Coming this June to our Front Gallery, don’t miss Stuart Simler and Tahira Mandarino’s show, in which the duo’s portrait based enquiry explores ideas around vulnerability, familiarity and how a modern partnership might evolve within our everyday.

Stuart and Tahira are independent practicing artists, husband and wife and co-founders of Raw Ground Arts. 

Their work involves an everyday collaboration where the practicalities of running a business is shared and ideas are formed. The opportunity and decision to work creatively in a more intimate and vulnerable way for the first time brings their partnership together in this studio based enquiry. Working directly from one another, providing both roles of artist and sitter, they exchange a new way of exploring their practices and each other, scratching beneath the surface. 

The realised outcome is unknown and unplanned but it will seek to undo the usual pretext of what it means to progress, which is often measured in the production of a finished piece of work. When do we get the opportunity to just journey?

Their approach investigates the potential to reveal the raw mark. Finding a new language to describe each other, a visual dialogue made up of time spent looking at what is beyond the skin, sometimes discomfort, anger, tiredness, anxiety or youth, invention, joy and love.

The viewer is invited into the unfolding landscape.’