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

Aigerim Arginbayeva
@lesidris
lesidris@gmail.comAigerim Arginbayeva is a contemporary artist whose work focuses on exploring memory, identity, and emotional landscapes. Drawing is the heart of her practice,  a skeleton that holds the painting together. It is the starting point, the framework from which everything grows. From this foundation, the work shifts between figuration and abstraction, guided by emotion and the material. 

Recently, she has incorporated felt and old knitted fibres into her practice, using punch needle techniques on raw canvas. As a mother, the tactility of these materials profoundly resonates with her experiences, adding a layer of intimacy and memory to her work. She listens to what the materials offer, allowing them to hold and reveal the narrative of her life and the stories of others.
TITLE: Aigerim Arginbayeva
"Inside-out"
Medium: Mixed media on canvas,
felt and fibres from my daughter’s knitted clothes

Dimensions: 96x80 cm

3 words related to your practice:

emotional , intimate, tactile
Elisabeth Bukenberger
@bukenberger.art
www.bukenbergerart.com / contact@bukenbergerart.com

Elisabeth Bukenberger is a figurative artist informed by a process-led, multidisciplinary practice. Painting remains her primary medium, offering freedom to navigate her experiences and emotions.

Her early explorations of light and shadow, capturing moments of overlooked beauty, led her to reflect on her own personal shadows. Investigating a silver spoon shifted her toward a more conceptual interrogation of form and confront her experiences of body dysmorphia within broader societal expectations.

Her current work explores identity and womanhood, with respect to the female gaze and experience, using the mirror as a ready-made and symbol for women’s psychological and physical realities.

TITLE: Diptyque 
Dimensions: 15 + 35 x 70cm

Medium: Oil on canvas

3 words related to your practice:

Identity, perception, womanhood 

Leyla Pooya K@leylapooyakhan
l.pooya.khan@gmail.com


Leyla Pooya Khan is a South Asian multimedia fine art Practitioner based in London whose works explore culture and Identity, hoping to prompt reflection on the relationship between global politics and the human journey. She is influenced by Contemporary Artists from South Asia, such as Imran Qureshi, Shazia Sikandar and Sasan Nasirnia, who incorporate text within their works. She is continuously inspired by the narratives and rich heritage of these regions. As an ongoing Practice, Leyla combines contemporary calligraphic letters, mark-making and conceptual imagery to push the bounds of visual dialogue with her audience. Her recent works explore the juxtaposition of text and the visceral effect of her visual dialogue on her audience. Her process entails experimentation with different materials and the incorporation of relief forms and shapes that might have the potential to provoke dialogue when intertwined with the calligraphic lettering within her works. 
TITLE: 'Lost Letters'

Dimensions: 91.44x 154.94cm

Medium: Acrylic Paint on 380g stretched canvas


3 words related to your practice:
Journey, exchange, dialogue

Gabija Grusaite@gabijagrusaite
https://gabijagrusaite.com/After working for 15 years with fiction and publishing three novels, I am interested in bringing literary narrative structures into the nonverbal language of visual art. I seek to develop sculptures as storyboards using found objects and various historical materials, envisioning them as characters that interact with each other and tell stories with a multiplicity of possible readings. The provenance of objects, historical context, and poetic associations are critical in assembling these narratives.
Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, educated in London (Goldsmiths College, RCA), I lived in Malaysia throughout my 20s, now based between London and Italy. The migration experience has taught me that identity is an ever-evolving story that connects personal with broader discourses of power. My family history, which stretches from Lithuania to Poland, Ukraine and beyond, has become a departure point that I interweave with various political, social, and historical contexts and articulate via speculative thinking and making.

TITLE: Silence of the Pine
Medium: Bronze, copper pipes, vegtan leather, enamel paint

Dimensions: 92x50x62

3 words related to your practice:

Flight, Traverse, Tresspass
Meishan Zhao@zhao.meishan
meishanzhaoart@outlook.comMeishan Zhao is a London-based Chinese artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, ceramic sculpture, and printmaking. Drawing from both Eastern and Western narratives, her work explores the cultural constructs surrounding femininity, weaving together natural landscapes and female forms to create evocative visual dialogues. Through her art, Zhao invites viewers to reflect on gender, society, and the complex terrain of cultural exchange.
TITLE: Unfolding soil
Medium: Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 85cm x 115cm


3 words related to your practice:

Nature, Identity, Painting
Kyungmin Nam0.white_plane
km.nam021120@gmail.comKyungmin’s work is a process of transformation. She uses found objects as her canvas, breathing new life into discarded materials and inviting a dialogue around memory, mortality, and renewal. These overlooked elements become vessels for exploring what remains, what fades, and what can be reimagined.  

For Kyungmin, painting is not limited to surface—it is a meditation on presence and impermanence. Grounded in the belief that death is a transition rather than an end, her work layers material and gesture to reflect the fluid nature of existence.  

Blurring the line between painting and object, she challenges ideas of permanence and value. By merging traditional methods with experimental processes, she allows texture and materiality to carry meaning.  

Through this balance of presence and absence, Kyungmin invites viewers to reconsider what is often ignored, offering a quiet but powerful reflection on time, memory, and transformation.

TITLE: The Night When Everything Flipped
2025
Materials: Oil paint on canvas

Dimensions: 137 x 90 cm

3 words related to your practice:

Transformation, Impermanence, Reclamation


Hanna Kojima Boyd@hannakboyd
https://www.hannakojimaboyd.com/I came across a window into paradise, an old window, hazy and coated in dust, through which the world beyond appears far off and unreal.
 Of paradise, I refer to the place of true belonging, a place where the most beautiful moments and cherished memories coexist forever.                                                
The view from the window is enchanting but tinged with melancholy and yearning. I press my nose against the glass like a child, trying to get closer, but my breath fogs up the cool surface, making it even harder to see. I become aware of the exquisite anguish of standing on the threshold of paradise but never being able to enter it. Even in the middle of an unforgettable moment, I am already anticipating the loneliness when it is over. The words get caught in my throat as they come rising up: “Won’t you stay, just a little longer?”                                                
I held her in my arms as we stood on the threshold of paradise - Ural Thomas and the Pain in “Smoldering Fire” 

TITLE: Monsoon Green
Dimensions: 80 x 60cm

Madium: Oil on canvas

3 words related to your practice:

Longing, Threshold, Obscurity


Mary Pedder
marypedder@hotmail.com
Moving from Harlesden to Hampshire just before the pandemic heightened my awareness of nature’s role in my life. This transition, alongside leaving teaching and navigating my children’s autism diagnoses, led me to reflect on the concept of ‘home’ as a web of correspondences between place, belonging and identity. I use an autoethnographic framework to explore themes of neurodivergence and contemporary exclusion within a broader social context. As a practice-led researcher, my process is iterative, often beginning with drawing and evolving through various media before culminating in painting—or unfolding in reverse.Painting is at the heart of my practice, providing a space to distill and synthesise insights from my research. I experiment with application, surface, colour, and media to convey the essence of an idea or emotion. It is through the materiality of paint—the freedom and challenge it offers—that I am constantly pushed to refine my work in pursuit of a more authentic representation of self.

TITLE: Rock Pool Womb
Dimensions: 110 x 80 cm.
Medium: oil on canvas

3 words related to your practice:

place, nature, belonging

@rcagraddipRCA Graduate Diploma September 2024