Creative Bonds

Long Reads

It’s the end of summer 2021 and the artists-in-residence at the Sarabande Foundation are preparing for the final night of their group show. For two weeks, the exhibitors have taken it in turns to man the bar. When they’re not pouring drinks, they are presenting their work to visiting gallerists, artists, journalists and collectors.

Behind the curtain, in the backroom offices, is Trino Verkade, the founding trustee of the Sarabande Foundation, which was set up in 2006 by Lee Alexander McQueen to support creative and visionary talent and nurture opportunities for them to push boundaries. ‘I’m constantly saying: “Go and talk to this person! Go and talk to that person! Tell them about your work!”’, she says.

Verkade was McQueen’s first-ever employee, starting with him in 1994. After his death in 2010, she took over responsibility for continuing the work of the Foundation, and invested in a derelict Victorian stables next to the Regent’s Canal in De Beauvoir, East London. It includes office space, meeting rooms, a large gallery area, communal kitchen and 15 studios. Patrons include a collection of influential creatives who all had personal connections to McQueen, such as the photographer Nick Knight, head curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton, the film director Sam Taylor-Johnson and the jeweller Shaun Leane. Verkade is currently planning the opening of a second outpost in north London in 2022.

Formally, the Foundation supports emerging artists in three ways: through 12 scholarships providing living income for BA students and additionally covering fees for MA students at the Slade School of Fine Art and Central Saint Martins; a subsidised studio programme (rent is a nominal £1 per square foot per month) with bespoke mentoring; and a public programme of on-site events. Informally, the support Sarabanders receive is more amorphous.

‘The studios are purposefully used by a really great mix of different creatives,’ explains Verkade. ‘Our residents are jewellers, painters, filmmakers, performance artists, fashion designers – they come from very different disciplines, and each represents what being creative means right now. But at the heart of it, it’s very much about supporting each other. It’s a family.’

‘Family’ is a recurring word here: it’s the group subject on their WhatsApp; last year’s Christmas window display at Burberry’s flagship store was conceived as ‘a family portrait’; one artist describes their summer show as a ‘family hoedown’; their recently published limited-edition book, Bound, is ‘a family album,’ a hand-bound collection of specially commissioned artwork by 36 Sarabande artists. What the Foundation offers in terms of practical and financial support gives rise to something altogether more invaluable. ‘You’re never not a Sarabander,’ is how one artist puts it: ‘You’re part of this big extended family for life.’

https://sarabandefoundation.org/

 

These are eight of the Sarabande siblings:

 

 

Conor Joseph – Jewellery Designer

‘I’m obsessed with hands and skin texture,’ says Conor Joseph. ‘I often find myself staring at other people’s hands – especially older hands. There’s something really nostalgic about that to me. This idea that your rings can tell a personal history – it paints a story about who you are.’

Joseph’s latest collection, Second Skin, explores the intimate narratives inherent in fine jewellery, shifting the focus to parts of the body that often get overlooked – the contours between fingers, behind the ears – as well as the ‘uncelebrated details’ of the skin: wrinkles, scars, freckles.

 

 

The collection comprises 30 bespoke pieces including the polished Auris cuff, which is crafted from 18-carat-gold-plated silver and is designed to sit on the outer edge of the wearer’s ear – a polished, portable sculpture. The Condulus ring conjoins the index finger and thumb, encasing the knuckles in precious metal and forcing the wearer to form a fist. ‘Some of the pieces in the range control you,’ Joseph says. ‘They freeze your hand into these beautiful, organic positions.’

Joseph made his first piece of jewellery when he was a child. He had broken the strings of his tennis racket at the same moment his older sister’s beaded earrings fell apart. Instinctively, he removed the strings from his tennis racket and threaded the beads to form a new necklace. His parents encouraged his proclivity for making and he went on to study jewellery design at Central Saint Martins.

While at Sarabande, Joseph has explored the idea of a ‘remote bespoke’ collection that combines his fascination for skin and metal. Using a new moulding technology, he is working with a supplier who is able to print finely detailed wax moulds that depict the texture and topography of the skin. These moulds are cast into metal, leaving an imprint of the skin. ‘It’s a way of always having another person with you in jewellery form,’ he says.

