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In Conversation with Dustin Emory

For the Urban Dwellers exhibition curated by LVH Art, we interviewed Dustin Emory about his exploration of isolation as a central theme, his decision to work exclusively in black and white, and the work he made for this show.

Dustin Emory (b. 1999) is a self-taught American painter based in Atlanta, whose work explores isolation by rendering familiar everyday moments strangely unfamiliar and subtly absurd. His paintings often feature solitary figures sharply lit within interior settings, intensifying feelings of introspection and quiet tension. These seemingly ordinary scenes carry a charged atmosphere, as if something troubling has just occurred or is about to unfold. Emory amplifies this unease through distorted perspectives and unexpected viewpoints. Using oil, acrylic, gouache, and pumice stone on canvas, he builds rich, monochromatic surfaces that draw viewers deep into these intense moments. His muted palette and textured layers invite a visceral connection with the psychological spaces his figures occupy, capturing the complexities of solitude in modern urban life. Through his distinctive treatment of light, colour and perspective, Emory challenges viewers to reconsider the hidden emotions embedded within everyday experiences.

LVH Art: Can you walk us through your creative process? Do you usually begin with a plan or sketch, or does each painting develop more intuitively?

Dustin Emory: My process begins with a very quick sketch, usually in my notes app as it allows me to jot it down quickly as the idea forms in my head. I then take the sketch into 3d modeling software and build out the scene. A lot of times this will be the longest part of the process as most of the decision making happens here. I’ll often make animations of the scene that I can then pull from to create a more natural feel. Once the composition is decided, I shift my focus to layering, creating textures and surfaces on the canvas.

LVH Art: Are the figures in your work based on real-life references, drawn from people you know or pictures found online, or are they entirely imagined scenes and people?

Dustin Emory: The figure in the paintings started out as a reference to my father. I think now the figure has become a stand-in that allows me to explore all angles of isolation and constraint. 

LVH Art: Your artworks frequently feature solitary figures set against interior backdrops, evoking a sense of isolation and resilience. What attracts you to this theme, and what aspects of the human condition does it allow you to explore?

Dustin Emory: I’ve been interested in isolation and, more specifically, confinement ever since I was a kid. It started when my father first became incarcerated. That became a jumping off point for me to dive headfirst into the subject, and I’ve explored it almost exclusively since. I’ve found that invention usually happens once I’ve given myself strict constraints to work under. I want my process to be influenced by the narrative and vice versa. 

LVH Art: Your palette is entirely monochromatic. When did you choose to make this shift away from colour, and why?

Dustin Emory: I’ve been working with a monochromatic palette for around 4 years now. Early on I was much more drawn to compositions and textures rather than color. Giving myself this parameter has made me question the negative connotation “limitation” generally receives. Creation hasn’t ever been invigorating to me if I have every tool at my disposal. 

LVH Art: Are there any artists, writers, or other creatives who have inspired or influenced your practice? If so, what about their practice or ideas resonates with you?

Dustin Emory: I’ve recently been reading about and looking at Robert Therrien a lot and have been quite enamored with his ability to make inanimate objects feel like they’ve had a past life. 

LVH Art: Could you share more about your painting which will be part of the Urban Dwellers exhibition? We would love to hear about the inspiration or some of the references that you looked at for this work.

Dustin Emory: The figure in my work exists in an introspective world, with the walls of his environment appearing to be the extent of his life. Our current reality can be so individualistic that even moments surrounded by others can feel increasingly isolating. 

In Conversation with Sophie Birch

For our upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with London-based artist Sophie Birch to discuss how spatial awareness, emotional resonance, and organic forms shape her practice.

Sophie Birch (b. 1992) is a London-based painter whose layered compositions explore moments of change and perception. Beginning with drawing to capture her observations and memories, Birch then develops abstract paintings where enigmatic forms gradually emerge, seeming to float just beneath the surface. Using brushes, cloths, palette knives, and sandpaper, she applies and removes paint across multiple layers. The result is a translucent and layered composition, resembling shifting membranes between inner and outer realms. Her work draws from a broad range of sources, including natural elements, medical imaging, science textbooks, cinema, and art history. She often reinterprets existing compositions, softening or destabilising their structure until new shapes arise. Overlapping transparent layers dissolve into one another, evoking feelings of flux and uncertainty. Colour also contributes to this effect, as many of her hues are pale and muted, suggesting processes such as corrosion, bruising, or bleaching. Birch’s practice investigates fragility, impermanence, and time, inviting viewers to consider the fleeting nature of experience, perception, and memory.

LVH Art: Drawing is often your starting point. How do you see the relationship between drawing and painting in your practice? Are they in dialogue with one another, or do you approach them as distinct practices?

Sophie Birch: I find it quite difficult to draw a clear line between drawing and painting; they feel like part of the same process to me. When I studied at the Royal Drawing School, there was this constant debate about what counts as a drawing or a painting, but I’ve always seen them as employing the same ideas. I start by drawing mainly because it’s portable and immediate. I carry a sketchbook everywhere, using pencil or charcoal almost like note-taking. I tend to draw when something feels slightly beyond recognition, when a subject is in flux, transforming, or feels unfamiliar, like a reflection on a car or a fleeting gesture from a friend. Painting then becomes a way to expand on that feeling of estrangement. I use my drawings alongside other references such as science images or photos I’ve taken to build on my observations and make connections. Because for me painting is slower, I can re-approach the subject repeatedly, trying to rediscover it each time. So, the two are very much in dialogue to me.

LVH Art: Do you see your paintings as completely abstract compositions, or as works that carry traces of recognisable forms?

Sophie Birch: I’m often drawn to subjects that sit just outside recognition, forms that feel familiar yet slightly beyond grasp. So, while my paintings may appear abstract, they do carry traces of recognisable shapes that hover in that in-between space. One recurring form, for instance, is an open book or a double-page spread. I’m drawn to it because it plays with the tension between image and surface, it’s both a pictorial space and a flat plane, suggesting depth while reminding you that you’re looking at paint on canvas. There’s a text by Sargy Mann that I often think about; he describes two kinds of artists who work with recognisable imagery: those who want to show you things you know but in ways you’ve never seen them before, and those who want to show you things you see every day, but as they appear through their own eyes. I relate to the latter. I think I’m always trying to describe an ordinary experience that’s at once both familiar yet just beyond grasp, something about perception itself, and the strangeness of seeing.

LVH Art: How do you approach colour in your work, and what role does it play in shaping the atmosphere of your paintings?

