Graduate Residencies – Paige Warrington & Oreoluwa Ahmeed

Back Lane West were pleased to host Paige Warrington & Oreoluwa Ahmeed during July, as the recipients of the 2022 Falmouth School of Art Graduate Residency.

Biography

Paige Warrington
Paige is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose practice seeks to explore a portrait of her life through the art of walking, unearthing the everyday by discovery of found objects. 
Paige creates large scale ambiguous textile paintings and sculptural objects; her work holds crucial elements surrounding surface layer and materiality. The paintings are unprimed, raw and handmade with machine stitch, fabric overlays, acrylic paint, watercolour and chalks. Paige’s work complicates the viewers automatic assumption of how paintings are made and to be viewed, with hung installations, transparent materials. Her aim is to showcase the conjoining of frame and canvas together rather than as separates, alongside creating a dynamic conversation between sculpture and painting. The paintings are also considered sculptural pieces, due to the dynamism and encouraged invitation to move around the work as 3D forms. Paige’s style is wonky and awkward, as her depiction of the found objects from road to the canvas become entirely a migration from familiarity to obscurity, skewed of their natural resemblance into new still life scenes. Paige questions the hyperreality of daily experiences and mundanity, by distorting our reality of the uncanny in a playful and vibrant manner.

Oreoluwa Ahmeed
Oreoluwa is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily between painting, moving image and printmaking, all underlined through experimental and poetry. Her work is conceptual and experimental in nature, in both process and final realisations. Oreoluwa’s work, overall, critically examines ‘absurdity’, contemplating the nonsensical nature of existing within such an irrational and paradoxical universe. Exploring the idea of appreciation despite chaos and uncertainty, she takes a diaristic approach to making, depicting personal reflections on her own journey of living and making the most of ‘the little things’; aiming to provoke audiences to confront and embrace reality in spite of subconscious questioning. Through her work, she playfully confront rationality and question convention in order to remove constraints on existence that are within her power to manipulate.
“Creating freedom for the self on the most personal level is the challenge I have been thinking about most recently in my work. Investigating my own life, sense of place, both internally and physically, presenting the notes and contemplations of this journey through my visual art practice, I hope to encourage new mindsets and streams of thought for myself as well as my audience, bringing these large existential questions into something more mundane and accessible”. Oreoluwa Ahmeed