BUFF presents works by the Slade Summer School Artists-In-Residence. Featuring four recent MFA/MA graduates from the Slade School of Fine Art, the exhibition explores the overlapping conversations implicit within each artist’s work. Some of the recurring themes include: dislocation, traces, the bodily, refining processes and sensuality.

Yearsley’s works take inspiration from the artist’s recent travels around Cuba. Large in scale the paintings push the very physical act of making. Yearsley combines this sensitivity to paint with personal experiences that are structurally considered and imbued with emotive force. The vibrant paintings can appear transient as the artist works with fluidity and urgency before each memory slips away. Beach presents the first piece in a new body of work exploring the intersections of concrete photography, cartography, and notions of becoming-with. Employing GPS software, they tracked their movements throughout the Slade building while performing a dérive, making tracings and rubbings along their route. This route was then enlarged and inverted, creating new speculative territories for nonhuman representation. The tracings and rubbings act as photographic negatives, populating these unexplored topographies. Sandra expands the crushed and distorted shapes of her ceramic cigarette ends, making visible their anthropomorphic forms. She further explores her interest in conflating things that touch the body with the body itself, and contrasting and combining beauty with the destructive and the seedy. Woz's recent work attempts to reconcile the relationship between artistic temperament and social prowess. By crassly employing symbols from the business landscape or utilising instructional text on painting, the work childishly depicts a cynicism towards the commodifiable approach of the contemporary artist. The pieces situate themselves in BUFF by implicating the necessity for constant self reflection and self improvement.

Fleur Yearsley

Fleur Yearsley (b. 1990, Manchester, UK) received her MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She completed her Foundation Diploma in Art & Design and BA (Hons) Fine Art at the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. She also participated in artist residencies at Malvern St. James and and Cheadle Hulme School. Yearsey has curated and exhibited in shows across the UK including Faith (2017, Austin Forum, London), MEMEMEME (2016, The Crypt Gallery, London), The Windshow Drawing (2015, Camden People’s Theatre, London), Manchester International Festival (2015, Old Granada Studios, Manchester), OBSESSION: Love, Ritual, Collection (2014, Embassy Tea Gallery, London) and PLATFORM (2014, Shudehill Studio, Manchester). Most recently Yearsley was awarded the Almacantar Award granting her a bursary and studio in East London until August 2018. She works from elusive, but potent memories. Painting facilitates a way for the artist to revisit, grasp and depict certain recollections and capture their sensuous qualities. Personal experience allows Yearsley to refine each subject with colourful sensibility whilst employing idiosyncratic imagery. In this age, it is both challenging to process the abundance of images and information and navigate through a society that is constantly moving. It is easy to lose sight of whom we really are and that our memories are what make us. In a world often imbued with exclusivity Yearsley's paintings are made to remain open.
Instagram: @fleuryearsley
Website: www.fleuryearsley.wixsite.com/fleur-yearsley

Matthew Beach

Matthew Beach (b. 1993, Olathe, USA) is an artist based in London, UK. From September they will be a Printmaking Fellow at City and Guilds of London Art School and an MA Geography student at Queen Mary, University of London. Beach received their MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and BFA from the College of the Arts, University of Florida. Exhibitions include The Showroom, London, Kunstverein at Rosa–Luxemburg–Platz, Berlin, and Gallery Protocol, Gainesville. They also participated in the 2016 Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. Presently, their artistic practice engages the relationships between photographic materiality and the environmental humanities. They are particularly interested in the entanglements between the industrial production of photographic materials, adverse environmental change, and the representation of ecological crisis in visual culture. More broadly, interests include: materialism, permaculture, human-non-human relations, care practices, photographic theory, more-than-human geographies and socially-engaged art.
Instagram: @mbeachstudio
Website: www.matthewbeach.org

Sandra Lane

Sandra Lane (b. 1954, UK) graduated with BA Hons Fine Art Drawing from Camberwell College of Art in 2013. She received the Camberwell/Acme Studio Award 2013/14 finishing with her first solo show at Bearspace Gallery, Deptford. She has just completed an MFA in Sculpture at Slade School of Art. She is starting the Graduate Residency at the Sidney Nolan Trust in September and is taking part in Space Projects exhibition Authorship, in Amsterdam on October 6th. Sandra’s work explores femininity, beauty and awkwardness though intuitive sculpture making. She has recently added recognisable forms of ceramic shoes, cigarettes and make-up to her abstract shapes, liking the way they plant a presence and themselves become abstracted.
Instagram: @sanlanpink
Website: www.sandra-lane.com

Woz

Woz (b. 1990, UK) recently graduated from an MFA in Media at the Slade School of Fine Art. He grew up overseas, predominantly the Middle East, before returning to complete his undergraduate degree at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, University of Oxford. The artist has undertaken residencies at the Merz Barn, Cumbria and in Zarakes, Greece. Recent exhibitions include MeMeMeMe at the Crypt Gallery, Waiting Room at Chelsea Waterside Art Space & Autocorrect Ruined my Life at the Chalton Gallery. He recently was awarded the Stanbury Scholarship prize and will be exhibiting in Rome in Autumn 2017. Woz’s practice aims to reflect the temperamental processes of artistic production by layering visual metaphors onto recognizable frameworks. Acting as chapters in a life-long narrative, each work employs specific signifiers or visual metaphors that parallel universally experienced phenomena.
Instagram: @ahpwoz
Website: www.a-woz.com