Sophie Birch: I think about colour mostly in terms of light and how it creates movement on a still surface. I often look to the Impressionists, using colours of similar value but different temperatures, layering warm and cool tones so they almost vibrate beside one another. It creates this liminal, transformative kind of light that feels like it’s shifting or alive. I’m also really drawn to the physical qualities of paint, how certain pigments feel, their texture or stickiness, and how they interact on the surface. Those physical qualities often guide my colour choices. Through layering and washes, I try to build a diffused, glowing atmosphere, like those moments of the day when light is just coming up or fading away. In terms of materials, I use a range of tools such as brushes, sandpaper, and rags to shape the surface and bring out different sensations within the painting.

LVH Art: You work with an expansive range of tools (from brushes to sandpaper). What draws you to this variety, and how do these different materials shape the surface and feel of your paintings?

Sophie Birch: I use tools that both add and take away, brushes, sandpaper, or even techniques like lift-off, where excess medium on a semi-dry surface scuffs what’s underneath. I like that push and pull, making an image and then scrubbing back into it, flattening and building it up again. It’s a constant back-and-forth where the painting feels like it’s forming in front of me. That process brings out new associations I didn’t expect and gives the surface this sense of something emerging or growing.

LVH Art: Do you think about your works as part of a series, or as individual pieces that stand on their own?

Sophie Birch: Each painting could be viewed individually, though it’s very helpful to think in series. I’m always trying to do something new, even when I return to similar images or palettes. I might mine it differently or explore a new kind of mark or movement. I like the idea that we don’t really control how themes and motifs recur in our work; whether you work intuitively or not, you naturally loop back in unexpected ways. There’s a kind of remembering that happens through the body, through colour. I like to work with that sense of evolving rather than against it.

LVH Art: What challenges you most in the studio, and what part of the process do you enjoy the most?

Sophie Birch: I find it challenging when I have a clear idea for a painting, a strong image or intention, but I’m just not ready to make it. I’ll start, and it doesn’t work, so I have to let it go. I’m quite impatient, but that often leads to the moments I enjoy most, when I scrape something back, move on, and something unexpected happens. I usually have several paintings going at once, and I love when ideas start to cross between them. It’s often late in the evening, when I’ve moved things around in the studio, that I’ll suddenly see something in a painting I’d set aside, just a trace or impression left on the surface, and I know exactly what to do. Those surprising, intuitive moments feel almost external, like easing into something already happening.

LVH Art: Are there any artists, writers, or other creatives who have inspired or influenced your practice? If so, what about their practice or ideas resonates with you?

Sophie Birch: There are so many. In terms of artists, I’m most visibly influenced by those I can actually spend time with in person, seeing their work up close rather than on a screen. I often go back to Blake and Turner, partly because their works are accessible to me, but also because of their sensitivity to light and vision, and the sense of the numinous that runs through their work. There are also many contemporary painters I find exciting, though it’s hard to narrow them down. In terms of writers, I’m currently reading Clarice Lispector and Annie Erneaux. There’s something about their radical intimacy, the way they write about consciousness, memory, and the act of making, that feels very close to how I think about painting. Their language is both simple and destabilising, sentences
that feel confessional, thoughts that don’t resolve but flow. They make ordinary things strange and capture subtle emotional or perceptual shifts that really resonate with me.

LVH Art: Could you share more about your painting which will be part of the Urban Dwellers exhibition? We would love to hear about the inspiration or some of the references that you looked at for this work.

Sophie Birch: The work I’ve included is called The World’s Oldest Eye II. It’s based on an image from a book on light and vision, a diagram of a compound eye, which is almost identical to the oldest known structure for sight. It’s the same visual structure found in insects such as flies today, though it originally evolved underwater. In the painting, I wanted to suggest that sense of countless tiny, microscopic lenses vibrating across the surface. The format is quite stretched, about 105 by 180 centimetres, so there’s a physical tension in it. I wanted it to feel expansive, almost like a landscape you could move through, yet be about something miniscule. That contrast between scale and subject really interested me. I think there’s a similar tension within the painting itself, between structure and space, surface and depth. In relation to Urban Dwellers, I connected to the idea of sensory experience, how we perceive and belong to the environments we inhabit. The painting has a movement that reminds me of the hum of the city, but it also originates in something microscopic, which felt like a fitting parallel.

In Conversation with Lucas Dupuy

For our upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with London based artist Lucas Dupuy to discuss his process and inspirations.

Lucas Dupuy (b. 1992) is a London-based artist whose work explores the intersection of language and form, inspired by the bold geometry of 20th-century Brutalist architecture. He plays with perspective, composition, and light, capturing fleeting moments as he builds, erases, and reworks surfaces. Using acrylic or gouache on raw materials like hessian or canvas, Dupuy layers paint intuitively to create subtle, elongated brushstrokes. For Urban Dwellers, we commissioned him to paint a wooden door in the main exhibition space as a response to the environment. He is also contributing an additional artwork to the show, and discusses both pieces in the interview.

LVH Art: Your work often sits at the edge of language and form. When you start a work, do you map a structure first, or let the composition emerge through layering, erasing, and return?

Lucas Dupuy: I work on many drawings in the studio, and these often evolve into larger paintings. The process is somewhat obsessive, I’ll crop, layer, and project parts of these smaller studies to arrive at a final composition. It’s rarely about mapping everything in advance; instead, it’s a process of discovery through repetition and alteration. Each new layer can shift the work’s direction entirely.

LVH Art: You’ve completed several commissions in the past, but was this the first door you’ve ever painted? What was the experience like working in the space? Were there any thoughts or inspirations going through your mind during the process? Did you approach this commission differently from your usual practice?

Lucas Dupuy: It’s the first door I’ve ever painted, yes! The space itself has a lot of history, and that immediately affected how I approached the work. The light moves through the room in such a beautiful, shifting way throughout the day. I found myself constantly taking photos of reflections and shadows. They became a kind of visual language that helped guide the painting process. James Turrell’s work kept coming to mind while I was painting, particularly the way he treats light: “For me it was important for people to come to value light. To value light as we value gold, silver, objects, paintings.” This quote has always resonated with me, and it returned to me strongly in this context. The space itself felt almost spiritual like a chapel or a concert hall, especially with the high ceilings and the way light moves around within it. I definitely approach commissions differently from my studio practice. When working in a specific location, I think a lot about how the piece will interact with its surroundings. For this project, I focused on creating a composition that felt as though it was meeting in the middle, radiating outward from a central point. It was about allowing the work to live within the space rather than simply occupy it.

LVH Art: You’ve spoken about dyslexia shaping how you see words as shapes and symbols. How does that experience guide your use of grids, fragments, and “unreadable” marks today?

