Artist Sebastián Espejo talks about observational shifts between scene and surface, how multiple temporalities accumulate in his paintings, receptiveness versus modulation in his process, and more.

Sebastián Espejo (b. 1990) is a Chilean artist based in London whose practice centres on painting as a form of attention. His work explores the language of painting through close observation of the natural world, living organisms, and the perception of light. Espejo has exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He was twice a finalist for Jackson’s Art Prize and was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2025.

In 2025, he undertook a residency at Drumlanrig Castle and was subsequently selected for the Fugger Kunsthof residency in Augsburg for 2026. He is currently preparing two solo exhibitions: one at Union Pacific, London, and another at Sun Gallery, Seoul. In January 2026, he received the Brave Project Award and will be featured in Chapter 5, alongside a solo exhibition at Interval Gallery, London, presented in dialogue with works by Pierre Bonnard.

Espejo understands painting as a surface of encounter. His works often place direct references to historical artworks alongside everyday objects or observed scenes, creating a dialogue between lived experience and inherited visual languages. These dualities operate both in his approach to observation and in the process of translation onto the painted surface. Alongside his studio practice, Espejo has developed and led workshops focused on painting, attention and embodied ways of seeing, extending his artistic enquiry into shared, pedagogical contexts.

Sebastián’s Instagram: @sebaespejov

Reference links:

• Adolfo Couve, Melliza (1964)

• Adolfo Couve: Una lección de pintura by Claudia Campaña (2015)—see cover for painting referenced

• Ron Padgett, Pink Dust (2025)

• Jim Jarmusch, Paterson (2016)

  
  

Episode cover art: "Dog Star", Oil, wax, marble dust and pencil on birch wood panel, 50x40cm, 2025. Courtesy of the artist, Interval, Jessica Draper and Wildenstein & Co. Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards.

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Artist Edith Dormandy talks about specificity, honoring visually led impulses, exploring the shifting relationship between language and experience through painting, and more.

Edith is a London-based artist with a classical training. She graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2024 where she was supported by the Vice Chancellor's Achievement Award and where she won the Colart Materials Prize. She has been working as an artist and teacher for several years. She studied a Classical Western drawing and painting technique at The London Atelier of Representational Art from 2016-2020, supported by the ARC First Place Scholarship. Before that she gained a first-class Art History BA at UCL in 2016, achieving a place on the Dean's list for overall high marks. She has exhibited widely and has work in collections around the world.

Edith’s work: www.edithdormandy.co.uk

Edith’s Instagram: @edithdormandy

Episode artwork: Edith Dormandy, "F is for Foxtons", 2025, oil on plywood, 11x8cm

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Artist Olivia van Kuiken discusses intentional misdirection, how she is thinking about language through painting, engaging with the architectural element of her work, and more. This conversation is concerned primarily with the work in her recent show “Bastard Rhyme” at Matthew Brown Gallery in New York.

Olivia van Kuiken (b. 1997 in Chicago, Illinois) is a New York based artist. She received a BFA in Studio Art at Cooper Union, New York, 2019.

Solo Exhibitions include Losing looking leaving, Caprii, Düsseldorf (2024); Beil Lieb, Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2024); Make me Mulch!, Chapter NY, New York (2023);  She clock, me clock, we clock, King’s Leap, New York (2022).

Select group exhibitions include the Lord will spit out the lukewarm, Bortolami, New York (2025); What are you looking for?, curated by Brandy Carstens, Société, Berlin (2025); Meet me by the lake, CLEARING, New York (2024); Mad Monk, Micki Meng, New York (2024); A Modern Disease, curated by Cooper Brovenick, New York (2024); Manic Pixie Nightmare Drawings, Adler Beatty, New York (2024); Anything can pass before the eyes of a person, Derosia, New York (2023); Works on Paper: 100 Years, Amanita, New York (2023); Supper Club, As it Stands, Los Angeles (2023); Oceans of Time, Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2022); Elective Affinities, Chapter NY, New York (2022); Bright lights, big city, no fun, Shoot the Lobster, New York  (2022); La Saison Creuse, Hoffman Maler Wallenburg, Nice (2022).

Olivia’s Instagram: @livankuiken

Reference links:

• Bernini, Chair of St. Peter (1657–1666)

• Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51)

• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias (1818)

• Tove Jansson, The Summer Book (1972)

• Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1665-1669)

• Taryn Simon, Image Atlas (2012)

• Beyoncé, AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM (2022)

• Cap’n Jazz, Scary Kids Scaring Kids (1998)

• my bloody valentine, mbv (2013)

Artist Gavin Gleeson talks about his really good titles, wearing ideas like loose garments while painting, aiming to be irresponsible in the studio, and a lot more.

