To The Studio

Steven Gee is a London-based artist, curator, and founding Director of Piccalilli. In 2013 he graduated with a BA from the University of East London and in 2015, an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art.

In 2017 Steven subsequently co-founded the curatorial collective IKO (It’s Kind Of hard to explain) alongside Corey Bartle-Sanderson and Oliver Durcan, curating exhibition across London, Margate and Hastings. Collaborating with and commissioning early career artists and writers in the UK, they were interested in viewership and challenging how artworks and exhibitions can be engaged with through fabricated specific framing devices (literal and conceptual) to house the artworks. Their projects rejected the showroom model of presenting pre-made artwork in white rooms, working closely with project participants to collaborate and build projects in line with a collective goal.

In 2022, Steven co-founded and is current Director of Piccalilli. An artist-led initiative and gallery, supporting early career and under-represented artists by providing them with a supportive framework to develop their practices with ambition and experimentation at the fore. Through cultivating a supportive environment and concept collaboration, piccalilli aims to bridge a dialogue between artists, audiences, community and place.

Now based in South Bermondsey, Piccalilli is a permanent space based in the Penarth Centre. Following an ethos where the space and programme are centred around the engagement of commissioned artworks, within a specific environment which acknowledges the architecture rather than ignore. Invited artists are supported to research, develop and realise projects over a dedicated period of time - a space for rumination and fermentation. 

As an artist, Gee’s practice navigates the everyday and the absurd — he works across mixed media, sculpture, installation, painting, and recently bespoke jewellery, often incorporating unconventional materials like mayonnaise, teeth, energy drinks and everyday ephemera. His solo exhibitions — such as Sandwiched, Tasteful Thickness, and Every Time You Lick a Stamp, You’re Consuming 1/10th of a Calorie — reveal a playful yet probing engagement with consumer culture, digestion, materiality, and texture.

Rhys Coren was born in Plymouth (UK) in 1983, and completed a Foundation at Plymouth College of Art and Design (2001-2002), followed by a BA (Hons) at UWE, Bristol (2002-2006), then the Royal Academy (2013-2016)

Rhys has a studio practice that consists of painting and animation, supplemented with sound and writing and collage. Hes work with Cristea Roberts Gallery in London and makes furniture in collaboration with Peter Noyce.

Rhys has also just recently completed a residency in Kentish Town at The Fores Project, which is where our conversation took place.

Rhys recently had a solo exhibition in New York at Foreign & Domestic gallery, consisting of 9 new paintings created using marquetry. Alongside that, F&D published a book of writing - the compilation of 10 years worth of sketchbook annotations.

Rhys is currently working on two concurrent public works; one a commission through Hospital Rooms for a children’s psychiatric hospital in Birmingham that involves workshops and contributions from the young patients, the other a 60metre-long marble and granite floor for a public walkway next to Liverpool Street station, managed by Contemporary Art Society. 

Recent notable achievements include curating FORMES, a group exhibition in Paris last year, the completion of a 9metre long public work behind Bond Street Crossrail station in 2022, and Love Motion, a courtyard commission for the Royal Academy in 2018. 

Kate Burling (b.1998, Reading) lives and works in South East London. Her iridescent finger-paintings examine a corporeal experience of exponential change. Marking the inside and outside of the skin as initial zones of softness and hardness respectively, Burling observes a gradual obscuring of boundaries as the sponge-like body ages and absorbs. Her paintings are amalgamations of rolling mass with repeated motifs, scattered like confetti. They are places of rumination, where the artist attempts to catch elusive ideas and map them in soft, organic space. Since completing her BA in Fine Art at Camberwell College in 2022, Burling has presented two solo shows with Nosbaum Reding (Brussels) and Ronchini Gallery (London), as well as taking part in a number of group exhibitions at Christie’s, Guts Gallery, Soup Gallery and Milan Art Fair, and residencies at Goodeye Projects, Pictorum Gallery (both London) and Fondazione Sandro Moretti (Umbria). 

Since November 2024, Kate Burling has been a participant at the Conditions Studio Programme in Croydon. She is currently working towards a breadth of projects within the programme and externally, including a solo show with Solito Gallery, Naples in October 2025.

Grant was born in 1982 in Worthing, and is a London based artist who completed a MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2012. 

In 2019 Grant was International Randall Chair at Alfred University, New York, and in 2016 was Fellow in Contemporary Art with The British School at Rome.

In 2007 he was a Prizewinner in John Moores 25, and is currently a mentor on The Turps Banana painting program and founding member of audio/visual recording project in a skull. 

Hannah Bays (b. 1982) is a London based painter who graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in London, 2015.

Through painting, Hannah Bays explores psychological terrain associated with the sacred, the profane and the transformational. Familiar objects are used symbolically to convey existential meaning, whilst gesturing towards broader philosophical, social, and global concerns. These objects within the paintings echo the ritualistic potency of ceremonial vessels that hold our deepest desires, memories, and fears. 

Drawing upon mythological and folkloric references, Bays often anthropomorphises animals and everyday objects, playing with scale to shuffle hierarchical relations. Colour is employed emotively, with line and form expressive of a bold desire - the sensual properties of paint a vehicle for meaning. 

Recent exhibitions include: I’m Not Afraid of Ghosts, Palazzo Tiepolo Passi in Venice, Italy, Confessions, which was a solo exhibition at Jack’s House, London, and ABG Emerging, Alice Black Gallery, London which were all in 2024 as well as Muscle Beach, two-person exhibition with Ana Kazaroff, Kupfer Project, London in 2021 

Residencies include the Malevich Residency, Lake Como, 2021; Dover Arts Club Drawing Room Residency, 2020; Eton College Artist in Residence, 2018 and RRU Artist in Residence, Liverpool, also in 2018.