Lucas Dupuy: That experience has definitely played a role in how I think about visual language. When I was younger, dyslexia made reading a very physical experience. Letters and words didn’t always appear as stable, fixed forms but as shifting shapes or abstract patterns. I used tinted overlays to help focus on sentences. That early experience informed a lot of my mark-making. I began to see language less as text and more as image.

Over time, that has evolved into a broader interest in abstraction, using fragments and marks that echo written forms but resist direct readability. These gestures still carry a sense of communication, but they move away from literal language toward something more open-ended, influenced now by both nature and architecture.

LVH Art: Brutalist architecture and city structures recur in your paintings. What aspects of those forms — their mass and rhythm — are you translating, and where do you allow them to dissolve into atmosphere?

Lucas Dupuy: I’ve always been drawn to Brutalist structures. There’s something fascinating about how these massive concrete forms can simultaneously feel monumental and fragile, depending on how light hits them or how they weather over time.

In my paintings, I try to translate that sense of rhythm and presence. I often begin with a clear grid or structural form, but as the painting develops, it becomes clear its moving between precision and ambiguity, just as the city itself does.

LVH Art: You frequently work with gouache and acrylic on raw supports like hessian. What about that material attracts you and your practice?

Lucas Dupuy: I’ve always been interested in the tension between fragility and durability. Hessian has this rough, open weave that absorbs paint in unpredictable ways. That unpredictability becomes part of the work’s energy. I like how the surface interacts with the medium and how areas of paint can sink in deeply or sit on top. It exposes the process, allowing you to see where decisions have been made. That tactile quality feels essential to my practice.

LVH Art: What was it about the theme of Urban Dwellers that first attracted you, and how do you feel your work connects to it?

Lucas Dupuy: The quote from Martin Wong used in the show’s text, his view of the city was incredibly inspiring (“Everything I paint is within four blocks of where I live, and the people are the people I know and see all the time.”-Martin Wong). His ability to see poetry and humanity within urban spaces has always been very important to me. Growing up in London, I’ve always found the city to be an endless source of inspiration — not just for its architecture but for its constant movement and energy. The city is a kind of living organism. I hope that’s reflected in my work, it’s moving, but it also attempts to hold qualities of stillness.

LVH Art: Can you speak in detail about the artwork that you created for Urban Dwellers? What were some of the ideas or themes you were exploring while creating it? How did the work evolve during the process? Did it change from your original idea?

Lucas Dupuy: For Urban Dwellers, I wanted to explore how architectural and organic forms could merge — how the language of the city could be reinterpreted as something softer. I reflected on the wall painting and how this work responded to the space, bringing some of that same energy into the studio, as I made both works during the same period. I was thinking about the scale of the space and felt this long, thin format would lend itself well to the building, this also helped inform the mark making.

In Conversation with Paul Robas

Ahead of LVH Art’s Urban Dwellers exhibition, we spoke to Vienna-based Romanian painter Paul Robas about how his process turns distortion and layering into intimate portraits of fading memory.

Paul Robas (b. 1989) is a Vienna-based Romanian artist whose work explores memory, perception, and the shifting relationship between the real and the imagined. Working primarily in painting, he begins with found or digitally altered photographs which he subjects to a process of layering, distortion, and surface manipulation. Blurred faces and textured grounds emerge as portraits that feel both intimate and elusive, evoking the sensation of fading memories. Imperfections and surface disruptions are not hidden but embraced, becoming essential to the meaning of the work. Through this painterly language, Robas challenges traditional notions of portraiture and creates a space where figures seem suspended between personal history and universal experience.

LVH Art: Could you share a bit about your creative process? Are there any specific routines, rituals, or habits that help you get into a creative flow?

Paul Robas: I don’t have a strict creative process or fixed ritual. Mostly, I go out, talk to people, interact, take walks. In these random moments ideas come unexpectedly. I try to stay open and keep an eye out for interesting things. As soon as I see or think about something I could use, I either take a photo or write it down so I don’t forget. Then comes the processing phase, but the initial phase is really as open as possible.

LVH Art: Do you sketch, or do you mainly take photographs?

Paul Robas: I write down a description of an idea: how the work should look and approximately how I’ll compose it. I write it in words — that’s the first thing, because I’ve forgot so many ideas in the past. Afterwards I do sketches of roughly how I think it should look. Then comes computer work: I compose the reference images digitally.  I try to get it as close to the final image as possible — not colour-wise, as colour is a separate process, but in terms of the composition.

LVH Art: The figures in your paintings often originate from photographs. Do you source these images from archives and found material, or do you also take your own photographs?

Paul Robas: It’s a bit of both. I used to use more archive images, but I always modify them a lot: distorting or processing them in Photoshop to achieve a certain look. Recently I’ve photographed friends, and I’ll continue doing that. I studied photography for a while, so I enjoy controlling the light and gently directing how the person moves — but I try to keep it spontaneous, not theatrical. I’m also thinking to mix these two worlds: found images with my own photographs and see what comes out. I don’t want to limit myself to one approach.

LVH Art: Could you tell us more about the work Kill Switch, which will be included in the show? Where did the inspiration come from, and are there any interesting facts about the work?

Paul Robas: Kill Switch is based on a found image, I’m not sure of the origin. The original context and source is not important in relation to my work. I am always interested in the image itself and what interested me was the lost gaze of the person, almost as if they’re experiencing a mental crash. I’m fascinated by how painting can shift psychological states with just a small change: a line or a colour can move a figure from ecstasy to despair. The title ‘Kill Switch’ comes from the technical term for a mechanism that shuts off a system to protect it from damage. I made an analogy to the human mind reaching a breaking point and instinctively switching off. The tear in the eye and the distant gaze suggests an endpoint, but also the possibility of a new beginning.

LVH Art: Colour plays a significant role in your work. Do you approach colour instinctively, or is it a carefully planned and structured element in your process?

Paul Robas: My sketches and collages are mainly for composition; I can’t really fix the colours at that stage. When I start painting, many decisions are made instinctively along the way. I never have everything fixed at the beginning. It’s hard to explain, but I need to see it in my head, then on the canvas. For example I might start with a base layer of orange or yellow and then think: what works next to this?

I prefer to build colour directly on the canvas by painting transparent layers. This approach lets the colours blend optically, right before your eyes, creating tones and nuances you simply can’t achieve by pre-mixing the end result feels more vibrant and complex. You can really lose yourself in the layers, discovering new shades and subtle details the longer you look.

LVH Art: Many of your works carry a dreamlike, even unsettling atmosphere. Is this something you actively seek to create, or does it emerge naturally through your process?

