Jerwood Survey is a major biennial touring exhibition that presents new commissions by 10 early-career artists from across the UK, providing a distinctive snapshot of current artistic concerns and approaches in the visual arts. It spans a wide breadth of disciplines and takes a non-institutional approach to selection by inviting leading artists to nominate the most outstanding early-career artists making work today.

The artists selected for Jerwood Survey III are: Che Applewhaite, Aqsa Arif, MV Brown, Philippa Brown, Alliyah Enyo, Sam Keelan, Paul Nataraj, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Ebun Sodipo and Kandace Siobhan Walker. The artists’ works wrestle with complex subjects that are inextricable from the concerns of our time through the lens of photography, installation, sound, moving image and sculpture; addressing themes from colonialism, climate change and healing to gender, sexuality, folklore and spirituality.

Alliyah Enyo, Selkie Reflections, 2022, (sound installation). Image taken by Miriam Craddock.

Now in its third edition, the exhibition launches in London at Southwark Park Galleries, lead partner for Jerwood Survey III, on Friday 5 April 2024 with a press view from 11am – 1pm and an evening preview from 6pm – 8pm. Following London, the exhibition will tour to g39 in Cardiff 13 July – 7 September 2024 and Site Gallery in Sheffield 27 September 2024 – 26 January 2025. Jerwood Survey III will culminate at Collective in Edinburgh 28 February – 4 May 2025, marking the first time that the project has been presented in Scotland.

“Against the (current) oppressive environment, artists forever ground us, teach us and show us where joy, celebration and resistance can still be found. Using the spectrum of their practices and experiences, the artists in Jerwood Survey III speak generously not only to the intimacies of their lives, but to global histories and issues. The multiplicity of their voices, and their enduring empathy and advocacy for community, are vital” says Charlotte Baker, Deputy Director, Southwark Park Galleries

Aqsa Arif, Spicy Pink Tea, 2022. Film Still.

The artists and their Jerwood Survey III works:

London based Che Applewhaite is an artist, filmmaker and writer who facilitates critical engagement with ongoing histories borne of territory, ideology, and documentary. His work has been exhibited internationally at film festivals, museums, galleries, and sites of study, recently selected for the Aesthetica Film Festival 2023. Applewhaite will present a photographic paper sculpture for Jerwood Survey III which forms a fragmented narrative around an auto-fictional character. Images taken from his personal archive, express ideas of the diasporic home and queer familial connection in the context of colonialism. Applewhaite was nominated by Sin Wai Kin.

Aqsa Arif is an interdisciplinary artist working across film, installation and poetry in which she explores identity disruption, migration and the process of healing through archetypal narratives. As a Pakistani refugee to Scotland, now based in Glasgow, she experienced life with the split of two cultural identities, a polarity underpinning her work. Arif takes her dual heritage as a standpoint to explore two female archetypes in South Asian folktales — the heroine Marvi and the ghost-witch Churail — in a new moving-image installation. Arif was nominated by Alberta Whittle.

Rooted in performance, Glasgow based MV Brown’s practice uses the human body and new technologies to explore tensions across embodied subjectivity, the body as spectacle and socio-techno constructs of gender and sexuality. Drawing on cyberfeminist, glitch-feminist and transhumanist approaches; they investigate avatars, prototypes, ‘false-self’hoods and the fallacy of the ‘IRL’. For Jerwood Survey III, they have created a karaoke performance to camera installation generated through 3D body scans, AI and CGI software. Brown was nominated by Hanna Tuulikki.

Philippa Brown lives in Cardiff and is a multidisciplinary artist looking through portals and hovering between enlightenment, fantasy and bogus wisdom. She makes sculptural forms, installations and paintings as a means to explore the ambiguous, magical and sometimes fragile interconnectedness between histories, materials, beliefs and bodies of all kinds. Brown’s vibrantly painted architectural sculpture for Jerwood Survey III is bound with symbolic objects and images that reference individual and collective divination, spirituality and spaces of transformation. Brown was nominated by Davida Hewlett.

Glasgow artist Alliyah Enyo’s interdisciplinary practice gravitates towards embodied and meditative processes. She harnesses song, somatics and sculpture to create ‘sonorous myth’ installations and performances. The bedrock of her research investigates myths, folkloric tales or science fiction stories concerning queer and feminine ecological perspectives and histories. Enyo’s multi-layered sonic and ceramic performance installation for Jerwood Survey III takes influence from ancient Greek mythologies and Scottish folklore to echo a futuristic deep sea apocalypse. Enyo was nominated by Hanna Tuulikki.

