Cample Line have announced their 2025 exhibition programme – presenting work from Sayan Chanda, Lotte Gertz, Bryony Rose and Amalia Pica alongside a year-round programming of screenings, workshops and a supporting engagement strand.
London-based artist Sayan Chanda will stage a solo exhibition of new and recent textile and ceramic works from across the various series – ‘Jomi’, ‘Bohurupee’, ‘Dieties’ and ‘Shapeshifters’ – that make up his wider body of work.
Chanda often draws upon the rituals he witnessed as a child and the living traditions with which he was surrounded when growing up in Kolkata, reimagining votive objects, folk narratives and indigenous rituals as hybrid ambiguous forms that function as totems, portals and talismans.
Through weaving, stitching, dyeing and hand-building, he gives physical forms to his anxieties, and to mythologies and individual and collective memory. Chanda’s Bohurupee, for instance, evoke Bengali folk masks made and worn by the Bohurupee community. Combining tight and compacted weave with bursts of loosened yarn. Cleo Roberts-Komireddi has suggested that they have the potential to ‘become bodies in themselves. Eye hollows serve as portals, the skirt of fibres as limbs.’
Sayan Chanda
22 March – 1 June
Solo exhibition
Images: A Smear and The Crown, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, 8 Sept – 22 October 2022
In his textile work, Chanda often uses found clothes that can be of deep personal resonance, such as vintage Kantha quilts from Bengal, gamchhas (coarse cotton cloth commonly used as a scarf or headdress across eastern parts of South Asia) or Jandami fabrics – deconstructing, knotting, folding, embroidering and weaving them into objects, reliefs and tapestries.
His Jomi series – titled after the Bengali word for ground/land/field – was partly inspired by childhood memories of female elders reading poet Jasimuddin’s ‘Nakshi Kanthar Math’ (The Field of the Embroidered Quilt) (1928) to him. Of his Deity works he has said: ‘The Deity series was my first body of work made using vintage Kantha. I was trying to find a system, akin to ritual tying and wrapping observed commonly in folk and indigenous customs, often in the context of wish-making or wish-fulfilment.’
Chanda’s solo exhibitions include Jhaveri Contemporary, south Mumbai (2022) and Commonage Projects, London (2022-23). In 2023, his work was included in a major travelling exhibition Actions for the Earth: Art, Care and Ecology, curated by Sharmila Wood. He also undertook a Thread residency in rural southeastern Senegal, which allows local and international artists to work in the village Sinthian and learn through its model of local production. In 2024, his work was included in the group show, Reverberations: Textile as Echo, Green Art Gallery in Dubai.
Lotte Gertz
29 June – 31 August
Solo exhibition
Images: Migrating Eye, Intermedia Gallery, CCA, Glasgow, 28 Feb – 9 March 2019
Glasgow-based artist Lotte Gertz will create a new body of work for the upstairs space at CAMPLE LINE, opening June 2024 and running till the end of August.
Gertz has lived and worked in Glasgow since graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 2002, and has exhibited widely in Scotland and in Europe, most recently in Copenhagen in September 2024 with Mia Fryland.
In her practice, she uses drawing, painting, collage and assorted printing techniques, making layered, often complex works that play with forms and fragments at once familiar and yet hard to place. Previously she has worked on various types of unprimed fabric and linen, including Calico and silk, typically foregoing the stretcher and attaching the fabric straight to the wall.
More recently, Gertz has worked on Japanese papers, developing a body of work drawing upon Ursula K Le Guin’s concept of the container or vessel. She has said: ‘I became interested in Le Guin’s essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1986).
‘The essay is well known, but I read it for the first-time during lockdown and it really resonated with me – perhaps emphasized by the stillness of the world at that point – and due to looking closely at the small things around me…The ‘container’ provides for me a framework with which to create rules and structure within my practice, and to mine and invent imagery.’