Paul Robas: It’s very intentional. I’ve always been fascinated by the fragility of perception, and how memory begins to distort the moment almost as soon as it passes. With time, memories slip further into obscurity and even become directed narratives of our own making. And even in real time, perception is rarely precise. Light bounces, colours blur, shadows interfere; we never truly see a perfectly clear, stable image. Photography can freeze clarity under certain conditions, but that feels too staged, almost theatrical. My paintings aim to capture the unstable nature of both memory and experience — fleeting, imperfect, and layered.

LVH Art: Are there any writers or artists who inspire you? Any particular art movements?

Paul Robas: I’m not really a fan of specific movements, but I do come across painters whose work I like. Sometimes I’ll see a painting that interests me and then research the artist further. For example, I like the Belgian painter Léon Spilliaert for his atmospheric, almost monochromatic compositions. I recently saw works by Vilhelm Hammershøi in Copenhagen. He paints interiors and fragments of buildings with reduced, vibrating colours, and I was fascinated to experience his work in person for the first time. From Monet and Turner, I take a deep fascination with light itself — whether it is dissolving in mist, scattering off water, or thickened into abstraction, their treatment of atmosphere continues to shape how I look at the world. I’ve also admired Victor Man since I first saw his work in 2015.
 

In Conversation with Samuel Haitz

For our upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with artist Samuel Haitz to discuss how personal and collective memory shape his approach to found materials, and how art and literary history continue to inform his visual language. 

Samuel Haitz (b. 1997) is a Zurich-based artist whose work engages with the legacies of literature and queer history as a framework for thinking about desire, memory, and artistic production. Drawing on a variety of archives, printed matter, and cultural history, from classical poetry, to mid-century gay journals and overlooked ephemera, he reconfigures found material into paintings, prints, and assemblages. These works foreground both the persistence and fragility of cultural memory, asking how histories can be preserved, re-imagined, and made visible today. His practice reflects critically on questions of originality, reproduction, and authorship within contemporary art.

LVH Art: Your work engages deeply with literature and art history. What first drew you to these archives as a starting point for your practice?

Samuel Haitz: I think what draws me to literature and art history is what Roland Barthes describes in Death of the Author: the way something, for example a text, slips free from its origin and becomes available for projection, desire, misreading. My practice sits where the archive is not a fixed authority. I might recognise myself in these materials, even if only partial, fragmentary, or imagined. They were not made “for me” but become mine in the act of reception. That’s what an archive is for me: not something fixed, but unstable, re-readable, and re-writable.

LVH Art: You often work with printed matter such as magazines, books, and journals. How do you choose which sources to bring into your work?

Samuel Haitz: My choice is never purely conceptual; it emerges from a combination of affinity, serendipity, and the material’s capacity to be (re)contextualized. I often use texts and images created decades ago. By choosing to work with them, I assert their relevance for our time.

LVH Art: Desire is central to your work, not only as a theme but also as a way images and texts connect. How do you think about desire in relation to artistic production?

Samuel Haitz: I think that Pasolini got it completely right in his film Teorema: when the handsome, mysterious guest who has intimate encounters with the whole family leaves their house, they all go crazy. After his sudden departure, he leaves behind emptiness and mental chaos, which the mother, father, daughter, and son try to compensate for in diverse and sometimes absurd ways. The son, Pietro, begins abstract painting and develops conceptual ideas about painting and artistic technique.

LVH Art: Could you share more about your work Anthology (Rimbaud, p. 78–79), 2024, which will be part of the Urban Dwellers exhibition? We would love to hear about the inspiration behind the work and what shaped its creation.

Samuel Haitz: This piece was part of my solo exhibition Hermeneutics at Triangolo, which consisted of 23 re-photographed page spreads in which Kathy Acker traces the romance between poets Rimbaud and Verlaine. Kathy Acker’s In Memoriam to Identity (1990) is an experimental novel that defies clear categorisation, merging fiction, autobiography, and literary critique. In her signature punk, postmodern style, Acker dismantles conventional narratives of identity, authorship, and desire, all themes that I address in my work. The work you selected is the first page of chapter two of Kathy Acker’s In Memoriam to Identity. On it, I digitally marked two lines and physically collaged four snapshots: a chapel in Berlin designed by James Turrell, a poem by Frank O’Hara, a bar in Brussels, and the view from a plane window.

LVH Art: What tells you that a work has reached its point of completion, and how do you recognise that moment in your process?

Samuel Haitz: Working with found materials, the media and devices I use set a framework of restrictions that shape the work. In the end, I hope it declares its own sufficiency: not polished into infinity, but held together by the right tension of intention and openness.

In Conversation with Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King

For the upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with London-based artist Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King to discuss how movement, rhythm and gesture animate her practice.

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King (b. 1998) works primarily across painting and drawing, treating line as an active force whose speed, rhythm and intensity register the motion of her own body. Figures in motion recur throughout her canvases and works on paper, where gesture becomes inseparable from image. Combining charcoal, oil paint and distemper, often with pigments she grinds herself, Gordon-King tests the boundaries between drawing and painting, grounding her images in earthy tonalities while allowing sound and music to shape the scale and cadence of her compositions. This interplay of material, sound and motion underpins works such as Blue Note (2025), which will be included in the Urban Dwellers. Our conversation traced these concerns, exploring how Gordon-King translates internal and external rhythms into visual form and how presence and process converge in her studio.

LVH Art: Can you describe your creative process? Do you have any rituals or habits?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: I wouldn’t really say I have any specific rituals. I do tend to listen to music while I work, usually it would be Jazz – lots of Nina Simone and Alice Coltrane. It ends up being part of my environment. I have also started to do collaborations with musicians, which stemmed from the listening of Jazz and interactions with live music. 

LVH Art: How do these collaborations with musicians work, and what do they bring to your practice?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: The collaborations are a conversation, a back and forth. The musicians that I have worked with most regularly are Arnold, who plays clarinet, and Avila who plays the drums amongst many other instruments. They respond to my drawing, and I to them playing. With the tapping of the charcoal and notes from their instruments informing each other. I record these sessions, then listen back to them when painting.

LVH Art: Are these collaborations mainly for drawing or painting? How do drawing and painting relate in your practice?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Most of the collaborations with musicians have been with charcoal drawings because the medium is immediate and doesn’t require a slowing down to think about colour. Drawing and painting have a cyclical relationship in my work. When I was living back home in Sussex, I’d go for walks by the river and fill a sketchbook with quick studies. Later, I’d take those sketches to the studio and develop them into larger ink or charcoal works. The paintings in my degree show were documentations of the act of drawing itself, of the body in motion as it makes mark. For me, drawing and painting are on equal footing; they inform each other.