Gavin Gleeson (b.1995) is an American artist born in Iowa to Irish parents and raised in Kentucky. Now based in London, he holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2024) and a Post-Baccalaureate diploma in Studio Art from the Burren College of Art (2023).

Drawing upon the dual influences of his American upbringing and Irish heritage, Gleeson’s practice engages with personal narratives, memory, and the subtle tensions between intimacy and distance.

Gavin’s work: gavingleeson.com

Gavin’s Instagram: @gavingleesonart

Reference links:

• Tal R Visiting Artists Program Lecture at SAIC (2016)

• Markus Lüpertz, Dithyrambe – schwebend (Dithyramb – hovering) (1964)

• Annabel Grey, mosaic at Finsbury Park (1983)

• Masayoshi Fujita, Cumulonimbus Dream (2021)

• Michelangelo, The Last Judgement (1536-1541)

Artist Danny Leyland talks about strategies for re-organizing paintings, working towards an archival approach to image-making, how drawing is informing his way forward, and more.

Danny Leyland (b.1994) is an artist and educator from Oxford, UK, currently based in London. His practice is led by painting, but also encompasses drawing, printmaking and writing.

A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art (2016), and the Royal College of Art (2024), Leyland has exhibited internationally, with highlights including RSA New Contemporaries (2017), Edinburgh Art Festival (2021), Contemporary Art Now, Ibiza (2024), and a solo presentation at Mare Karina, Venice (2025). His work is included in private and public collections, including the Royal College of Art’s special collections, and the Park Seo-Bo Foundation (Korea). Leyland was the winner of the Chadwell Award (2024), runner-up for the Jackson’s Art Prize (2024), a shortlisted artist for the Waverton Art Prize (2024), and has been a two-time awardee of the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant (2021, 2023). Leyland is the 2025-2026 Abbey Scholar at the British School in Rome. Since 2016, Leyland also works in a collaborative practice with the artist and curator Connie Hurley.

Danny’s work: dannyleyland.com

Danny’s Instagram: @danny_leyland

Reference links:

• Paul Nash, Landscape of the Megaliths (1937)

• Daumier reviewed by Merlin James (2014)

• Wings of a Butterfly exhibition at Ingleby (2025)

• Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ (1437-1445)

• Pierre Bonnard, Le Boxeur (portrait de l'artiste) (1931)

• Timothy Hyman, The New World Made (2022)

• Edvard Munch, Self Portrait between the Clock and the Bed (1940-43)

• Pierre Bonnard, The C C Land Exhibition at Tate Modern (2019)

• Kim Ki-duk, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2004)

  
  

Artist Scarlett Budden talks about writing scripts for paintings, staging ideas, how she thinks about surface in relation to her subject matter, and more.

Scarlett’s work explores the complexities of spectatorship and the voyeuristic exploits within both cinematic practices and the traditions of figurative painting. The female protagonist occupies theatrical yet ambiguous spaces that collapse the divide between reality and fiction. A space known only to the sitter. Close-up stills of the body are framed and disguised within illusionist portals to empower the observed to become the observer. These ghostly psychologically layered images haunt their audience. The spectator is given as a cold shoulder as the relationship between abjection and desire is questioned.

Through its fragmentation, the body breaks down traditional modes of representation. Instead, the aesthetic whole of the female frame is replaced by an inner voice, as the interior and exterior fuse. The mouth recurs as a metonym for this liminal space and the body becomes a site of rupture, autonomy and agency.

The work seeks to move beyond the threshold of conscious perception through the use of subliminal messaging and symbolic imagery such as fish, forests, and the ocean. All of which are symbols of the depths of the human psyche in Jungian psychology. The body is framed as morphic and escapes existing archetypes. Just as the Surrealist’s Exquisite Corpse, the self finds power in its fluctuating and indefinite state.

Scarlett’s work: scarlettbudden.com

Scarlett’s Instagram: @scarlettbuddenstudio

Artist Gabe Duarte talks about reconnecting with their practice in the context of returning to their hometown, their diverse array of technical and mental approaches drawing, community in relation to observation, and more.