Gertz’s exhibition for Cample will build upon recent work that she presented as part of the ‘Instalments’ series at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (2022), and new work she is making as part of her RSA Residency for Scotland award (2024-25) at Edinburgh Printmakers. Solo shows include Weaver’s Nest, Danske Grafikeres Hus, Copenhagen (2022) and Migrating Eye, Intermedia, CCA, Glasgow (2019). She has published two monographs with Good Press Gallery, Glasgow: Lotte Gertz (2016) and Migrating Eye (2022). She has held residencies at Cove Park, Scotland (2018) and SVK: Statens Værksteder for Kunst/The Danish Art Workshop, Christianshavn, Denmark (2021). Her work is currently featured in Conversations with the Collection | Surface Detail at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
Bryony Rose
29 June – 31 August
Solo exhibition
Images: Blinking, Glare, Quench Gallery, Margate, 3 Feb- 17 March 2024
Concurrently with Gertz’s exhibition upstairs, Glasgow-based artist Bryony Rose will present a new body of work in Cample line’s downstairs space that builds upon her recent exhibitions, Blinking, glare (Quench Gallery, Margate, 2024) and Night Jar (Kiosk, Glasgow, 2023). In both shows, Rose presented groups of glazed tiled relief panels that draw upon her teenage memories of rural Dumfries and Galloway – of walking home along a narrow track or across the park as evening or night falls. Motifs recur: brambles, bindweeds, football pitches, flood lights, the beam of a car’s lights: ‘This journey was made hundreds of times and the memory has no defined edges but wrapped around it all is a sense of nostalgia and of disconnection – an unremarkable coming-of-age.’
Throughout her work, semi-autobiographical fragments are in tension with the pastoral language of British applied arts, with the imagery around teenage rites of passage in a small community taking on the same cultural weight as more traditional rural motifs such as nightjars, egrets, swans, rooks, moths and foliage. In a new body of ceramic work for Cample, Rose will explore this tension further, introducing new elements to her visual language – horseflies, clegs, erupting insect bites, sore legs, fireworks and car keys – uncomfortable and mundane realities of rural living that will bump up against and undercut more idealised forms that reference the ways the countryside is often represented, for instance in children’s literature.
Bryony Rose graduated from the Glasgow School of Art graduating in 2015, where she received the W O Hutcheson Prize for Drawing. She was an associate artist of Open School East 2019. Notable solo and group exhibitions include Cho! Cho le! 2024 (Arusha Gallery, London), Blinking, Glare 2024 (Quench Gallery, Margate), Night Car 2023 (Kiosk, Glasgow) Bathing Nervous Limbs 2021 (Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh) Glass Houses 2020 (McBeans Nursery, Lewes) The Reception Was Brilliant 2019 (Open School East, Margate) digging 2018 (Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh) Say What I am Called 2018 (Glasgow International).
Amalia Pica
4 October – 14 December
Solo exhibition
Images: Aula Grande (Outlined), 2024, in Amalia Pica: Aula Expandida, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, February – April 2024
Argentinian artist Amalia Pica will stage a solo exhibition, opening October 2025 and running until December.
Pica lives and works in London, and over the last twenty years, she has developed an expansive practice that investigates human modes of interaction, especially our desire to learn and to be understood as we try to make sense of, and negotiate, the world around us. Often using seemingly simple materials and found objects, her work has a lightness of touch and playfulness that belies her own experience growing up in a military dictatorship, but which she prioritizes for its power to draw viewers into a conversation. Pica often incorporates playful signifiers of collective expression and cultural celebration such as bunting and confetti into installations – ultimately exploring cultural intimacy and the political potential of joy. She began her career as a primary school art teacher, an experience that continually informs much of her work, and her recent solo exhibition in Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York – Aula Expandida – featured an interactive installation, sculptures, embroideries, and collages that explore how art, imagination, and language are connected, especially during the formative years of early childhood.
Pica has had solo exhibitions at Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2023); Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2022); Brighton CCA (2022); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2020); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2019); The New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK (2019); Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Australia (2018); The Power Plant, Toronto (2017); NC Arte, Bogotá, Colombia (2017); Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany (2016); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2014); List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2013); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Neuquén, Argentina (2013); Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2012); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012); Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden (2010); among many others.
Her work was included in the Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2016); The Ungovernables: New Museum Triennial, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2015); and ILLUMInations, curated by Bice Curiger, 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Public commissions include University of North Carolina, North Carolina; Semaphores, King’s Cross, London; and Sipping colors, De Pijp Station, Amsterdam. She received the Zürich Art Prize (2020); Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award (2011) amongst other awards. She has had residencies at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado (2017); Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California (2012); Uqbar Foundation at Casa Vecina, Mexico City (2011); Markus Lennikus, Baeurmarkt 9, Vienna (2010); and BijlmAIR, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Zuidoost, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2007).
CAMPLE LINE
Cample Mill
Cample, near Thornhill
Dumfriesshire
Scotland
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