LVH Art: Does music influence your painting as well?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Yes, it’s in everything I do, rhythm. For Blue Note I listened to a recording from a collaboration with Avila and Arnold while painting. But with painting, I sometimes need silence to focus, especially when I’m working with colour. Its bursts of energy followed by stillness. It really depends on the moment.

LVH Art: Can you tell us more about your work Blue Note which will be included in Urban Dwellers?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Blue Note started again as a documentation of the collaborations and of the body. I listened back to recordings from one specific session from earlier this year, and wanted to allow for the sound to come through into the painting: in parts writing a kind of musical language, dictionary of sound. The painting brings together different types of making marks and arranging of space, it feels it’s a culmination of all the knowledge I’ve gathered so far.

LVH Art: How does working with colour affect your process?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Colour adds another layer of complexity. I’m always thinking about how each colour or tone relates to the others. With Blue Note and similar works, I use oil, alongside distemper, which dries quickly and requires mixing each colour from pigment. You can’t just squeeze it from a tube, so you have to work in sections rather than layering everything at once. There’s a kind of time pressure, because the paint dries fast, and you have to be decisive. I like that it forces me to slow down and think, even as I’m working quickly. I remember listening to Andrew Cranston talk about the sectioning that distemper pushes you to adopt before I’d tried it, and it really rings true.

LVH Art: Why do you often return to charcoal as a medium?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: I started using charcoal for quick drawings, I like the immediacy and the fact that it is a completely natural substance. Its relevance grew after being involved in the coppicing of trees for a charcoal company in Scotland. Their process is slow and sustainable, as they wait seven years for each plot of trees to grow before processing. The charcoal itself is uncompressed and comes in large sticks, sometimes half a meter long. I love the materiality of it: the way you can make big, physical marks, and even the smell of the fire in the charcoal. It’s a very direct, tactile medium, and I’m drawn to that.

LVH Art: Movement is a key part of your practice, both in the physical act of painting and in the figures, you depict. How do you think about movement in your work?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Movement is central, especially in large-scale works. I started making big circular marks with my whole body while listening to jazz, which led to more physical drawing that engages the whole body. I had the chance to use the Bloomsbury Theatre whilst ay Slade, a huge paint frame that’s about 10 meters long and almost as tall. The circles began as a way to loosen up and activate the composition. Sometimes I document these sessions to use as references for figures in my work. The act of moving, responding to music, and making marks becomes a kind of dance, and that energy is captured in the finished piece.

LVH Art: What tells you that a painting has reached its point of completion, and how do you recognise that moment in your process?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: There’s just a moment when I feel it’s done. I don’t like to overwork pieces, but I am obsessed with the idea of concealing and working over, so if I do go too far theres usually a way to bring it back. The time it takes to finish a work can vary from a few days to a few months. Sometimes I’ll leave a painting in the studio for a long time and come back to it later, adding to it whilst working on other pieces so they are in dialogue with each other.

LVH Art: Are there any artists, writers, or other creatives who have inspired or influenced your practice? If so, what about their practice or ideas resonates with you?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Right now, Goya is a big inspiration, especially his Black Paintings and the way he depicts the weight and movement of bodies. I’ve spent a lot of time with his work here in Madrid, and I hope to see his drawings in the archives. I also look at Cy Twombly, for the way that he understands the materiality and substance of paint, you can feel the speed of his hand when looking at his paintings. But also, for his use of mythology, how he is able to distil stories into these compositions that don’t bear everything at first glance, you have to work to draw out knowledge. They’re like musical scores or notes.

LVH Art: How has your work evolved in the last years?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Collaborating with others has changed my practice, making it less singular and more dynamic. I used to think of painting as a solitary activity, but working with musicians and other artists has opened up new possibilities. Both are necessary, to be alone and to be in a conversation. Working more consciously with movement too, being aware of how it guides the body has also shifted things significantly.

In Conversation with Yooyun Yang

For our upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with Yooyun Yang to talk about how her paintings capture the solitude, tension, and fleeting moments of urban life.

Yooyun Yang (b. 1985) is a South Korean painter whose work transforms fleeting and estranged moments of daily life into enigmatic visual excerpts. Trained in oriental painting, she works with diluted acrylic on jangji, a traditional Korean handmade paper made from mulberry bark. This paper is more absorbent than others, allowing her smoothly rendered brushwork to blend seamlessly with its fibers. Her compositions begin with photographs she takes herself, which she crops and distorts into close-up fragments. This technique allows the familiar to shift into the uncanny. Figures often appear partially hidden, faces blurred or turned away, and gestures abruptly cut, creating a sense of solitude and psychological tension. Yang’s work captures what she calls the “age of anxiety,” revealing the alienation and emotional pressure commonplace in urban life.

LVH Art: Can you walk us through your creative process? Do you have specific rituals or routines that help you when you’re creating?

Yooyun Yang: I usually think about what kind of painting I want to draw in my head first, and then start drawing right away. In the past, I used to make esquisses or small sketches in my drawing book before beginning the main work, but these days, I just do a very simple pencil sketch and get started right away. I think that a painting has the potential to change throughout the process, so I try to stay open to those possibilities as I work.

LVH Art: Many of your paintings begin with photographs you’ve taken yourself. What qualities do you look for when selecting an image to develop into a painting? Can you describe your process of translating a photograph into a painted work, and what tends to shift, disappear, or emerge in that transformation?

Yooyun Yang: I habitually take photos of moments I come across in everyday life. I don’t like to stage scenes or deliberately construct images that I want to draw. I frequently return to photos taken a long time ago because the subjects and themes I want to draw at each time are different. Sometimes, parts of an image that I didn’t notice before suddenly catch my eye when I look at it again after some time has passed. Rather than following the original photo exactly, I tend to crop out unnecessary parts, and exaggerate or alter the elements that left an impression on me or that I want to emphasize. Because of this process, what disappears or changes in each work is always different.

LVH Art: Many of your works feel as if they’re seen from a specific, sometimes hidden or bizarre viewpoint. How do you think about perspective and the act of looking when composing a work?

Yooyun Yang: This is a very important question for me. At the beginning of my work, I wanted to find hidden points or gaps that people generally don’t notice. Since long ago, I have had a habit of focusing not on the centre of a landscape or object but on its edges or corners, or looking at things askew rather than straight on. Perhaps this was an effort to see things differently. This way of observing has naturally been reflected in my work since I was young. Until now, the results of my attitude toward subjects have influenced my paintings. However, recently, I have been more concerned with the cause and process behind that attitude rather than the results. In the process of observing and interpreting a subject, we often encounter misunderstandings. I believe these misunderstandings are not negative but rather necessary. From them, new interpretations arise, which sometimes become the foundation for new works.

