Mike Abrahams is a graphic designer and artist and has spent the last seven years establishing and participating in a local charity called Clapton Commons. He has led the £250+k development of Liberty Hall, a project to convert a disussed toilet block owned by Hackney Council into a space for all, a village hall, community cooking school, coffee kiosk, cycle repair station, community garden... The project secured almost £50k via Spacehive in 2018/19 and throughout the build the hoardings around site were used as a community notice board, and to communicate and engage the community, initially thanking everyone who had particiaped in making it happen and then into a memori-wall to celebrate the lives of neighbours who had died during the first lockdown in 2020 establishing new traditions for grieving.
Mike's art practice is an exercise in going beyond the given and against the grain, exploring the creative process itself as an opportunity to deconstruct the world around us and the way that we behave within it. He makes interventions into that which is often banal to the point of invisibility, exposing and unravelling the wiring that lets us see only that which we wish to see, encouraging a more conscious relationship to our surroundings.
www.mikeabrahamsartist.com
abrahams.uk.com
Francesca Giuliano is a contemporary artist based in London. She works in a variety of traditional media (mainly paint and drawing) as well as in digital, moving image and sound.
Trained as an Experience Designer with a particular bent for cognitive psychology, her practice focuses on perception, comprehension, decision-making, error and action. Among her key questions are: how might a thing be interpreted, and how do different versions of a thing help build a single understanding?
At the core of Giuliano’s process is the push and pull between creating by design or by intuition. Between making work that is considered versus working without thinking. Between engaging the conscious or not. That tension informs the materials, the means of production and the techniques used.
www.francesca-giuliano.com