With the focus now on securing stockists, Joseph is working hard to perfect the process and develop the range. He also makes time to collaborate with other members of the studio. As we speak, he is just finishing an elfin ear cuff for Auroboros, fellow Sarabande artists working in digital haute couture. ‘We help each other out. It’s a real network.’

@_conorjoseph_

 

 

Aurora Pettinari York – Textile Artist

Born and raised in Milan, Aurora Pettinari York moved to London at the age of 18, to study Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths. Her career in theatre took her to New York from 2006 to 2009. ‘I’m from a family of archaeologists and classicists,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d run away from all that by leaving Italy and moving to England and then to New York … Somehow, all these images and stories have clearly stayed with me.’

It was during a period of grief that York felt she needed to change direction. ‘I wanted something I could do with my hands from beginning to end – something that would allow me to be by myself,’ she explains. At the end of 2013 York enrolled on a course in historical hand embroidery at the Royal School of Needlework, where she ‘fell in love’ with stump work – a 17th-century technique in which stitched figures are raised to create a three-dimensional effect. ‘The first thing I made was a human body that looked exactly like the black figures you see on ancient vases made by the Etruscans. I thought I was doing something completely unrelated to my family,’ she notes, ‘but all these classical stories I grew up with were just resurfacing in my work.’

 

 

Drawing inspiration from mythological characters and archaeological artefacts, York has developed a distinctive, pared-back practice. For a group exhibition in December she created a series of six embroidered roundels, each sparsely embroidered with the bust of a small but perfectly formed character from mythology. ‘These are also my ancestors,’ she says. ‘Whenever I go home [to Italy], they’re all around me.’

For the summer show, York’s work took on a larger format. A pair of hand-embroidered tapestries explore the myth of Bellerophon, Pegasus and the Chimera. ‘It’s called The Washing Line,’ she explains. ‘We have the same saying as you in Italian, about airing your dirty laundry in public. A lot of mythology deals with very intimate stories, but they also belong to everyone,’ she explains. ‘They’re our collective inheritance.’

After more than 18 months, York is finally travelling home to Milan to see her family. When she returns to the studio, she plans to take her practice further by experimenting with a technique that will enable her to create a series of assemblages made from textile sculptures and found objects. It’s this spirit of experimentation that Sarabande fosters. ‘It is so inspiring to be able to work alongside people from various disciplines,’ she says. ‘At Sarabande, you get ideas from where you least expect them.’

@aurorapettinariyork

 

 

Robert George Sanders – Performance Artist

For the summer show, Robert George Sanders performed his interpretation of the festival of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day – a Christian celebration marking the beginning of the harvest season. ‘The show started in the same week the combine harvesters were out in the fields gathering wheat,’ he explains. ‘The festival is all about sacrificing the spirit of the field, and I wanted to present my own vision of that.’

At the start of the performance, members of the audience bind dying stems of flowers to Sanders’ limbs. He returns to his dressing table at the centre of the gallery and changes into several pairs of dangerously high stilettos, running on the spot, limbs and leaves flailing as he recites a poem that includes fragments of thought on his identity, his sexuality and his place of birth.

‘I don’t like tall buildings or the colour grey, so I go back to the countryside whenever I can,’ explains Sanders, who lives in East London but grew up in rural Kent. ‘My family come from a little village in the countryside – that is where I get my inspiration from.’

Sanders studied menswear design at Central Saint Martins but gradually developed his own practice as a performer when his catwalk shows ‘fell apart’ into processions or happenings. Today, his work draws on a wide- range of cultural influences from Celtic festivals, to the illustrator and fairy enthusiast Charles Altamont Doyle (father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), via Una Stubbs’ portrayal of Aunt Sally (‘my style icon’), whose startled smile is pinned to the walls of his studio.

Since graduating, Sanders has performed at the Turner Contemporary in Margate and Studio Burgoyne in Dover. This autumn, he is performing at the Cornish festival, Bangers & Mash-Up, and at a series of Friday Lates at the V&A. After almost a year at the Sarabande Foundation, Sanders is content to describe himself as a ‘pagan pantomime performance artist.’

‘I enrolled on an MA at Central Saint Martins knowing I wasn’t going to be stocked in stores, or have my own brand in a traditional sense,’ says Sanders. ‘My work will always follow nature cycles, not fashion cycles.’