LVH Art: The cinematic quality of your work often makes everyday details appear uncanny. Do you think urban life itself already carries this sense of the strange?

Yooyun Yang: I could say that. I was born and raised in the city. The constant noise and changes in the city naturally influenced my life. The city itself has many different personalities. I was born in an old part of town but spent my childhood in a newly developed area, and after becoming an adult, I returned to live in the old town again. The two parts of the city looked very different and had distinct environments. For me, having grown up in a planned and organised new town, the old district felt faintly familiar yet strikingly unfamiliar to me. Tangled power lines like a spider’s web, a power plant that seemed asleep during the day but appeared menacingly awake with its red lights at night, ever- present construction sites, and the way old buildings quickly disappear and are replaced new ones in the blink of an eye — all of these urban scenes deeply influenced my early work.

LVH Art: You’ve described your paintings as being like “a thorn in the mind” or “a gentle fever.” Could you expand on what you mean with these metaphors, and how they reflect the kind of experience you hope to create for the viewer?

Yooyun Yang: Since I was young, I have thought, “Others will paint happy and pretty pictures well, so I will paint pictures that are not like that.” From childhood, my natural temperament has drawn me closer to darkness than brightness, and to negativity rather than positivity. Each of us has our own dark parts or secrets that we cannot reveal. Even if we share them with others, I believe there are some parts that are difficult to convey in words and thus cannot be fully empathised with. The word “melancholy” is a single word, but the feeling of “melancholy” is different for every individual. Emotions are like waves — they cannot be held in one’s hands, they cannot be defined by a single colour, and they constantly shift and change every moment. Perhaps what I wish is to make people look into the corners of their own hearts that they had forgotten, or tried to turn away from. I value the moments when we confront those emotions.

LVH Art: You often work with diluted acrylic on Jangji paper. What draws you to this material?

Yooyun Yang: When I was in middle school, I first encountered Hanji, traditional Korean paper. Among the many types of Hanji, Jangji was the one I used. Compared to regular drawing paper, Hanji has a distinctive texture and absorbs water very well, qualities that suited me perfectly. While preparing for art college entrance exams, everyone around me was using standard drawing paper, but I was the only one using Jangji. Because of this, I naturally chose Oriental painting as my major in university. During my college years, I painted using traditional pigments instead of acrylic paints. Traditional pigments are delicate and sensitive, making them challenging to work with. Around the time I graduated, I started using acrylic paints, which were easier to handle than traditional pigments. I also felt that the opaque and muted colours of acrylics suited my work better than the clear and transparent tones of traditional pigments. Since then, I have continued to use acrylic paints.

LVH Art: Can you speak in detail about Seeing (2024). What were some of the ideas or themes you were exploring while creating it? How did the work evolve during the process/ Did it change from your original idea?

Yooyun Yang: This work reflects my thoughts on the act of simply looking, as the title suggests. At some point, we began to look into the small screens in our hands countless times throughout the day. When we gaze at these screens, others can observe us in an unguarded state. Conversely, I observe others in their unguarded moments. They show different faces when looking at their small screens compared to when they make eye contact with someone else. I often enjoy observing people in this state. This work is also part of a series created sequentially after a work titled ‘Taking’. We constantly capture something with small objects in our hands throughout the day, habitually looking at those tiny screens. These small devices, which never leave our hands, are paradoxical: they represent the widest world to us while simultaneously confining us to the smallest spaces. I wanted to express these thoughts that often come to me while using my phone through this series.

In Conversation with Filippo Antonello

For the Urban Dwellers exhibition curated by LVH Art, we sat down with Filippo Antonello, a London-based artist whose experimental practice combines textiles, bleach, ink, and found materials, to discuss his process and how his work resonates with the theme of the exhibition.

Filippo Antonello (b. 2002) is a Swiss-Italian multidisciplinary artist based in London. His practice explores the boundaries between memory and loss, presence and absence. Combining conceptual thinking with an intuitive material sensibility, he treats painting as a site of continual transformation, where images surface and recede, creating a state of flux in his works. Working with bleach and ink on fabrics such as velvet, denim, and corduroy, Antonello reimagines familiar textiles as unstable, reactive grounds. His process involves both addition and subtraction, as he layers, and strips back continuously. At times Antonello lets chemical reactions guide the image’s evolution, embracing elements of chance, imperfection and unpredictability, evoking the nature of analogue photography. For Antonello, destruction is not an end but a mode of revelation, as through the breakdown of surface, traces of light and form emerge. Antonello’s works reveal a delicate balance between fragility and permanence, with absence resonating as strongly as presence.

LVH Art: Can you walk us through your creative process? Do you usually begin with a clear vision, or is it more intuitive, with the work evolving as you go?

Filippo Antonello: It really depends on the medium I’m working with. Some mediums require more preparation and planning, where I start with a clearer vision, while others give me more space to be intuitive. I usually begin by mapping out a precise structure for the composition and its forms. Once that framework is set, the ink pouring’s and colour become more instinctive and playful. Over time, I’ve come to see research itself as a form of practice—not about finding definitive answers, but about opening possibilities and creating space for reflection. My work has always been fluid, never strictly linear or confined to one approach, and with this new body of work the lines between mediums have started to blur quite naturally. The process often feels circumstantial, almost like coexisting with the pieces: I move back and forth between them, sometimes setting one aside for months before returning to it.

LVH Art: You frequently work with textiles like velvet, denim, and corduroy, treating them as unstable grounds. What attracts you to these fabrics, and how do they shape the energy of your paintings?

Filippo Antonello: For me, the process begins by letting the hands think first. I might experiment with combining resin and paint, working with velvet or metal in unexpected ways, or piecing together collages from found objects. These experiments are worked out through the body rather than just in the mind. The brain often convinces you that you’ve already solved something, but it’s only when you engage with the material directly that you notice what’s missing, like revisiting a math problem you thought you knew back in school. What really interests me is the way materials create their own rhythms, sometimes slipping out of control and other times holding back.

LVH Art: In the studio, how do you know when a work has reached its point of completion, especially when you’re working with shifting forms and unpredictable materials?

Filippo Antonello: Eventually a work reaches a state that feels almost like perceiving white noise. At that point, the abundance or scarcity within the composition creates an intangible visual hum. I think of it as a hum not in the sense of a sound, but as a presence with a kind of direction that shapes how I see and think about the work. It’s difficult to describe precisely, but it’s a sensation I recognize – almost like a distant bell ringing, telling me the work has reached the place it needs to be.

LVH Art: Colour plays a central role in your work, do you approach it more instinctively, or do you deliberately build palettes to evoke certain moods or themes?

