Edges considers the world as divided by boundaries, in these Octopus works the female protagonist, with eyes closed, appears to soar above it, entering into the boundary-less, poly-sensory world of her octopus lover.’ www.eleanormoreton.co.uk
EXHIBITING ARTIST : Tamsin Morse
After a BA at the Slade, and an MA at Chelsea, Tamsin Morse exhibited throughout the UK and beyond, being represented by One in the Other gallery, London before taking some time away from the studio to raise a family. Returning to the UK from living in Portugal and New York, current and recent exhibitions include Gate of Horns, curated by Hettie Judah, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate (2025); Somatechnics at the Tagli, London (2024); Outliers, Q&C Gallery, Cambridge (2024); and WomXn, curated by Jo Baring and Beth Greenacre, London. She is co-director of TondoCosmic Projects She approaches picture-making as a way of upturning perceptions of acceptable codes of conduct through references to mythology, narratives and symbols. Infused with humour, the subject matter is quite serious; she sees herself very much as a storyteller, combining images she finds online, through AI, or from observations, imagination and observational drawing. The use of animals reflects the animal that is base in us all, and how people see domesticated animals as echoes of their own thoughts. The colours she uses border on toxicity and edge on the beautiful, reflecting the contradictions in the subject matter. In A Making of Legends: Pegasus’ Changing Rooms, she depicts the process of transforming Pegasus, the winged horse, into a legend, his hoofs being painted, his wings delicately cleaned. Yet Morse warns us that appearances can be deceptive: a swan lays bleeding on the ground beside Pegasus, as if the creation of this mythical legend required the sacrificing of another creature. In the background, a field of wind turbines offers a menacing glimpse into the deadly obstacles that await Pegasus. www.tamsinmorse.com
EXHIBITING ARTIST : Casper Scarth
Casper Scarth’s equivocal figures invite the viewer into an uncertain exchange. There is a mutuality about them that draws you in. Initially their small scale pulls at you, then their use of colour and detail. Often painted in egg tempera on hardboard, they are saturated with intense, matt colour, counterpointed by concise details that stand in relief on the paint’s surface – a woman’s fingernails, a man’s buttons – piques that divert the eye across and into the space. Others, on smooth board, have a dilute, free quality that is mirrored in his line. In some works this restiveness is explicit in the figure itself, like ‘Swan Song’, which fluctuates between the human and the animal. In others it remains more implicit, dwelling in the detail of an awkward, twisted hand of an ape perched precariously on a globe, as in ‘Terra-Apocalyptic’. For Scarth, none of the pictures start with a set idea, rather they evolve through the process of painting. Still, certain motifs reappear across his work, such as the primate, a conscious allusion to the quiet horror of a short story by Kafka in which a captive gorilla talks of his accumulated observations of humans and their interactions with the environment. Others include deflating balloons, the ambivalent, enquiring figure of a boy, and the hirsute artist with his miraculous bag of possibility. Appealing, knowing and at times disquieting, Scarth’s work stands slightly to one side. As such it provokes viewers into articulating some of the more uncomfortable elements of their humanity, and also to consider the position of the artist in relation to inherited traditions, both in the mainstream and outside it. (text by Hannah Fussner, 2024) www.casperscarth.com
EXHIBITING ARTIST : Nahem Shoa
Nahem Shoa lives and works in London. He studied Fine Art at Manchester Polytechnic (1988–1991) before later completing postgraduate studies at The Royal Drawing School (2003–2004). Shoa was the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshield’s Foundation award (1993–2001), and was the winner of the Royal Society Of Portrait Painters award (1992) and the Lord Leighton Prize (1992-93). Shoa’s exhibition Into The Light (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) was recently selected for the landmark publication The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting 3 (Anomie Publishing, 2024). Recent and selected solo exhibitions and curated displays include: Seen and Unseen, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (2024-25); Nahem Shoa: Into the Light, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2023-24); Face of Britain, Southampton Art Gallery, Southampton, UK (2020); and Black Presence, The Atkinson, Southport, UK (2019). Nahem Shoa paints portraits that celebrate British ethnic and sexual diversity, as well as figurative paintings in which he explores themes of nature, fantasy, paradise, climate change and the human condition. www.nahemshoa.co.uk