@robertgeorgesdanders

 

 

Anna Perach – Sculptural Textile Artist

Anna Perach was seven years old when she relocated from Ukraine to Israel. ‘We moved to this very desert-like city, and yet our family home maintained the appearance of a traditional Soviet house, filled with colourful carpets and porcelain,’ she recalls. ‘The interiors had nothing to do with the climate or the surroundings we were in.’ The marked transition between the displaced interior and the scorched landscape is a friction she draws upon in her work as a textile artist.

Perach creates three-dimensional, wearable sculptures that are ‘activated’ as choreographed performances. ‘I start by hand-sketching ideas and patterns using markers or watercolour,’ she explains. Her sketches are then given to a pattern cutter, who creates two-dimensional shapes that Perach then manually tufts using spools of bright yarn and a tufting gun – a technique used in domestic carpet-making. The tufted panels are then padded and stitched together to form otherworldly figures inspired by Perach’s research into ancient folklore, ritual and female archetypes. Once activated, these tactile figures bring to life ideas of identity, gender and craft.

Perach – whose work has been exhibited internationally at galleries including White Cube and Saatchi Gallery – joined the Sarabande Foundation after completing an MFA at Goldsmiths. As well as providing her with professional legal advice, the Foundation has been an invaluable source of camaraderie.

‘It’s not like a normal studio,’ she explains. ‘It’s much more like a school in that you all start and leave at the same time, and that creates a different dynamic. It’s more of a community. Plus the artists here are good artists,’ she adds. ‘There is something inspiring about being surrounded by people who are motivated to do their best in their own areas. That creates something quite special.’

@anna_perach

 

 

Daisy May Collingridge – Wearable Textile Artist

At the age of 12, Daisy May Collingridge’s parents took her to see Gunther von Hagens’ Plastination Exhibition. She recalls seeing ‘actual dead bodies’ for the first time and the experience marked the beginning of her fascination with anatomy and the human form.

Collingridge went on to study fashion design at Central Saint Martins, but soon realised a career in womenswear was not for her. ‘It seemed to me that, if I pursued a career in fashion, I might not actually get to continue to work with fabric. I didn’t know how I’d come up with any ideas without playing with the fabric itself, so I didn’t really see where I’d fit in.’

While travelling in New Zealand in 2016, Collingridge created her first ‘squishy’ – a wearable, fleshy object made from weighted pink pockets of jersey viscose. In 2016, she entered and won the World of Wearable Art competition, an annual event in Wellington, where extraordinary works of wearable art are brought to life on stage in front of an audience of around 60,000 people. She has been expanding her flabby, fleshy family of characters ever since.

Collingridge hand-dyes her fabric at her parents’ house in Surrey before hand-stitching the lumpen components together to form her wearable characters. She describes the process as impulsive: ‘I always make the head first – that informs the character – and then I just let it grow …’

Fully formed, the characters travel back to her childhood home. ‘I actually think a lot of [my work] has come from the house I grew up in,’ reflects Collingridge. ‘That feeling of safety and comfort – and these muted colours …’ Here, her parents try the characters on. ‘It’s good to be able to work with no judgment,’ Collingridge explains. ‘We’re obviously all incredibly familiar with each other, so their reaction to wearing the suits is quite pure, which is really interesting to watch.’

@daisy_collingridge

 

 

Christopher Thompson Royds – Artist-Jeweller

‘Ironically, both my grandmother and my mother had their jewellery collections stolen,’ explains Christopher Thompson Royds. ‘I grew up with very little jewellery around me.’ The flowers found in the verges and hedgerows of the Oxfordshire countryside became Royds’ inspiration. ‘The first item of jewellery I ever made was probably a daisy chain,’ he recalls. ‘It’s that level of naturalism I try to recapture in my work.’

Royds – who has an MA in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery from the Royal College of Art – already had an international reputation when he joined the Foundation. His work is included in several prominent collections and he is represented by numerous galleries in the UK, Europe and the US. This year, the challenge for Royds has been to turn his conceptual practice into something he can earn a living from.