Filippo Antonello: Colour plays a central role in my work because it’s impossible to ignore, but my relationship with it is very instinctive. I usually mix colours on the spot and approach them in a very natural, immediate way. Colour becomes essential in my structures and compositions because it carries a certain energy, almost like a frequency or a rhythm. For me, it’s about aligning the rhythm of the colour with the rhythm of the structure or the image, and that interplay is something I enjoy exploring again and again.

LVH Art: Are there any artists, writers, or creatives who have influenced you or your practice, and if so, what makes you resonate with them?

Filippo Antonello: I would say poetry has had a strong influence on my practice. As a child, reading poetry gave me an awareness of rhythm, arrangement, and simplicity, and how these elements can create impact through precision and clarity. That way of thinking stayed with me as I moved from writing into photography, painting, and ceramics. I became very attuned to the idea of being deliberate in composition, of balancing sensitivity with structure. Words carry their own rhythms and physical weight, almost like materials such as metal or wood, and I’ve always been interested in syntax not just as writing but as a kind of arrangement.

LVH Art: What was it about the theme of Urban Dwellers that first attracted you, and how do you feel your work connects to it?

Filippo Antonello: What drew me to the theme was the opportunity to think about urbanity not just as a subject to be described, but as a rhythm or a structure to be explored. I wasn’t so interested in defining what urban life means to me, but more in questioning it and translating its energy into a visual language. For me, the urban has a certain pulse and geometry, and I wanted to capture that sense of order and collapse that cities often embody.

LVH Art: Can you tell us about the painting you created for Urban Dwellers, what inspired it, what connected you to it, and how you feel it resonates with the theme of the exhibition?

Filippo Antonello: For this exhibition I created a painting that focuses on the rhythmic and geometrical aspects of how I perceive urbanity. In the lower part of the composition, the repeating shapes almost feel like a beat, something I associate with the pulse of the city. Above, the structures rise and then collapse, which to me also feels very urban, reflecting both construction and fragility. Unlike much of my practice, which often has a fluid relationship with materials and more organic structures, this piece emerged more rigid and restrained, almost metallic in quality. That stiffness gave the work a precise character that, for me, resonates strongly with the idea of interpreting an urban setting.

In Conversation with Gabrielė Adomaitytė

For our upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with Lithuanian artist Gabrielė Adomaitytė to explore how she transforms archival material and digital fragments into gestural, painterly forms.

Gabrielė Adomaitytė (b. 1994) is a Lithuanian painter based in Brussels whose work explores how memory and material are stored, circulated and transformed in the digital age. She moves between archives, photography, writing and painting, treating each as a technology of remembrance and testing how traces fragment and re-form across different systems. Initially drawn to printed matter for its quiet material histories, she has shifted toward more direct and complex methods, transmitting networks of images, data and research into layered, gestural paintings. Patterns of repetition and sequence run through her practice, evoking loops, erosion and renewal rather than simple reproduction. In this way she situates painting within contemporary digital conditions, opening new frameworks for how personal, collective and planetary knowledge can be preserved, reframed and reimagined.

LVH Art: In your process, you move between archives, photography, writing, and painting. How do you connect these different knowledge frameworks?

Gabrielė Adomaitytė: I think of painting less as making images and more as building systems. Archives, photography, writing, and painting are all technologies of memory, and I move between them to test how information circulates, fragments, or collapses. For me, a painting is never singular, I see it as a repository.

LVH Art: In your earlier work, you engaged with printed matter such as photocopies or book pages, but over time your attention has noticeably shifted. What kinds of source material are most important for you today?

Gabrielė Adomaitytė: Printed matter first drew me in because its material subtleties already carry history without revealing any particular information. Although over time, I shifted towards more complex systems, choosing this direct interaction and transposition instead of copying the source material.

LVH Art: You often layer images, creating a dense grid or network. Why have you selected your specific subjects to clash, interweave?

Gabrielė Adomaitytė: My work is driven by accumulation. Images come broken up, indexed, or re-coded, like data in circulation. I let them coexist rather than creating painterly scenic views. The compositions are non-hierarchical. Everything happens all at once, so the body is decentralised. Painting evolves as a systematised totality.

LVH Art: Can you talk about your source material in general and how your process of collecting and incorporating the photographic collection into your paintings evolved?

Gabrielė Adomaitytė: Collecting and categorising is at the core. If my earlier series dealt primarily with singular images, now I am drawn to constellations of knowledge infrastructures and archiving systems. The photographic collection is no longer just a resource bank, but a work in and of itself. My engagement with the vastness of data concedes to operating from a non-human-centric perspective.

LVH Art: Your paintings feel less like isolated images and more like networks. How would you describe them connecting across a room or within an exhibition?

Gabrielė Adomaitytė: I rarely think of paintings as closed objects. Each one is behaving in a system, and together they form networks. The exhibition space is an environment of relations sustained by its own logic, just as a collection does.

LVH Art: Technology, archives, and medicine intersect in your paintings. How do you see these systems converging?

Gabrielė Adomaitytė: I was always surrounded by medical iconography. With most of my family working as doctors and pharmacists, visiting hospitals was a big part of my daily life. Medical and diagnostic devices transform the human body into diagrams, scans, and language. What interested me early on was how the promise of technology, which appears so structural and aims for clarity, ultimately manifests as something incredibly fragile.

LVH Art: Can you speak in detail about the work you are showing in Urban Dwellers?

Gabrielė Adomaitytė: Automation (2025) began with my visit to the Abbey Library of Saint Gall in Switzerland. I often encounter terrestrial globe models in museums, which are symbols of science and, inevitably, its thresholds. That became the starting point. The work then evolved through fragments from medical imaging, echoscopy panels, and monitors appearing simultaneously. Today we are hyper-trained to absorb novel complexity, almost to the point of automation, yet our bodies impose hard boundaries. I am deeply invested in tracing what happens beyond these limits.

In Conversation with Orfeo Tagiuri

For the forthcoming Urban Dwellers exhibition curated by LVH Art, we spoke with Orfeo Tagiuri about the stories, materials and rhythms that shape his practice.

Orfeo Tagiuri (b. 1991) is an American artist and writer based in London. He works almost exclusively with wood stain, rarely using traditional paint. Each composition is built through layered applications of stain, with the depth and darkness of the image determined by the number of layers applied. Working on wooden panels, he allows the natural grain to remain visible, making it an active element in the work and inviting reflection on the nature of painting and the process by which it is normally created.