Mary is based in London and graduated from the Royal Drawing School in 2018 and Goldsmiths College London’s BA in Fine Art and contemporary critical studies in 2010.

Her works have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Moskowitz Bayse (Los Angeles) and Lychee One (London), and have recently been included in group exhibitions at The British Museum, White Cube, Union Pacific, and Huxley-Parlour (London), Hweg (Penzance), F2T Gallery (Milan), Harkawik (New York), and Clint Roenisch (Toronto), among others. 

I visited Mary a few days after her most recent show ‘Careful not to fill an Emptiness’ opened at Moskowitz Bayse in London, which is where our conversation takes place. So as our conversation predominantly references the work within it, a fitting introduction to the work in the show, and to lead into our conversation as a whole would be to read an excerpt from her press release.

The experience of the body can’t be measured in feet or by the length of its limbs. But as a changing and curious instrument, the body knows space as something foreclosing – an abrupt cul-de-sac in a dream – and sometimes so blown open it can feel like sensory deprivation, extending past any textured surface or distance in time.

The artworks in Careful not to fill an Emptiness move into spaces which have held – and been held by – the body. Here, these spaces are loosely described by paint or in dry materials on paper. They are shared and solitary at once: a group of figures stand together with their heads bowed, someone holds out a flower to another who is angled away and appears not to see them but is still supported by bodies on either side. 

When an object or body is depicted, a surrounding space forms by default. Around the bodies of natural elements, Mary Herbert paints a kind of default landscape that doesn’t need to be clearly defined to be occupied. It is a not-quite place that exists despite the body’s vulnerability, despite the human dualisms of language. 

Anna Ilsley is based in Suffolk and graduated from Royal Drawing School in 2010 and University of Brighton’s BA in Fine Art Painting in 2006. 

Anna is inspired by mythologies and cultural references from across eras and cultures, be that a saucy detail from a Medieval manuscript; mythical representations of feminine power, the erotic frescoes of ancient Pompeii or the latest series of Love Island.

Her paintings and drawings address the physical and emotional impact of motherhood and her intensely strong urge to kick back against the cultural and political forces that shape women’s relationships with their own bodies. Her work often draws on the mess, joy and viscerality of her own experiences. Using the physical constraints of the canvas itself as a structure that both restricts and supports the figures it contains, the characters she depicts are in turn resplendently fleshy, embracing, smothering, saucy, monstrous.

Whenever possible Jennifer Caroline Campbell obsessively cultivates a shifting bag of mixed fragments, recombining, contaminating and navigating without a map. Textures and stories build up like minerals. The crystal bundles snowball and scatter into multicoloured slices, oscillating shiftily between slathered picture and lumpy thing. 

Through reckless and rhythmic process new thoughts are shaped and multiple characters are inhabited. They exchange gossip stumblingly while glancing and clutching at the surrounding terrain. This process is both childish play and serious questioning. It is honed in order to expose unseen power cloggings, weave silken nets, nourish unsolved shadows and side-step claustrophobic categorisations.

Ross Taylor was born in 1982 in Harrow, London, where he continues to live and work. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Painting, he was awarded the Abbey Scholarship at the British School at Rome and was artist in residence at the Edward James Foundation. 

Taylor’s work is concerned with an emergent space; a swilling and churning dual sphere of production and consumption where all that enters is incessantly gnawed, singed and regurgitated. He sees the studio as a restless stomach-cave which rages, and correspondingly pacifies. A place wherein each stain, drip, blob, and smear, can appear to congeal, much like grammar. And, through the contemplation of this surface, each idea, word or moment running through his head has space to intensify, making it conceivable to take control of chaotic ideas, order the subconscious and attempt to model thoughts that are somewhat impossible. 

Luke Burton (b.1983, London) lives and works in London. He studied at Chelsea College of Art for a BA in Painting and the Royal College of Art for an MA in Sculpture. 

He works across media including painting, vitreous enamel, collage and installation. He has an ongoing interest in the relation of ambivalence to aesthetics and politics, especially as to how it may pertain to the decorative. He is also interested in the sticky concept of style and its relationship to ideas around language in painting.

You can get in touch with us with opinions and suggestions at:

Email - [email protected]

Instagram - instagram.com/tothestudio

This podcast features an edited version of the song "RSPN" by Blank & Kytt, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blank__Kytt/Heavy_Crazy_Serious/Blank__Kytt_-_Heavy_Crazy_Serious_-_08_RSPN

Phil studied at the Royal College of Art from 1990 to 1992 and is also currently a director at Turps Banana.

John Yau’s 2024 Hyperallergic review of Phil’s NY Miles McEnery show states:

"Something about his visual preoccupations speaks to the viewer’s mind and eye—the connections and ruptures between physical and visual sensations—working in tandem with our capacity to daydream and reflect upon the bond between the ephemeral and the permanent. His paintings embody the joy of looking and the space of self-reflection that such elation might bring. His fluid approach is unrivaled, and his layered accumulations of imagery evoke the interplay between creation and waste, flights of imagination, and an ever-present awareness of mortality."

You can get in touch with us with opinions and suggestions at:

Email - [email protected]

Instagram - instagram.com/tothestudio

This podcast features an edited version of the song "RSPN" by Blank & Kytt, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blank__Kytt/Heavy_Crazy_Serious/Blank__Kytt_-_Heavy_Crazy_Serious_-_08_RSPN