I meet Baud Postma at his studio in South London under the railway arches. We talk about authenticity and constructing images in the same breath. Postma’s expression lightens up when discussing the technical side of photography but he speaks with equal consideration for his sitters. His technical ability is admirable and it accomplishes poetic effects. However, it is the space he creates for fragility and vulnerability that echoes our will to relinquish strength. Sitters appear in thought, absent and introspect. Still life shows bruised and transient. It feels good to surrender projections and aspirations and just be.
In the studio with Hannah Brown
“An artist statement is constantly rewritten and almost always out of date because things keep moving on.”
In the Studio with Rana Begum
“The modular nature of the works mean that they may be perceived as a section of something that could be much larger. This idea of the infinite, fluidly extending vertically or horizontally into space is an important quality of my works.”
Mark Barker and A Return to the Body in Sculpture
Studio Visit with Yelena Popova “The idea would be to make a work that disintegrates”
Yelena Popova (b. 1978 Urals, Russia) is based in Cambridge for the year ahead at the Girton College residency. Her paintings are quickly associated with constructivism given the formal quality of her translucent geometric layers. These elusive paintings, however, are the entrance doorway to a distinct practice encompassing video and installation.
Yaron Lapid: “The world is full of images, the trick is to interpret the existing ones”
“I find images and I let them rest. Then at some point I know the feeling I am looking for or the idea I am after. I go through many different boxes of images that I have bought in markets or found somewhere, work them digitally… and when I see images together, I know where I need to go. Many times I am wrong; images don’t do what I thought they would and they don’t work; or they do work but not in the way I want.”