Far Away Inside brings together works by Rachael Causer, Julie Mayer, Sophia McNab, Yein Son and Sarah Tew. Material affinities and gut feeling have been a strong driving force in creating this exhibition.

If things are stuck, they’re not stuck for long. Through ideas of skin, landscape, the domestic and ritual, these artists are harnessing their sensitivity to, and are highlighting, the crashing tectonics of attempts to understand the world around us. Both meaning and substance appear to crack, opening up alternative terrains which give a shifted view of what we take for granted in the act of seeing. Eyes becoming attuned to nuance, sensation, vibration listening to what the world has to say. If things are stuck, they’re not stuck for long.

The exhibition encompasses painting, printmaking and sculpture. Within these disciplines boundaries are blurred and celebrated: we glimpse into Sophia McNab’s monoprints which feel momentary, yet also Yein Son’s works on fine fabric which give an arresting view of a vast terrain of other worldly skin; we see languages colliding within Julie Mayer’s paintings through pattern and lost sequences, but also the vicissitudes of time captured and held within the textile installations of Sarah Tew, with their residual nature suggesting a freshwater stream. Compare this to Racheal Causer’s sculptures which tell stories through an accumulation of time and debris (which has then been reformed) and we see the breadth of approaches taken here.

Rachael Causer is an artist living and working in London. Her practice explores the ways human and non-human activities intertwine and is a subtle nod to the tenuous line we tread between co-existing and colliding fragile ecologies. Her sculptures stem from the familiar but bridge into the unfamiliar, witnessing breakage, scattering, dissolving and transformation over time. She graduated from Camberwell College of Art, with an MA in Fine Art in 2020, and was a member of the MASS Sculpture Programme in 2021-23. www.rachaelcauser.com

Julie Mayer is an abstract painter whose practice is rooted in traditional materials, processes, and histories of modernist geometric painting. Interrupted patterns combine with colour combinations, which are drawn from observations of domestic, urban and coastal landscapes and the traditions of colour theory (such as the work of Josef Albers and Sanzo Wada). The combinations are then translated into a limited palette and complex geometry which references a ‘site’ of a lived experience within the painting. Julie now lives and works in Preston and completed an MA in Fine Art at University of Central Lancashire in 2019. www.juliemayer.org

Sophia McNab is an artist based in Hastings, East Sussex, with an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School. Sophia's work spans printmaking, collage and stitching to explore memory, agency and our relationship to landscape. She draws on a family archive of photographs and postcards, as well as natural and found materials. Lost and remembered landscapes are evoked through thoughtful material exploration. Exhibitions include North Coast Asylum, Newquay; Warbling Collective, London; Phoenix Art Space, Brighton; Blue Shop Galleries and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, London. www.sophiamcnab.com

Central to Yein Son's work is the physical analogy between the surface of a painting and bodily skin, its relevant metaphors, and interpretations. In addition to the painting's materiality and 'skin-like' tactility, she has considered the symbolic value of 'skin' as a medium and painting method. Using psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's concept of the 'skin-ego', she has investigated the metaphor of skin as a thin interface between inner and outer. She has extrapolated this to develop a painting practice with a specific haptic visual vocabulary based on layering. Yein now lives and works in Seoul after completing her PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in 2022. www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/research/mphil-phd/yein-son

Sarah Tew was brought up in the Cumbrian Lake District, North West England. She now lives and works in London, graduating from Slade School of Fine Art, MFA Fine Art in 2019. Her practice incorporates painting, installation, and site-responsive work. The physical interactions of materials and time play a central role in her making, exploring their inheritance of cultural and historical contexts in relation to landscape painting. Recent works explore the potential of watercolour in largescale silk painting. Recent awards include the Boise Travel Scholarship 2019 which funded a residency at Arts Letters & Numbers in upstate New York 2020, with explorations into Thomas Cole’s landscapes of the Catskills and The Hudson River School. www.sarahtew.co.uk



Thames-Side Studios Gallery
Thames-Side Studios
Harrington Way, Warspite Road
Royal Borough of Greenwich
London SE18 5NR.

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