Five By Five
Incubator is pleased to present "Five by Five”, a group exhibition showcasing the work of five established artists working in the UK, each paired with an emerging artist selected by them.
The pairings include Maggi Hambling & Jelly Green, Mona Hatoum & Tamara Al-Mashouk, Georgie Hopton & Alice McCabe, Abigail Lane & Rebecca Hancock and Ingrid Pollard & Matthew Arthur Williams. Reflecting the ethos of Incubator’s solo show programme, these ten artists explore a diverse range of themes through painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation. The kinetic energy that emerges from these pairings ignites by way of their distinctness. If understood as a delicate duet, the liminal space between each artist belies an unspoken dialogue that reveals the harmonious fusion of contrasting perspectives and methodologies.
Mona Hatoum and Tamara Al-Mashouk’s installations share a poetic exploration of political discourse and global narratives, while Abigail Lane and Rebecca Hancock orchestrate a mesmerising conversation between form and movement. Maggi Hambling and Jelly Green’s paintings explore the energetic dichotomy of water and fire, while Georgie Hopton and Alice McCabe delve into the regenerative qualities of nature. Ingrid Pollard's cyanotype photography converges with Matthew Arthur Williams' depiction of human forms and landscape, creating a poignant connection between past and present, flesh and earth.
In this exhibition, the artists' works transcend individual narratives, creating a collective symphony. “Five by Five” becomes a testament to the power of intergenerational collaboration and mentorship, where a range of overlapping themes and materials among these pairings give rise to a rich and nuanced artistic tapestry that becomes representative of the broad landscape of contemporary art currently being made in the UK.
curated by Angelica Jopling
The Artists
Tamara Al-Mashouk
Tamara Al-Mashouk was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1988 and is a London-based Saudi-Palestinian artist and organiser. Through multi-channel video, performance and architectural installation, her work examines the displacement of people both on an intimate and global scale, and negotiates the relationship between home, identity, trauma, memory and collective histories. As a socially engaged practitioner, Al-Mashouk investigates the fracture as a site of possibility and expands epigenetics beyond the body into place and matter.
Al-Mashouk has exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Yuan Museum, Beijing, Today Is Our Tomorrow festival, Helsinki, Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana. In her curatorial capacity, centering topics of anti-racism, decolonisation and social justice, she has produced a short film and organised cultural programs, gatherings, and dialogues in a range of institutional and independent contexts. From 2018 – 2019, Al-Mashouk was a Research Fellow at the the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, Boston, and in 2019, she received a travelling fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SFMA), Tufts University, Boston. In 2021 she received the Stevens Fellowship from Wellesley College from whom she holds a BA in architecture, she has an MFA from SFMA.
Jelly Green
Jelly Green was born in Ipswich, Suffolk in 1992 and is a contemporary British-New Zealand painter who divides her time between her studio in Suffolk and London. She has been mentored by artist Maggi Hambling since she was 16 years old.
Her work is defined by her passion for the natural world. Having spent extended periods immersed in the global web of jungles and rainforests from Brazil to Borneo and Sri Lanka to New Zealand, Jelly’s large-scale works revel in the magnificent primordial canopies, while unflinchingly bearing witness to the brutal decapitation and destruction of the arboreal world. Green’s most recent work is focussed on the wildfires that threaten many of the earth's forests. Her paintings capture the savage elemental forces that are unleashed when a fire takes hold.
Selected recent exhibitions include BURN, Noho Studios, London (2022), The English Garden, Somerleyton Hall (2019), Art for Cure, Bankside Gallery, London (2019), DEVOUR, Gallery@oxo, London (2019).
Maggi Hambling
Maggi Hambling was born Sudbury, Suffolk in 1945 and is a contemporary British painter and sculptor. Hambling studied first at Cedric Morris’ and Arthur Lett-Haines’ East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, before going to the Ipswich (1962-64), Camberwell (1964-67) and Slade (1967-69) Schools of Art. In 1980, she was invited to be the first artist in residence at the National Gallery, London.
Hambling’s work has been the subject of many solo museum exhibitions since 1980, including two solo exhibitions at The National Gallery, London, in 1981 and 2014; solo exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in 1983 and 2009. Other significant museum exhibitions include The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA (1981), the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (1997), The Lowry, Salford (2009), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2009), The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2010), Winchester Cathedral (2013), The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (2013), Somerset House (2015), The British Museum (2016) Hastings Contemporary (2018), CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2019) Gainsborough’s House (2023), and Museo Ettore Fico, Turin (2023). Hambling’s work is held in many important private and public collections including Tate, National Portrait Gallery, British Museum, CAFA, Beijing, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public sculpture includes A conversation with Oscar Wilde, London, Scallop (for Benjamin Britten), Aldeburgh beach, The Brixton Heron, London, and A sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft, London.
Rebecca Hancock
Rebecca Hancock was born in Brighton in 1998 and currently lives and works in London. Her practice invites us to explore the nuances of domesticity. She orchestrates conversations among objects, capturing them in isolated, momentary observations of space with recurring motifs of the table and chair. Through a nuanced interplay of fragmented thoughts and relationships, she delves into the complex connotations that arise when playing with distance, perspective, and distortion.
