Private View: Wednesday, 7th May 2025, 6-8 pm
London (Wandsworth)
Are you sure / That we are awake? / It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream.
– from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, reality intertwines with illusion and the boundaries between the natural and supernatural blur. The latest group exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Wandsworth brings that same sense of transformation and duality to life, as three artists – Robin Kang, Julia Blume and Sato Sugamoto – invite us into fantastical realms where ancient wisdom, digital landscapes and evolving ecosystems merge. Through vivid colours, organic forms and sculptural investigations, their works challenge perceptions of reality and beckon us to explore alternate worlds and states of being.
Brooklyn-based artist Robin Kang’s vividly-coloured woven artworks explore the intersections of ancient cultural wisdom, ecological awareness, and technological innovation. Her compositions are created using a digitally operated Jacquard handloom – a contemporary evolution of the first binary-operated machine and a precursor to early computers. Rooted in global weaving traditions, her practice is shaped by immersive training in the Amazon Rainforest where she studied the healing properties of plants and ancestral textile techniques. The resulting imagery blends botanical motifs with circuit-like forms in an otherworldly cohesion between the natural world and the digital realm, the ancient and the new. In Ceiba Tree, for instance, the abstracted shapes and hypnotic patterning of tree limbs simultaneously resemble a coded language while shimmering iridescent colours and frayed edges evoke the pulse of magical energy.
Meanwhile, sculptural works by Julia Blume explore symbiotic processes and forms, imagining a world in which traditional dichotomies – between life and matter, artificial and natural, human and animal – are broken down to bring about new modes of existence. These ideas are visualised through hybrid, evolving forms but also through Blume’s use of non-biological, highly-processed materials such as plastics, fluorescent pigments and fabrics cut and coated to appear as flowers. Spiraling root systems hint at non-verbal forms of communication and the sharing of resources while fringes of threads, in works such as The Light-Eater and 6 Years Old and Cicadas, allude to the passage of energy and light, of personal and collective memories.
London-based artist Sato Sugamoto is also interested in the ways in which colour, material and form can suggest complex neurological systems and emotions. Her work stems from an exploration into how external forces shape our internal landscapes. Glimpse, a bright, whirling twist of electrical cords, examines the impact of social media on our mental stability and sense of self while Balance combines rounded shapes and sharp, rigid forms to negotiate the tension between the desire for individual autonomy and societal norms, particularly in relation to the expectations placed on women.
Presented together, the works in Midsummer Night’s Dream invite us to embrace the transformative power of the imagination as a way of dreaming up new ways of connecting and existing.
