BASEROOM 2B - FINE ART AND RESEARCH
Ruarí Milne@ruarimilne____
ruarimilne.comI use painting as a full-bodied process to record my body’s movement while experimenting with the illusion of depth and space. The intimacy and urgency of touch is integral to my work. I paint with my hands and feet, often sliding across the canvas to archive a moment of physical release. My work questions the order of thought, where dance-like, active engagement with painting leads my conversation with an image and its surface history. I test colours directly on my skin, my fingers flutter through paint to suggest the weightlessness of waves, and scratch marks reveal illuminating raw canvas. Over several weeks, I use a blend of painting, drawing, and sculpting techniques in charcoal, clay, acrylic, rock, and sand. I walk all over my work, spit on it, scratch it, sleep with it, cry with it, bleed into it. With time, space reveals itself, so I care for and cultivate this illusion of depth like a fossilized piece of my body and its natural imperfections. However, the work is never fully finished. Clay and paint peel gently from the surface like shedding skin, so the painting remains active and alive even after the completion of the painting process.
TITLE: At dusk we feel our bodies, 2025

Medium: Acrylic, clay, dirt, grass, charcoal, and oil stick on canvas

Dimensions: 1.8 x 300 cm  

3 words related to your practice:
Movement, spatiality, alive


Sandy Kelso
sandykelso.comSandy Kelso (b. 2001, Evergreen, Colorado.) is a writer and photographer whose work explores memory, gender, and architecture. She lives and works in London. 

TITLE: Fossil Trace
Medium: Poem

3 words related to your practice:
Meditative, Intimate, Consuming

EK Myerson
@ekmyerson  EK Myerson is an interdisciplinary artist & critic. EK investigates alchemy, Arab-Jewish histories & disposable archives, through film, text, sculpture, collage, curation, photography & painting. As a filmmaker, EK makes wearable sculptures & props, & performs in character & on flute. They work with gold leaf, acrylic, papier-mâché, leather, wax & plaster-casting.

EK collects & re-uses receipts & ephemera as surfaces for texts. EK terms their methodology ‘auto-friction’: a specifically trans engagement with self & materiality. EK is fascinated with trans illusion as creative practice.

EK has a PhD in medieval literature from Birkbeck College (2022) & shifted to practice-based research at the Derek Jarman Lab. Their film ‘submerged reliquary of a Kentish Saint’, made with Sophie Mei Birkin, was screened at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image in 2023. Their work has appeared in publications including GLQ, Wasafiri, postmedieval, t’ART, The TLS. Their first book, The Desire for Syria in Medieval England, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

TITLE: Still from the film Leger-De-Man
Dimensions variable; duration: 7 mins

Medium: Sony A7 iii camera


3 words related to your practice:
multimedia, narrative, premodern
Klara Fokicheva
@klara.fokicheva
fokichevaklara@gmail.comExploring the interconnectedness between living and non-living matter, my work sits at the intersection of Buddhist ideology and materialist theory, both sharing a common intention to promote awareness of one’s surroundings. Works begin with collecting materials through processes like mudlarking, eco-gathering, and flea market scavenging. Often utilising discarded  materials and found objects, my practice is grounded in a mindful awareness of repurposing and upcycling—like making canvas frames from found wooden crates or using old socks to build structure. I have a strong interest in tools and objects designed ergonomically to be in close contact with the hands, forming a constant, symbiotic relationship with people. Also drawn to found organic matter, such as small animal bones and eggshells, powerful symbolic remnants of living organisms. Far from inert artefacts, finished pieces feel like active tools for engagement, reflecting our relationships with the space we’re in, the objects surrounding us, and the forces at present. 

TITLE: Truth of the Jaw Within, 2024
Dimensions: 52 x 66 cm

Medium: Mdf, socks, plaster, plastic, acrylic, oil, metal claw, animal jaw from the Thames
3 words related to your practice:

Energy, Interconnectedness, Objects

@rcagraddipRCA Graduate Diploma September 2024