Project-based memberships

Artists’ Projects previously developed at Rochester Square

Lucía Pizzani 
2023

Born in Caracas and based in London Pizzani's practice involves the body and self always informed by materiality. Having worked as part of the environmental movement in Venezuela for many years, these concerns are still very present in her research and production. 

Lucia’s joined Rochester Square to work on her recent commission by Cecilia Brunson Projects.

Anne Ryan
The City Rises, 2021

Artist Anne Ryan (born in Ireland, lives in London) has been working on a series of new ceramics at Rochester Square from April to May 2021. These pieces will be part of her upcoming installation 'The City Rises’ at Dilston Grove, Southwark Park Galleries opening in July 2021.

This show considers the idea of walking through the city, assembling memories of people and spaces and how spaces are altered by the movement of people through them.

Anne is represented by Greengrassi gallery in London, she is a contemporary artist who creates highly coloured constructed paintings and ceramics of figures. Her subjects dance, party, pose and generally indulge themselves, in scenarios that draw on diverse sources from visual culture and the world around her.

Philipp Schenk-Mischke
Collectible Fair, 2019

Designer Philipp Schenk-Mischke has been working at Rochester Square on a new series of ceramic vases for his exhibition at 107 Rivoli Store at Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, curated by the Collectible Fair. His work will be shown with other designers during Paris Design Week 2019.These ceramics get deformed on a body vibration plate right after demoulding. The plate, with its origin in the fitness industry, is a hijacked tool to explore new ideas and processes. His work aims to question traditional methods in a post-internet era. It interferes by misapplying materials with findings from online-shops or DIY stores, and contributes to the debate of rethinking old links that we begin to perceive as natural - a powerful tool to create new experiences without new resources.

Nissa Nishikawa
Phytology, 2018

Nissa Nishikawa works with performance, painting, ceramics, glass, and film. Her practice interprets traditional forms of dance, ritual and craft in ways that illuminate the current crisis in ecology and community. She engages with alchemical and animistic practices through the use of elemental base materials, forging processes of transformation that are intuitively informed by a close observation of the intelligence of nature and the non-human as systems of navigation.

The all-gender liquid loo came out of a series of co-design discussions with Phytology about finding alternative ways to transform and compost human waste, whilst also creating a toilet space which is accessible for all genders and practices. (Hari, Compost Mentis / Phytology)

Paulina Michnowska

Paulina Michnowska is a London based artist, born in Poland 1984. Paulina works foremost with ceramics and painting, and her work explores topics that range across: autobiographical details, banalities of everyday life, historical folklore and the aesthetic of accident and injury.Paulina teaches 2 pottery courses and she has been contributing to several events engaging the public with ceramic board games. She has also participating to our first neighbours breakfast with her coffee van Ello Darling Coffee.

Narumi Nekpenekpen
Something(s) more permanent, 2022

Born 1998 in Kashiwa, Japan
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

In her process, slab porcelain clay is pushed and pulled into a central foundation onto which, like armour, the artist affixes a head, chunky limbs and highly textured garments, chains and other accessories. Nekpenekpen is interested both in what clay wants to do on its own, as well as what can emerge from their imminent relation. The result is a small, fierce army of lovers, produced from Nekpenekpen’s care and a dynamism of intra-acting forces. In this interstitial place, a dependency on others is essential to existence; love reigns supreme.

Jonathan Baldock
Bluecoat, 2020

Artist Jonathan Baldock has been using our studio facilities to work on a new series of ceramic columns for his new exhibition Facecrime at The Bluecoat Liverpool's centre for the contemporary arts (12 March 2020).

The main installation contains a landscape of ceramic columns inspired by cuneiform-inscribed tablets - an early system of writing - dating from 2500BC. Baldock’s version presents an alternative history of clay as a tool of communication; his ceramic columns feature expressive faces, emoji symbols and make audible groans, whistles and chuckles through concealed speakers. The columns are also adorned with weaving, basketry and glass drawn from different eras of labour, folklore and storytelling like an archeological find from a parallel universe.

Zoe Williams
Mimosa House, 2019

Artist Zoe Williams has been working at RS for her first solo exhibition in London (25 May - 27 July 2019) , transforming Mimosa House into a liminal bedroom-like environment which acts as the backdrop for her new film commission Sunday Fantasy. The show incorporates elements from the set of the film, drawings and new ceramic works, focusing on exploring and challenging ideas of fantasy, glamour and role playing relation to sexuality.

