Meet Cassie Beadle

For the first time, the Affordable Art Fair is excited to announce a partnership that celebrates all the local Battersea community has to offer as Battersea Power Station supports this year’s Recent Graduates’ Exhibition. With an exciting extension to the exhibition taking place in the Circus West Village Hall, on the newly opened Battersea Power Station site, visitors to the fair will be able to pick up a ‘Power of Art Trail’ map and follow it to discover the pop-up display featuring work by Seungjo Jeong (above) and Millie Layton (below) and all that the new shops, restaurants and bars of Circus West have to offer.

We caught up with Cassie Beadle, our brand new Recent Graduates’ Curator, who talked us through her highlights from this year’s display.

‘Beginning with the big stuff, there are two superb large-scale sculptural installations. Chloe Milner’s playfully oversized pair of hand-woven dungarees can be found suspended above the central bar, whilst Millie Layton’s kinetic sculptural landscapes will feature in our exciting extension to the Recent Graduates’ display taking over The Village Hall at Battersea Power Station.

Opposite in scale but equally fascinating, Connor Coulston’s collection of contemporary ‘granny kitsch’ ornaments are bound to ignite memories of childhood nostalgia in us all and Leonie Lachlan’s life size, hyper-detailed bronze sculptures of orange peel are, in her words, executions of ‘small, simple or everyday things’ performing big ideas.

One theme to have emerged is the authenticity of imagery and its potential ambiguity in an increasingly digitised world. Realf Heygate’s work, also a part of the Battersea Power Station display, interestingly balances a somewhat traditional painting style with digitally rendered video work counterparts. Rudolf Romero has also created a new body of work using a nineteenth century wet plate colloidal technique to capture a 3D rendered glass sphere, an object that comes as a default in most modelling software. Similarly, sculptor Romily Alice Walden see her works questioning the role of craft in a digital age as she produces all of her own neon sculptures.

As always, we can look to recent graduates for an exploration of the zeitgeist, anxieties relating to gender identities, and a particular focus on feminist perspectives, form a focus for Rosa Luetchford. Rosa’s paintings of forgotten female artists, throughout history to the modern day, present an interesting exploration of such issues, painting these women as artists in their own right to raise them to equal status with the painter. These works juxtapose beautifully with Gaizka Saracibar’s wonderful photographic series ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being A Man’ that perhaps touches on a lesser explored gender anxiety narrative and concepts of masculinity through a lens of social media.’ 

Book your tickets to our Battersea fair, 19 – 22 October, to get your hands on the next big thing, and be sure to pick up a ‘Power Of Art Trail’ map to discover our extended display at Battersea Power Station. 

RECENT GRADUATES 2017