‘What’s brilliant about Sarabande,’ he explains, ‘is the support they are able to offer in terms of transitioning to the next phase.’ At the moment, Royds makes everything himself – including the packaging. An object from his Against Nature collection, for example, is encased in an orange box that is tied with a burgundy ribbon. When Royds pulls the bow at the top of the box, all four sides of the box fall away to reveal a small glass dome, under which is an 18-carat-gold sculpture depicting a sprig of bird’s foot trefoil. The buds of the flower detach from the stem to form stud earrings. Both sculpture and jewel, the piece encapsulates Royds’ commitment to quiet innovation and impeccable craftsmanship.

Similarly, the items in his Natura Morta collection are mounted in hand-crafted marbled folio boxes – a reference to the Sir Hans Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum. For this collection, Royds captures the fragility of pressed flowers by tracing their outlines on sheets of paper-thin gold, binding them together with fine gold wire and finishing them with enamel paint.

The V&A now holds a poppy necklace from this collection, but Royds was able to demonstrate its wider appeal during lockdown. While at his family home in Oxfordshire, he set about creating life-like forget-me-not earrings mounted on an illustrated card. For each pair sold, he donated £100 to the charity Refuge. The project has raised over £12,000.

@cthompsonroyds; christopherthompsonroyds.com

 

 

Karimah Hassan – Multidisciplinary Artist

Karimah Hassan is a multidisciplinary artist with roots in Wales, Yemen and Bangladesh. She studied for an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art in 2016 before ‘running away and reinventing’ herself in Toronto, on the Mural Art Career Development programme.

Pre-pandemic, Hassan created live paintings at events including festivals, open-mic sessions, dance performances and jazz recitals during which she would ‘express the energy of the performance’ through her vast and colourful canvases. Lockdown forced Hassan to re-evaluate her practice. ‘In the absence of community events, I started to ask friends and family how they were feeling,’ she explains. ‘I was painting a daily portrait of them alongside their responses – which were incredibly honest and poetic. It became a snapshot of this moment in time, covering everything from banana bread to the Black Lives Matter movement.’

What was a means of keeping in touch with friends and family evolved into a global art project. ‘When I showed the work to Trino [Verkade] in February this year, she helped me to get it off the ground and get it in front of more people.’

The project, entitled The Strangers Yearbook, was exhibited at Coal Drops Yard throughout May and June. It was accompanied by a book that Hassan self-published in the three weeks she had to prepare for the exhibition. ‘Before joining Sarabande, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to push myself to do that,’ she admits. ‘Having someone to support you and help you orchestrate something like that is invaluable.’

A steady stream of commissions has ensued. The Migration Museum in Lewisham has asked Hassan to fill empty storefronts with new vibrant and visceral portraits, while in Whitechapel, the People’s Mission Hall has commissioned her to produce work for its community space. ‘Everything that I do aims to elevate the stories of other people,’ she explains. ‘Sarabande has given me the momentum I needed to continue doing that.’

@karimah.hassan

 

 

Alice von Maltzahn – Installation Artist

Alice von Maltzahn grew up on a farm on the border of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire. She describes the elevated setting as a ‘nucleus’ (her father is from Austria). A family fulcrum, it has also informed von Maltzahn’s practice: ‘I grew up with the understanding of nature, and it being very apparent that things are cyclical and temporal. There’s a constant movement, even if you can’t see it.’

The same can be said of von Maltzahn’s work, which – using specialist papers, an array of scissors and scalpels and pots of handmade glue – examines temporality, the environment and our place within it.

For the group summer show, von Maltzahn created an intricate paper installation from white, cold-pressed cotton paper. The form, entitled Bloom, grows in one corner of the gallery, stretching up towards the ceiling before breaking off into fragments. ‘It gets to a point when the work is big enough,’ von Maltzahn explains. ‘Then I’ll spend a whole day making extra sections and applying them. I’ll step back and realise that I’ve just spent a day doing something I can’t even see. But that’s OK, because the work is incremental and it is slow. Over time, you create something that is strong and robust and alive and impactful.’

Von Maltzahn studied at Wimbledon College of Arts and The Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University. She joined the Sarabande Foundation last year after her studio was flooded. Here, her papers are safe and dry and she has been able to focus on creating new work, including Hive – a series of pieces inspired by a visit to the apiarist who works on her family farm.

@alicevonmaltzahn