NPA Lab | 2021
COPped Out
Reka Rit Laklia
Reka Ritt Laklia is a Hungarian multidisciplinary visual artist based in London. Her primary media are painting, installation, and VR short film. Through these modes she is exploring ideas from modern consciousness research, transpersonal psychology, Eastern spiritual practices, mystical shamanic traditions, and folklore.
Sara Reeve
Sara Reeve is a Brighton-based painter who predominantly focuses on
portraiture. Her work is led by strong colour, shape, and impact. She is particularly drawn to representing women in her paintings. She is interested in the tension between the subject and the viewer and is often attracted to a confrontational gaze.
Teresa Zerafa Byrne
Teresa Zerafa Byrne is a British/Maltese mixed-media artist based in West London. Her practice explores the nature of memory and its vulnerabilities in the context of personal histories, family, and relationships. She looks at which details of our experiences are significant and are selected to be committed to memory for later recall.
KV Duong
KV Duong is a London-based artist with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, and performance. In his work he explores themes of migration and cultural assimilation, through a re-examination of his parents’ and his own experiences. War trauma and integration correlate with the artist’s coming out as a gay Asian man.
Sheila MacNeill
Sheila MacNeill is a Glasgow based artist working in a range of paint-based mediums. Through her practice she explores and shares her reactions to the boundaries between the natural environment and human imposed structures. She works in mixed media creating collages from the bi-products of everyday life.
Reka Ritt Laklia
‘Conference of One Person’ (2021)
Our collaborative project, “COPped Out” emerged from our chosen theme of the global climate crisis. It was contextualised through the COP26 conference in November 2021.
Sara Reeve
‘Hope Not Fear’ (2021)
The collaboration took the form of ongoing, and continuously developing, conversations developed through a series of supportive online meetings that facilitated knowledge exchange and critique of practice between the five artists in the group: Reka Ritt Laklia, Sara Reeve, Teresa Zerafa Byrne, KV Duong and Sheila MacNeill.
Teresa Zerafa Byrne
‘Close Of Play’ (2021)
The project was informed partly by images and sounds from the COP26 conference, sourced (shared by local artist and team member, Sheila MacNeill). Each artist created a landscape format work (digital or physical) in their own style and perspective. Through this process each artist shared the personal narratives that connected them to the overarching theme. These narratives were expanded through ongoing group reactions and feedback.
KV Duong
‘School Assembly’ (2021)
Images of the resulting artworks have been assembled into short videos. Each video combines soundscapes recorded during COP26 (e.g. sound of helicopters, music, singing, drumming) along with a short narrative from each artist about the thoughts, motivations and feelings that led their creative processes.
Sheila MacNeill
‘Feeling Little’ (2021)
As our theme is vast and touches on the most basic survival instincts of everyone on the planet, the artworks reflect personal and emotional responses. These can be seen as expressions of the various coping mechanisms the artists utilised to find balance between despair over the global climate crisis, and the hope that manifested itself through the supportive aspect of the collaborative process, and the wider, community driven climate justice movement.