Repetition is a central theme in Rebeccas work, evident through meticulous mark-making, the recurrence of objects, carefully composed visual elements, and the deliberate use of repetitive sounds. The artist's exploration extends into stillness that compels viewers to confront absence, as objects become vessels for conflicting emotions —desire versus frustration, comfort in conflict. The resulting discourse creates an atmosphere of anticipation and longing, revealing the domestic space as a profound site for reflection.
Selected recent exhibitions include 262 Chairs, Coachwerks Gallery, Brighton (2023), Day Fest, Brzn arms, Brighton (2022) Eastbourne Open, Volt Gallery, Eastbourne (2022) and Transcend, Gallery 3, Margate (2021).
Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and has lived and worked in London since 1975. She studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London (1975-1979) and Slade School of Fine Art, London (1979-1981).
Hatoum has worked in a diverse range of media, including performance, video, photography, sculpture, installation and works on paper. Her work deals with issues of displacement, marginalisation, exclusion and systems of social and political control.
Recent solo exhibitions include a major survey organised by Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015) that toured to Tate Modern, London and KIASMA, Helsinki (2016) and a large US survey initiated by the Menil Collection, Houston (2017) that travelled to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis (2018). In September 2022, Hatoum had three solo exhibitions that took place simultaneously in Berlin: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Georg Kolbe Museum and KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art.
Hatoum has also participated in international group exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Istanbul Biennial (1995 and 2011), Documenta, Kassel (2002 and 2017), Biennale of Sydney (2006), Sharjah Biennial (2007 and 2023) and Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013).
Georgie Hopton
Georgie Hopton was born in North Yorkshire in 1967. Hopton has lived and worked in London since graduating from St. Martins in 1989. Always working with and across varied media, Hopton has worked primarily in collage and printmaking, both of which are translated into textiles at intervals, forming an evolving collection of fabrics, wallpapers and rugs.
Hopton cites nature as supplying inspiration, materials, tools and teaching and many long summers, until recently, were spent at her upstate New York farm where she had the luxury of direct experiment and experience, submerged in it. Moving between figuration, abstraction and pattern, Hopton believes all are necessary to attempt to both meet and reflect her ideas and, like her heroes of Wiener Werkstatte and the Arts and Crafts movement, her heart lies in creativity with no boundaries, but the occasional border or curtain are sometimes necessary to frame the view.
Recent exhibitions include Royal Academy Summer Show 2023 and Chance Encounters, Lyndsey Ingram 2023. Hopton’s work is housed in several permanent collections including the Arts Council collection and the Tate Gallery. Public commissions can be seen at the Home Office and Royal London Hospital.
Abigail Lane
Abigail Lane was born in Cornwall in 1967. Lane studied fine arts at Goldsmiths College, London, where she played an important role in the exhibition ‘Freeze’, organised in 1988 by Damien Hirst and considered the marking of the beginning of the Young British Artists movement, of which Lane is seen as a key figure. Over the past 30 years, she has exhibited across the UK, Europe and the US including at the ICA (1989, 1995, 2011), Whitechapel Gallery (2003), Serpentine Gallery (1994, 1995, 2005), Hayward Gallery (1997, 2005), Pompidou Centre (1997), the Lyon Biennale (1997), the Château de Rochechouart (2019), the Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1994), Portikus, Frankfurt (1994), the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, (1996, 2001), the CAN in Neuchâtel (2000), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1995), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (1999). Her most recent exhibition was at The Art Station, Suffolk (2023), where she has lived and worked since 2007.
Alice McCabe
Alice McCabe was born in the UK in 1984 and is a mixed media artist, creating floral installations, paintings, performances and art education sessions using flowers and found materials of an ephemeral nature. Underpinning her work is a love of misunderstanding and humour, gleaned from a keen interest in Dada. An optimistic nihilist her work is designed to help the viewer reconstrue – and find space for – colourful protest within everyday life and create opportunities for re-interpreting the social possibilities of horticulture.
From 2022–2023 she studied on the Turps Banana Studio Programme bringing painting to the fore of her practice. Group exhibitions and performances in 2023 include ‘Ripe Bananas’ Turps Leavers Show, ‘Meshworks’ at Creekside Open Centre as part of Deptford X with Amy Cutler, ‘Recreational Grounds VII’ at Wendover House and ‘Side Step’ at Set Ealing.
Others significant collaborations include performing as part of ‘The There-There School of English Dada’ at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich from 2011–2016, setting up the Permaculture reading group with Amy McDonnell during the first lockdown 2020 and The Cultivar Residency, sponsored by The Museum of the Flat Earth, Fogo Island project ‘Adventitious Routes and Rhizomes’ exploring political displacement with Amy Ash in 2019.
Ingrid Pollard
Dr Ingrid Pollard MBE was born in 1953 and is a mixed-media artist and researcher using digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, whilst also incorporating printmaking, image-text and artist books, installation, video and audio.
Ingrid Pollard is presently Millard Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, UCL. Her recent exhibition, Carbon Slowly Turning at MK Gallery & Turner Contemporary Margate, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022. She will be taking part in exhibitions at Tate Britain, Dundee Contemporary Art and Art Institute of Chicago in 2024.
Matthew Arthur Williams
Matthew Arthur Williams was born in London in 1989 and is a Glasgow-based artist, photographer and DJ. He completed his BA in Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2012. Selected recent exhibitions and projects include: Gathering (2023), Dundee Contemporary Arts (2022—23), Jupiter Artland (2021), Edinburgh Art Festival (2023). Matthew has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Stills, Edinburgh, opening in early 2024.