Announcing Our Emerging Artists Programme 23/24

We are excited to announce the artists selected to be part of the 2023-2024 Emerging Artists Programme, designed for early-career artists in the first 10 years of their development.   

The successful artists will exhibit their work at Orleans House Gallery from September 2023 until June 2024, transforming it into a vibrant space. We are looking forward to working with Josie Rae Turnbull, Martina O’Shea, Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil and Saroj Patel, and continuing to support artists at exciting points in their careers.   

Josie Rae Turnbull

Josie Rae Turnbull is an interdisciplinary Artist and Art Facilitator. Her work spans across textiles, sculpture, printmaking and lens-based media. She completed her MA in Fine Art and Science at Central Saint Martins in 2022, following living in Ho Chi Minh City. Josie was born, grew up, and currently resides in the London Borough of Hackney.   

From Josie: 

“My practice dissects the chaotic systems that affect various ecosystems. Connecting forms which have emerged through natural history, the excesses of human taste, throwaway culture and industrial processes, I explore absurd and uncanny paradoxes within the natural and the artificial.” 

Saline Shock! will be on from 29 September to 27 November. For more information, click here.

Martina O’Shea and Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil 

Martina O’Shea is an Irish multi-disciplinary artist working in London. She has recently graduated with distinction from the MA Fine Art at City and Guilds Art School. O’Shea works with installation, sound, performance, poetry and sculpture.   

From Martina: 

“My practice traces its beginnings to childhood days walking the winding bóithríns of Cahersiveen in Kerry, with saltwater steps and a waxing mind. I now walk the London docklands by the Thames; a generous generator of materials for work. From here I explore the contemporary London cityscape of digitised information overload. Glitches and dreams, and the desire to identify the unexplored potential of an object, sound, or image fuel my work. As such the practice is constantly evolving, unfixed and poetic, but always underpinned by entropy.”

An Irish artist, writer, and filmmaker working between Dublin, London and the less explored regions of cosmic experience, Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil can also be found working under the name Loitering Theatre.   

From Caroline: 

“Mine is an esoteric art practice where video, text, mixed message, false flags, meme magic, artificial intellect, viral interference and future archaeologies of time are alchemically melded together – in order to disrupt the technologies and belief systems of consensus reality. No job too small. Idiom assured. Call us.” 

Saroj Patel

Saroj Patel is an artist based in Oxford. Her practice explores the contrasting, and sometimes conflicting, identities of a British Indian women. Drawing on the ritualistic practices and cultural traditions that have long influenced her, her sculptures are a celebration of Indian culture and community. They are also a way to address her own relationship with her upbringing.   

From Saroj: 

“Growing up in the UK, surrounded by a large Indian community, I have always been drawn to the aesthetics and ritualistic elements of traditional ceremonies. However, I have also felt a tussle between two conflicting ways of life, finding myself struggling to meet all expectations. As a woman, I experienced the pressure of trying to embody two starkly different gender expectations. In my practice I attempt to find an empowered space to connect with these visceral aspects of my heritage and explore the joys and challenges of growing up as a woman between cultures. 

My sculptures present imagined stories that expand on ritualistic practices, myths, Indian astrology, migration, race, identity and gender. I question rigid ideas of ethnic identity through a fluid and open-minded exploration of my own experience and others”