We talk about Orfeo Tagiuri’s new crowd painting for the Urban Dwellers exhibition, sparked by a 1943 photograph taken in Rome after the bombing of San Lorenzo, where the focus shifts from authority to the faces gathered in search of hope. Tagiuri explains why he works on wood, how staining and carving set the tempo of a piece, and how that began with a Slade project that turned school desks into surfaces for daydreaming.

LVH Art: We know you are still working on the painting that will be in the show, but could you
share a bit about the inspiration behind it?

Orfeo Tagiuri: It’s a large crowd scene, and I’m still in the process of bringing it together. It’s not a close-up like some of my previous works; instead, it’s a wide, complex composition. I was really inspired to make this particular work, and I always feel it’s important to follow that inspiration.

The inspiration for this piece comes from a black-and-white photograph taken in 1943, just after the bombing of the church San Lorenzo in Rome during World War II. In the original photo, there’s a huge crowd gathered, and at the front is Pope Pius XII, who was the pope at the time. What’s remarkable is that the Pope almost never left the Vatican, but on this day, because of the bombing, he came out to the site. The crowd is there both because of the destruction and because they’re searching for hope or guidance in a moment of crisis. In my version, I’ve cropped the image so that the Pope is almost entirely out of frame – only the back of his hand remains visible in the lower right corner. I wanted to shift the focus away from the figure of authority and instead highlight the faces and emotions of the people gathered. What drew me to this image was the intensity in the crowd – the sense that everyone is caught between something devastating and the possibility of hope. 

What struck me was the importance of people’s connection to the architecture of a city. In this case, it’s a church, which of course carries a whole resonance. Even though the building isn’t depicted, you sense its presence in the way people have gathered, and their connection to the city and to this specific site.

Up to now, I’ve only really worked with single faces or couples in my images. This is the first time I’ve created a piece that brings together multiple portraits in a single space. That was exciting for me — it opens up a whole range of dynamics. You get these different senses of relationships forming, because when everyone is crowded together there’s almost a breakdown of social boundaries. 

LVH Art: Have you looked at historical references before for your work?

Orfeo Tagiuri: Yes, that’s often how I’ll start a lot of my works. For example, Beatnik Chaos (2024) takes inspiration from an image that comes from a newspaper feature where a woman and her partner were given LSD as part of a scientific study, and the photographs documented them becoming progressively more altered. What interests me with that moment was the way it sits at a crossroads. It was a time where there was both a violent political climate and, at the same moment, blossoming of spiritual and psychedelic experimentation. So again, you have this tension between a subject full of spiritual potential in a way and a backdrop of a potent political moment. I think my work often sits between those two poles.

LVH Art: Could you talk more about your colour choices? Most of your works are in a brownish palette, they feel like they come from the same ‘universe’.

Orfeo Tagiuri: All my works are on wood, so the tones are naturally wooden. The only thing changing the colour is wood stainer. I rarely use other materials, except for the occasional oil pastel.

LVH Art: How did you first discover wood as a medium, and what attracts you to working with
it?

Orfeo Tagiuri: When I was at the Slade, we had to write an essay choosing five of our favourite contemporary artworks. I picked five things that weren’t technically artworks at all — but I defined them as such. One was a woman who lived near a church I passed daily. Every week she would place a huge bouquet of fresh flowers at the church door. I thought of that as a kind of performance sculpture. Another came from my mother’s work: she was a child psychiatrist, and one of her patients, during recovery from addiction, had been given a box of sweets. Each day she allowed herself only one sweet and then stuck the wrapper to her hospital window. Over time it became this stained-glass-like collage. When she finished her treatment, she peeled the wrappers off the window and gave them to my mother as a gift. To me, that was one of the most powerful artworks. I wrote my essay around gestures like these.

My professors pulled me aside and said, “You’ve critiqued the whole idea of institutions, as you haven’t mentioned a single artist, gallery, or museum.” I thought I was about to lose marks or be criticised, but instead they gave me a long list of artists who had done exactly this kind of work – blurring art and life, subverting and expanding the art world. That moment revealed to me a whole lineage I hadn’t known existed. For my degree show, I recreated a classroom with eight desks in the centre. On each desk, I carved into the wood as if a troublemaking student had been given endless time to leave their scratchings. That was the beginning of me working with wood — turning this institutional space into one that also allowed for daydreaming, and play. 

LVH Art: You studied Creative Writing before. How did the shift toward art feel for you?

Orfeo Tagiuri: I studied Literature and Creative Writing at Stanford in California, and still do quite a lot of writing, especially when making paintings. I sometimes think of it as taking footsteps. One step might be making an image or working with a photograph, and the next step is writing; which becomes a way of analysing why I was drawn to that subject in the first place. What I like about doing both is that in making art, you don’t always need to know why you’re interested in something – you can just jump in. Then writing gives you a chance to reflect and understand what that interest was. That in turn becomes another step. So it becomes this cycle: not knowing, then curiosity, then research and knowing, and then back again to not knowing, curiosity, research, and knowing, etc.

LVH Art: The new works are quite different from your previous works. Could you tell us more
about the shift in style?

Orfeo Tagiuri: Yes, so before I used a lot of imagery I imagined myself. I was inventing subjects for things I was internally feeling, or narratives I was curious about, but now I am looking more at capturing these historical moments.

I think the turning point for me was during an artist residency called IM Residency in Worlingham, Suffolk in April last year. There were a lot of flowers that started to open while I was there, and by the time I left they were fully blossoming. In particular, the magnolias. I started drawing them just as an exercise, and then I learned that magnolias have both male and female parts, but they can switch them off and on. I think noticing how something as simple as a flower can hold that kind of narrative — the same kind of narratives I’m trying to tell through my own imagery — suddenly opened up a door. So, everything I’m curious about can tell a story, whether it comes from me or from the world.

LVH Art: Do you have any creative rituals or processes that help you get into the right mindset?

Orfeo Tagiuri: The nice thing about working on wood is that it has to be prepared, as I need to put down a base layer and then several layers of stain. There’s already a rhythm built into that process before I even start making deliberate marks, and I think that helps get me into the zone.

LVH Art: Are there any artists or writers who inspire you at the moment?

Orfeo Tagiuri: I’m always drawn to the poet James Tate. He describes very ordinary situations, but each one has a kind of twist to it. Another artist I admire is David Horvitz, an LA-based artist who interacts very poetically with the world around him. His work is quite conceptual, but also accessible, not alien or opaque the way some conceptual art can be. For example, he once made a project where every time he went to a café, he would steal a spoon and mail it to MoMA. Eventually, there was a drawer in one of the offices filled entirely with these stolen spoons, and he turned it into a book called Stolen Spoons. He also made a beautiful work where he collected sea glass — the broken bits of glass you find on the beach. He gathered so much that he was able to melt it down and make new vases.