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Ben Cain

Works and lives in London

Ben Cain is a London and Zagreb based artist, whose multidisciplinary practice focuses on the effect of new conditions of work upon social and material interrelations, and on how the collapsing spaces of work and leisure affect our health, love, and care, both for ourselves and other people and things. His work is concerned with the work that objects do, and the work that viewers do. He combines primary sensory experiences of spaces and objects with language-based and immaterial encounters which involve viewers in the construction of images, spaces and objects. Overlapping crafted objects with industrial manufacture, and the tool or machine with the art object, the work is characterised by use-value and uselessness. The objects stand both as artefacts and exercises, records of and catalysts for production, in turn they are both active and inert. The work that objects and viewers (understood as interchangeable roles) do is a recurring theme, and a love/hate relationship with ‘Participation’ continues to be at the core of Ben’s practice. This is reflected in his two multiple editions for Assembly Line, ‘Can We Have Your Input Please’, and ‘Down Tools Corn Broom’.

Ben has exhibited extensively internationally, including Hordaland Art Centre Bergen, Wiels Brussels, MSU Zagreb, Tate Modern, South London Gallery, London’s National Portrait Gallery, MSU Belgrade, Brukenthal Museum Sibiu, Busan Biennial, and Manifesta amongst others.

Cedric Christie

Christie is a London-based artist who trained originally as a welder. His current studio, housed within a commercial metal fabrication factory, is located in the East London suburb of Dagenham – historically the home of the Ford Motor Factory.

Christie uses found industrial materials such as phenolic resin snooker balls, scaffolding pipes, coupler clamps, stainless steel channel, steel U-channel and cellulose automotive paint to make sculptures that mirror daily life while simultaneously exploring the boundaries of modernism and minimalism.

Christie’s work can be found in significant institutional and corporate collections including Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Canada; Derwent London, UK; Brown Rudnick, Boston/London; BUPA, London; and Groucho Club, London. Recent commissions include substantial sculptures in contemporary architectural settings at 4o Strand, London and The Peak, Victoria, London. Cedric Christie is the 2023 winner of the ING Discerning Eye Prize for Sculpture at the Mall Galleries, London.

Kate Street

Lives and works in Southsea, England.

Her work allows for the vestige of artefacts and related imagery to lead to the formation of new imagery and objects. Drawing upon figuration, landscape and cultivation, her work manifests itself through collage and sculpture. Small scale details from the pages become monstrous through enlargement and her Frankenstein approach to collaging and assemblage. This coupled with industrial remnants, such as hooks, clamps, reels and latex create familiar, yet uneasy, objects. Commodification of the female body is explored through a combination of image and objects. Often layered, punctured, stitched and assembled to emphasise surface and tactility, the work aims to elicit a physical reaction from the viewer.

Street’s work has been exhibited in shows across the UK and internationally, including the Torrance Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Rome, Thameside Studios, and is currently part of ‘The Horror Show’ at Somerset House, London. Her work is held in various private collections across Europe and the USA. Street is currently a senior lecturer at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.

Rose Eken

Eken methodically replicates the multifarious detritus of everyday life, often arranging it into taxonomic grids of narrative display. Her arrangements and sheer amount of production assume an anthropological quality, documenting and preserving the relics of a culture and celebrating a history in process. While Eken produces embroideries, drawings, and sometimes even videos, she favours clay for its versatility and clumsy form, as shaping and firing warp the object along the way, resulting in unforeseen and unpredictable imperfections.

Born in Denmark, Rose graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2003. She has received critical appraise in US for her solo exhibition ‘Remain In The Light’ at The Hole gallery in New York as well as her more recent solo show ‘Tableau’ at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, which was acquired and displayed at Aros Museum of Modern Art in Aarhus, Denmark. Recent work includes ‘Aftermath’ at Horsens Art Museum, Denmark.

Naomi Escott

Naomi Escott is the winner of Assembly Line’s Open Call competition for BA students at UCA Farnham held alongside the exhibition ‘Multiple Universe’ in the university galleries in 2023. She is a mature student and mother of 4. 

Escott finally realised her dream of attending art college in 2020 and is passionate about advocating for mothers to have access to both education and guilt-free aspirations, within the creative industries. 

Of her practice Escott says, ’Exploring the threads and traces of connection and how these lines are bound in the everyday detritus that surrounds us, my practice is a considered response to this concept. As an inter-disciplinary artist, with an interest in narrative, story and connection, I create work that is diverse and expansive in scope, across differing mediums.’