Communion: Assembly 2024

Assembly is an annual exhibition programme of newly commissioned work by emerging artists based in the Black Country, held in partnership with The New Art Gallery Walsall since 2024. The opportunity platforms emerging artists from across the region, and makes space for them to push their practice and experiment with making new work. Participants receive development support and mentoring from both organisations, a commission fee to create new work as well as having access to a production budget.

In our first year of working in partnership on this project, we worked with artists Leah Hickey, Jamal Lloyd Davis and Tomilola Olumide, supporting their creative and professional development as well as commissioning new work.

Communion

Exhibition dates: 8 August - 17 November 2024

Preview: Thursday 7 August 2024, 6-8pm

In Conversation: Saturday, 9 November, 2-3.30pm

Press: this is tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine

The theme of Communion, speaks to threads through the artists’ work that relate to being in communion with oneself and others, sharing intimate space and the re-contextualisation of faith. The artists share an interest in text and language as an essential component of their work and these can be found woven throughout the exhibition.

For Communion, Leah Hickey collaborated with local Tipton based stonemason Ryan Jackson to develop new work as part of her ongoing series ‘Offering’. Seeking meaning in grief, Leah was drawn to alleged family lineage; she had been told she comes from a ‘line of Druids’ a sect that existed throughout ancient England, Ireland and Northern Europe who, amongst other things, conducted ritual sacrifices and made offerings to God in bodies of water. Bodies of water, like rivers and lakes, were regarded as a passage to the heavens, and items like precious metals and gemstones were deposited as offerings. Central to the installation is a new body of work, a triptych entitled Offering (2024, hand-cut engraving on sandstone), which contains lines from a free-verse Romantic poem the artist wrote the year of her father’s death. This triptych represents three stepping stones, which lead a path to Heaven.

Threads that inform Jamal Lloyd Davis’ new works titled ‘black-and-blue’ include the language used around mental health - “feeling blue” - the origins of the genre of Blues music, the role of religion within historical trauma, systemic inequalities and cultural stigmas. While Jamal’s surroundings and other people have previously been the subjects of his work, for this exhibition, Jamal chose to turn the camera upon himself for the first time, presenting a new series of self-portraits that intimately explore his own experiences with anxiety. The artist creates a contrast between the distanced, staged self-portrait and the series of cyanotypes, to explore the deep vulnerability of revealing oneself and of being in front of a camera. Submerged in blue, the cyanotype self-portraits envelop the artist’s image in a soft haze, indicating a tenderness and act of self-care.

The process of experimentation and play are important aspects of Tomilola Olumide’s practice, and the artist approaches her use of material equally playfully, having used the commission to explore new materials and ways of creating work. In Olumide’s new work, ‘Chronicles of Respite’, the artist explores the importance of rest and self-preservation. Acts of joy and play, and a call to remain present in life’s daily routines thread throughout the series, which spans across poetry, textiles and metal work. Tomilola chooses to rest in activity that is whimsical and joyous rather than in stillness. Through internal conversations between her younger and present selves she has engaged in spontaneous productions of work that focus on the act of making.