EXHIBITING ARTIST : Jennet Thomas
Jennet Thomas makes films, performances and installations. She creates absurdist worlds that confound straightforward readings, in the form of sci-fi folk tales, musicals and unreliable lectures. She mines the connections between fantasy, ideology and the everyday with a DIY, absurdist spirit – a kind of resistance to capitalist aesthetics. She’s had solo shows with Matt’s Gallery, Tintype, Block 336, Zero Kline & Coma and PEER, in London; Anthology Film Archives in New York; and many film festivals, including IFF Rotterdam, European Media Arts Festival, New York Underground Film Festival. She lives and works in London. The cloth and plaster pieces in this exhibition originally came from a video work called IT ONCE HAD A FACE, NOW IT WANTS ONE AGAIN (2020), part of a series of works titled ANIMAL CONDENSED>ANIMAL EXPANDED. Thomas’s works often feature imagined, weird, half-alive creatures. These pieces are inspired by the curious, centuries-old tradition of Jenny Hanivers – dried carcasses of fish such as rays or skates that have been meticulously crafted to resemble mythical creatures like mermaids or winged sea monsters. They evoke the idea that, post-human extinction, ghost-like things might make themselves out of sludge and waste at the bottom of the ocean. A tiny, grim glimmer of hope that evolution will triumph eventually. www.jennetthomas.com
EXHIBITING ARTIST : Jeanine Woolard
Jeanine Woollard holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College. She has had numerous solo exhibitions at Galerie Analix Forever in Geneva, and was included in group exhibitions curated by Damien Roach (Real Time, Seventeen Gallery, London), Ryan Gander (Young British Art I and II, London and Zurich); and Keith Coventry (Peeping Tom, Vegas Gallery, London), as well as Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Her recent prints, drawings and collages borrow from the imagery of fairytales and the Commedia dell’Arte, exaggerating the gender tropes of these tales to explore the edges of femininity today. She captures her figures – which riff on stock characters like the raucous hag, cheeky jester and damsel-in-distress – as if in mid-narrative, swooning, gasping and looming. Her works relish in the fashions and costumes of the eras depicted: the flounces, bows and curly toed shoes. She amplifies the violence and strangeness of the tales through her use of masks, disguises and heads on plates. Animals feature in the works, either in the form of typical fairytale animals like monkeys and snakes, or as chimera that mix human features with wings, horns, tails and webbed feet. As with her earlier work, in which she recreated iconic art-historical artworks using her own body and props, she inserts her own likeness, using lived and dreamt experiences of being an artist and mother as material for these surreal scenes. www.jeaninewoollard.com
EXHIBITING ARTIST : Zatorski + Zatorski
Zatorski + Zatorski are collaborative artists and life partners working in lens-based media, installation, found object sculpture and performance. They trained at Scottish art schools, currently live in London and have exhibited widely, abroad and in the UK, including Tate Britain, Royal Academy, Whitechapel Gallery and the National Gallery of Scotland. Z+Z are preoccupied with notions of mortality, belief and the soul. A fascination with transience and collective belief systems led to residencies in sacred spaces, including Durham Cathedral. Following this they restored a 19th-century historic 100ft Dutch sailing ship De Walvisch (The whale) in which they live and work. Z+Z consider De Walvisch a constantly evolving art installation that they inhabit and into which they construct real and imagined situations. Objects from their collections aboard become props or players in their work and are then absorbed back into the fabric of the ship, adding to the radiation of ideas. Z+Z embrace the possibilities presented by the digital world with their lens-based works, but they believe we become disconnected from the material world at our peril. They coined the term Radical physicalism in 2020 during lockdown, to describe the growth swell they observed of diverse independent movements among artists to re-balance worlds and reclaim the material physical reality in art production and appreciation. www.zatorskiandzatorski.com
TondoCosmic presents holistic art projects and events in lesser used premises and unusual sites to maximise the potential of the artists and bring them to new audiences. We focus on artists who have shown dedication to their practice that has resulted in developed works in both skill and concept. TondoCosmic is the work of artists Tamsin Morse and Jo Chate.