Sam Keelan, based in London, uses his work to tell gay surreal narratives, primarily executed through photography, moving image and writing. Taking ideas around individualism, care and community from the collective consciousness, he creates queer doppelgängers of dominant middle class ideologies, often reinserted back into domestic spaces. Keelan’s work presents a silent durational film of a tender and surreal scene of two male figures — one human, one a human-sized hot water bottle — embracing and sleeping in simple, somewhat absurd, domesticity. Keelan was nominated by Lindsey Mendick.

Paul Nataraj is a sound artist, researcher and educator, from Blackburn, Lancashire. His research and sound art practice explores the South Asian diaspora, sound, memory and sonic materiality. Repetitions of 108: Counting almost nothing is an installation of nine modified vinyl record players and records that interrogates the complex relationship between colonialism, diaspora, spirituality and the navigation of mixed-race identity. Nine 9 is used as a fraction of 108, which has special significance across many religions, myth, cosmology and ritual. It is mobilised here to question tensions inherent in temporal and spatial movement of diverse epistemologies and spiritual discourses.. Nataraj was nominated by Nicola Singh.

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh is an artist, researcher and Gaeilgeoir from Derry, living and working sporadically with chronic illness and the legacy of post colonialism. His mixed media practice explores the complexities inherent in inherited memories, ecological decline, the embodiment of personal loss and lived experience. Through collaborations (often in informal economies), he explores how we might consider loss in relation to intergenerational trauma. These entanglements are explored in Ó Dochartaigh’s works for Jerwood Survey III through a series of sculptural healing tools in glass, ceramic and wood, and diagrams linking medical modifications of the body with local Irish history and lore. Ó Dochartaigh was nominated by Locky Morris.

Ebun Sodipo, Nasty Girl (The Sharpest Girl In Town), 2023 (video). Installation view at VO Curations, London.

Ebun Sodipo, based in London, makes multidisciplinary work for black trans people of the future. Guided by black feminist study, with a methodology of collage and fabulation, her work locates and produces real and imaginable narratives of black trans women’s presence, embodiment, and interiority across the past, present and future. An elegant, hybrid brass sculpture will be presented in Jerwood Survey III, which fuses scanned images of hands from several of her loved ones across the black trans women community. Sodipo was nominated by Sin Wai Kin and Evan Ifekoya.

Kandace Siobhan Walker is a writer and artist of Jamaican-Canadian, Saltwater Geechee and Welsh heritage, living in London. Her practice explores the intersections of personal history with wider social movements and systems. Dreams, displacement, belonging, care, community, spirituality and justice are recurring themes in her work. Walker’s domestic bedroom installation built of montaged footage and poetic spoken word reflects on medieval esoteric traditions, futurology, and Afro-Atlantic-Indigenous spiritualities in order to challenge Western discourses on the climate crisis. Walker was nominated by gentle/radical.

In May 2024 a limited edition publication will launch to accompany Jerwood Survey III, designed by Bristol-based designers and artists Conway and Young. The publication celebrates the vital connection between art and writing, and encourages new routes into the works by pairing each exhibiting artist with a UK-based writer. The invited writers are: Amrita Dhallu, Susan Finlay, Daisy Lafarge, Priya Jay, Christopher Kirubi, Debbie Meniru, Rianna Jade Parker, Megan Rudden, David Steans, and Salomé Voegelin.

Established in 2018, this third edition of Jerwood Survey introduces new partnerships and continues to build on Jerwood Arts’ and the partners’ specialist knowledge and experience of working with early-career artists across artforms. The selection of artists was made by a panel chaired by Lilli Geissendorfer, former Director at Jerwood Arts, including Charlotte Baker, Deputy Director, Southwark Park Galleries; Anthony Shapland, Creative Director, g39; Angelica Sule, former Programme Director, Site Gallery; Siobhan Carroll, former Head of Programme, Collective; and Jerwood Survey II artist Tako Taal. The project is being supported by Harriet Cooper, Project Director, Jerwood Survey III, who led previous editions in her former role at Jerwood Arts.