Artists: Alice Channer - Callum Innes - Robin Megannity - Jack Otway - Hannah Perry - Hayley Tompkins - Andrew Bryant - Damien Meade

Workplace presents Cold Feed, a group exhibition featuring new work by artists Andrew Bryant, Alice Channer, Callum Innes, Damien Meade, Robin Megannity, Jack Otway, Hannah Perry and Hayley Tompkins.

Cold Feed explores the complex relationship between form and perception, examining how surface, texture, and materiality shapes our understanding of the world. The exhibition will bring together a group of artists that investigate how appearances can both reveal and obscure deeper truths, realities and possibilities.

Gathering resources from print, the internet, and his own photography, Andrew Bryant creates meticulous paintings of isolated objects, which are purposefully lacking or incomplete. The works are informed by a deep interest in critical theory, queer theory, and psychoanalysis, as well as an ongoing engagement with art and image-making. Bryant’s recent body of work is an exploration into a critical engagement with AI, which has generated hybridised imagery drawn from his own photographs and found images. Simultaneously beguiling and banal, the objects are rendered with a forensic painterly process that acts to simultaneously reveal and conceal realities.

Dry Cask (Peacock) (2023), by Alice Channer is a floor-based sculpture comprising of three mirror-polished stainless steel vessels. Each cylinder contains volumes of undulating accordion-pleated crepe satin silk resembling ripples in a puddle or the gentle whorls of a fingerprint. Punctuating the fabric are vapour-blasted and chrome-plated aluminium sandcasts of ammonites whose own grooved natural forms echo the soft surface they are nestled into. The cylindrical forms are informed by sliced open dry-cask flasks, designed to store nuclear waste, whose pristine industrial surface belies the hazardous material housed within. In contrast, the frosted gold paper surface of Channer’s Sharks (2025) series presents a pleated relief supporting chromed thorns, some which are menacingly rendered in blood red enamel - simultaneously seductive and violent.

Callum Innes is known for luminous abstractions that push at the fundamentals of painting: pigment, surface and space. Composed of opaque sections juxtaposed with thin, translucent washes – remnants of a process of removal - that appear almost permeable, his paintings invoke a dynamic conversation between presence and absence. Through this unique, spare vocabulary, Innes elicits vast, ambiguous and sublime painterly territories.

Damien Meade produces alluring and visually disorientating paintings through a multi-layered process of clay modelling, photography, and editing before transforming them in exacting detail into oil paintings. Shifting between purely formal clay abstractions to feminine busts whose heads eerily float above their bodies, there is a strong interest in the animate and inanimate that runs throughout his work. The tension between surface and illusion, object and desire, and abstraction and figuration are sensitively explored in paintings that sit at the intersection of the quotidian and the uncanny.

Robin Megannity’s new body of work explores how seemingly disparate references, spanning the mundane and the historical, can coexist within a single, multifaceted plane. Whilst engaging directly with the tradition of historical still life, and nodding towards the lineage of the ‘master copy’, the paintings true focus lies in the act of compression and transformation – how the cultural and historical are remoulded into a deeply personal and contemporary encounter. The grisaille palette further distances the paintings from their sources, stripping away their status as replicas and transforming them into something more ambiguous – part historical echo, part present-day reflection. Visible traces of Megannity’s interruptions, hesitation and digressions on the canvas’ surface speak to the speed of thought and the fragmented way we process meaning.

Jack Otway’s kaleidoscopic paintings collide together two distinct layers of expressive gestural underpaintings with transparent hard-edged geometric patterns, which when combined create a range of hypnotic and hallucinatory optical effects. Carefully balancing order and instinct his paintings follow their own internal logic. For his new body of work, Otway arranges, coils and drapes remnants of his own paintings into new compositions, photographes them and then translates these hybridized forms into paintings with a paired back monochrome palette. The resulting works explore Otway’s interest in decaying forms and abstractly invoke a sense of collapse and renewal, questioning both time’s inevitable erosion and humainity’s propensity for destruction.

Hannah Perry develops a sprawling network of references, drawing inspiration from personal experience, the testimony of others and the accelerated nature of our hypertechnological times. Her works are about the materials she uses to explore the complexities of our inner worlds, as well as of everyday physical and mental endurance. In a recent series of works, she has produced large scale sculpture, dynamic audio-visual installation utilising sound, technology, dance, spoken word, printmaking and video, to engage with issues relating to our individual and collective welfare. Perry’s practice explores erotic discourse, motherhood, mental health, youth, social class, and taste, alongside gendered coded materials.

In her paintings and sculpture, Hayley Tompkins seeks to explore and expand paint and its application as a transformative tool. Often modest in scale, Tompkins’ energetic works are born from an experimental approach rooted in the navigation between intent and spontaneity. Soaked in paint, the works’ surfaces remain unpredictable as they accrue swaths of fluorescent color, and layers of brushstrokes that develop from both free-form association, and distilled yet calculated intervention.