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PRESS RELEASE
“Montage,” she said, “is an artistic technique in film that composes different narratives.”
“To disturb the logic,” another voice arose.
Today, we are reimagining the collage form—its meaning, impact, and conceptual expansion—acknowledging its roots in 20th-century modernism (Dada, Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism). In the face of 21st-century turmoil, surrealist collage remains, as it always has been, a means of responding to the challenges of our time. By repurposing and transforming found objects, collage envisions a world where disparate elements merge seamlessly across art and life.
From the photographic work of Eva Stenram in the show first, we might be reminded of Hannah Höch and Claude Cahun, both known for their exploration of the fragmentation of the body within visual culture. Stenram’s distinct style in collage reconstructs the reality of the male gaze in photography, using it as a political tool to disrupt and fracture the so-called photographic “reality.”
As stated in an interview: “Stenram uses the reconstructive act of collage as a deft political mode, a way of regaining control over the passive experience of viewing women’s bodies. But her works are always purposefully open-ended—to present and encourage, rather than expose, an interrogation of the way we are used to looking at women.” (Artsy, 2022)
Returning to the vitality of collage, we can trace elements of everyday life in the works of Mariana Mauricio, Cecilia Bonilla, and Kate Street, as well as in the paintings of Emily Stevens. One of the most influential filmmakers to capture the magic of the everyday is Belgium filmmaker Chantal Akerman. The political power of her work often emerges from the mundane, compelling the audience to closely observe every detail of a woman’s daily routine. Rather than simply documenting, the film turns into an interrogation of the act of looking itself. Similarly, the collage works in this show reflect the real world through a female lens, inviting the audience to engage in a critical reflection of their own surroundings.
Or we could say, this attention to inequality and injustice is also an act of love. Through their work, these artists are creating an alternative world—one that aligns with their vision, a space that playfully challenges the weight of unfairness. In essence, they are asserting a demand for their own truth. Rather than unpacking the term of truth here, perhaps it is better to interpret it by the words of performance artist Vida Vojić: “TRUTH can be heard in THE SOUND. WHAT VIBRATES BENEATH THE WORD?”
Drowning in her music and murmur, we might reach a realization: RATIONALITY is OVER. NOISE is ALL. (Vida Vojić)
Isn’t that, after all, the nature of the collage today?
Written by Emma Yifan Wang
London
Vida Vojić
Vida Vojić Frankmar is a music and performance artist, 'alchemical drummer' and writer from Gothenburg, Sweden. Her current performance work focuses on drumming as a means of amplifying input, triggering physical vibration and awakening alternate states. She combines this with poetic and scenographic outputs that draw upon her research into theology, posthumanism, music as magic, alternative conceptions of time and the nature of change.
Emily Stevens
Kate Street
Hung Up, 2024
Vinyl, copper, knitting needles, tights, marble eggs, gem stickers, phone handset, wood, lavender and wood75cm x 62cm x 15cm
Sarah Gillingham
‘Ruined Women’ ‘Ruined Women’ are a series of sculptures made by fusing together found ceramic figurines and clay, reglazing and then re-firing them. These female figurines that I am working with are revered for their prettiness and coyness.
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About Us
Welcome to TondoCosmic. We present holistic art projects and events in lesser used premises and unusual sites to maximise the potential of the artists and bring them to new audiences.Please get in touch: email tondocosmic@gmail.com