Gabe Duarte:

“My practice is driven by observing objects that are lost, forgotten and the anonymous actions that left them where and how they were found. I’ve been questioning what separates what is formally considered monumental from the mundane and how frequently the physical manifestations of both end up intersecting. This interest originated from believing that there is a personal and unshakeable connection, that adds constantly to the collective history of the materials that surround us. By paying close attention to day to day objects and the circumstances that define these meetings, we’re capable of defining new indicators in our memory, knowledge, and by relativity, identity. Consequently, a more realistic, fair and accessible system of values built in relation to materials, objects, places and aesthetics is collectively formed, making it equally suitable to an artistic context that is inclusive and speaks directly to community. For this reason, my work has become increasingly dependent on cooperative research, giving form and image to discarded visual records of community and social collectivity.

My representation of dissociated movements and objects has lately extended to include references to text and images found in online platforms that are seen as of little intellectual value, but that in sharing gain a new extremely personal origin and quality. I have been interested in breaking apart terminology and the aesthetics that surround the art world. The ones capable of separating a handwritten street sign from an artist’s instagram caption. I imaginarily and playfully delineate the relationships between these settings, objects, writings and images, always carefully considering the time and space between themselves and those who have or may come to meet them. The visual inspiration is drawn from the structures, shapes and patterns that belong to these situations and places, physically or mentally delineated. Painting and drawing make it possible for me to understand and record these themes, simultaneously challenging its traditional technical aspects. Additionally, I use sculptural and installation methods that ensure that the works are capable of being observed and encountered sensorially from unexpected angles and perspectives.”

Gabe Duarte was born in 2002 in Guimarães, where they grew up until they were 15, when their family moved to London, England. There Gabe completed in 2023 their degree in Fine Art: Drawing at UAL, Camberwell College of Arts. Gabe has been part of and organized several group exhibition projects in London. Over the past year, they have worked closely with Portuguese cultural groups such as CAAA (Center for Art and Architecture Affairs) and the Madrôa Collective, both in Guimarães.

Gabe’s Instagram: @ultratape_

Artist Samantha Jackson talks about how her work addresses what she terms “stoppages,” the holistic aspirations of her multidisciplinary practice, making work unconditionally, and more.

Samantha’s work is a gestural exploration of everyday life and the relationships that emerge between painting, material and site through making. She paints on found materials using water based pigments that allow the image to saturate into the fabric of the painting itself by pooling, staining, and sinking them into the surface of the work. She uses her phone camera as an extension of her body to capture compositions that erode hierarchies of sight and result in fleeting, fragmented paintings that play with the modern nature of images in our habitual lived experiences.

Believing that painting is a shared, lived experience rather than a singular event - her work rewards long looking as a way of fostering intimacy and connection with one another, particularly in the face of wider bureaucratic harm.

Samantha graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2023 and the Royal College of Art in 2024.

Samantha’s work: samanthamarionjackson.com

Samantha’s Instagram: @sam_jacksonart

Artist Rita Fernández talks about making unforgiving paintings, leaning into instinctual forms, how she approaches self-portraiture, and much more.

Rita Fernández (b. 1999), is a Mexican artist graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA: Painting). She has a BA in Philosophy from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a background in the film industry.

Her work is an exploration of self-portraiture and its limits. Through the dissection of personal experiences and striking images gathered from memories, dreams and daily life, her work is a constant inquiry about the self and what constitutes an identity. Fernández likes to consider her practice as a matrix of self-reflection and representation. Her philosophical formation plays an important role in the way she conceives and approaches the creation of her artwork. 

Rita’s work: www.ritafernandez.org

Rita’s Instagram: @sr.rita.fernandez

Artist Jack Hilton talks about leading with color, how failure begets momentum, the literary touchpoints that have been informing his practice, and much more.

Jack Hilton, b.1996, is a London-based painter.

Hilton’s work explores history, literature and mythology. Often a real historical episode is presented like a myth or biblical drama, riffing on the long tradition of History Painting. Subjects vary from the Tower of Babel to Bayeux Tapestry ships on fire. In the process Hilton aims to give a fresh sense of emotional resonance or comedy to these scenes.

Hilton uses these intense narratives as a leaping-off point for a more formal exploration of colour and pattern-making. He used figuration in a heraldic, patchwork kind of way, with large parts of the canvas blocked out by flat colour, interrupted by layered shapes. In art as in life, what you take out is sometimes more important than what you put in.

Following a degree in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Hilton began painting professionally in 2020. He has been part of many group exhibitions including with Felt Collections (London) and Reuter Bausch (Luxembourg). His first solo show came in the winter of 2023 at The Table, Hay-on-Wye followed by another at Galleriet Agnes in Copenhagen in summer 2024.

Hilton comes from a family of painters. His grandparents were the acclaimed St Ives artists Rose and Roger Hilton.

Jack’s work: jackhilton.co.uk

Jack’s Instagram: @jackhilton_art