She has been supported by Rochester Square on the creation of the ceramic objects, installed around the gallery space. There’s a mixture of artifice and nature; artefacts and consumer goods, shoes, dildos, insects, eels, food – all are intertwined and everything holds potential of pleasure, forming this highly sexualised World.

Tamara Kuselman
Delfina Foundation, 2018

Tamara kuselman (Argentina/Spain) is fascinated by the potential in the tension of a falling object - the loss of control between being dropped until it hits the surface below. She believes unexpected situations are an opportunity to learn about your own character and abilities. In her work, Tamara evokes the tug of war between anticipation and loss of control: ceramics that seem creased like a piece of cloth, and performers who analyse the fall while falling. The suggestion of movement immediately undermined by stillness.

Project: How Can Large Mountains Enter Small Ice, June 2018 for Delfina Foundation

Simon Bayliss
Standpoint, 2017

Simon Bayliss is an artist usually based in Cornwall. He makes slipware ceramics and enplein air landscape paintings, writes poetry and produces house music. He joined Rochester Square while on a Standpoint Futures artist development residency. Simon has been engaging a wide audience during Re-creation with his project Landscape Painters Anonymous.

Rafal Zajko
Loop, 2023

Artist Rafal Zajko has spent 6 month at Rochester Square working on his Arts Council Funded Project Research & Development project “Loop”.

Caroline Achaintre
The Fondation Thalie, 2020

Artist Caroline Achaintre has been working on a new series of ceramic pieces at Rochester Square for her next exhibition at The Fondation Thalie in Brussels (April 2020).Caroline Achaintre (born in Toulouse in 1969, lives in London) works on a wide variety of media, including textiles, ceramics, prints and watercolors, using techniques typically associated with applied arts. Her ceramic sculptures create an atmosphere both playful and absurd, exploring and experimenting with different textures and mixing glazes.

Bea Bonafini
Galerie Chloe Salgado, 2019

Artist Bea Bonafini has been working at Rochester Square creating a new series of work for her upcoming solo exhibition in Paris (7 Sept - 12 Oct 2019) at Galerie Chloe Salgado.

Stepping back into the world of ceramic sculpture at the beginning of 2019 after a few years of hiatus from the medium, she has continued to use explore the process of nerikomi. Porcelain is stained, layered, cut and recomposed repeatedly, to create stone-like patterned surfaces of unglazed clay. In a somewhat dream-like resurrection of ancient artefacts, the show takes the elements of water and air to encapsulate religious and mythical beliefs. Figures slip in and out of recognition, alchemical sirens hold holy liquids and narrative tablets display the narratives of human-animal water and air creatures' interrelationships.

Laura White
The Museum of Royal Worcester, 2018

For the next few months London based artist Laura White is working at RS to realize a commission for an exhibition at Museum of Royal Worcester (MoRW), organized by Meadow Arts. The installation which will be sited at MoRW from September 2018 - March 2019 explores our relationships to the production of porcelain today, such as how the digital environment has affected our relationship to porcelain, from the handmade museum collectables, to the mass-produced digitally designed slip cast crockery we use every day in our homes.

Laura has developed and produced a collection of porcelain objects that occupy and explore their own materiality - Working with the materials capabilities and limitations, such as the collapses, breaks and cracks to expose both the vulnerability of the material while offering up new possibilities.

Zoe Williams
DRAF, 2017

Zoe Williams is a London based artist supported by Rochester Square for her production of her ambitious commission Ceremony of the Void for DRAF, a voluptuous banquet tableau inviting visitors to experience her fantastical immersive environment and large-scale performance involving artist-made delicacies, musicians, actors, video projections and new ceramic sculptures.

Leonie Nagel
Kingsgate Workshops, 2017

In summer 2017 Leonie Nagel (lives and works in Berlin) became the first international artist to take part in Kingsgate Workshops’ studio residency programe. The Sirens of St L. The meeting-point at Kingsgate Project Space is an exhibition of new works begun in London and developed in the intervening months between London and Berlin.

Accompanying the film stands a large black piece of non-utilitarian furniture. The interior space of this block is invisible, while each tile on its skin is imprinted with scavenged detritus to depict dumb smiley faces.