Location: Unit 3 Projects, ASC Studios, Unit 3, Empson Street, E3 3LT

Lizzie Hughes and Faza Merajdin met as students at The Slade School of Fine Art in the mid 90’s. In 2022 after a chance encounter, they began sharing a studio in Bromely by Bow. This exhibition is a culmination of the first year of creating work independently in the same space.

Lizzie Hughes is showing a series of wall-based sculptures made in part from precious metal. The work stems from a residency she undertook in Hill End, a former gold mining town in New South Wales. The sculptures include a net made from golden thread, fragile frameworks supporting nothing more than voids and structures that could suggest archaic tools or oversized jewellery.

Over the course of the residency long walks exploring absences became part of the everyday. Although the gold of Hill End is no longer found in abundance, it remains alluring through absence. The frequent and somewhat treacherous holes found in the landscape, that feed into the sculpture, are charged voids hinting at the riches that were once there and the spoils left behind.

For over twenty years Faza Merajdin has steadfastly committed to the investigation of light. Faza uses patterns derived from sacred geometry as the means to hold light. Her paintings, informed by the drag and blur of screen printing processes serve as planes of distortion and sites of vibration.

Faza’s paintings juxtapose the active play of peripheral light and shade in everyday experience with the meditative stillness of the jaali in the Muslim mystical tradition. The fleeting glance, the fragile screen with its voids and disappearances, and intense light, are explored as sites of blindness, revelation, and inquiry.