Many opportunities for emerging artists and recent graduates, like Degree Shows and art openings, have been squashed by the pandemic. By opening up dialogues between artists, and fostering a new, creative synergy, I hope PLOP can help redress this and contribute to London’s cultural landscape post-covid. We want to amplify those new voices in the UK’s art scene who have an innovate and original approach to art making and who consider how their practice is reflective of current life and contemporary culture. – Oli Epp, co-founder of PLOP.

PLOP Residency was founded in London in 2019 by artist Oli Epp and curator Aindrea Emelife. PLOP is a residency run by artists for artists and has provided free artist studios, mentorship and industry visits to 48 artists from over four continents. The artists that have taken part in PLOP created communities where ideas, thoughts and opinions could be freely shared. Previous artists who have taken part in the residency include: Sarah Slappey, Andrew Pierre Hart, Stine Deja, Hunter Potter and Cathrin Hoffmann. They have gone on to have international and solo exhibitions, and forged long-standing communities that cross continents.

Beginning in August 2021, PLOP collaborated with Cob to host five, one-month residency programmes for emerging and early-career artists at Cob studios.  The Cob x PLOP selection committee chose fifteen residents in total to particpate including six international artists.  Artists were supported by the residency mentors, curator and artist Rosalind Davis and art historian Hector Campbell.   Each residency culminated with a dedicated exhibtion within the studios.

Cob x PLOP selection committee:

Oli Epp, artist | Marcelle Joseph, collector and curator | Claus Busch Risvig, collector founder of Artlandapp | Jeremy Levison, collector and lawyer | Aindrea Emelife, art historian and curator  | Cob Gallery - Victoria Williams, Cassie Beadle, Madeleine Dunnigan

Summer Residency 2021

Anna Kenneally, Desire Moheb Zandi, Okiki Akinfe

Autumn Residency 2021

Madinah Thompson, Natalia Gonzalez Martin, Eve Stainton

Winter Residency 2021

Anne von Freyburg, Ania Hobson, William Grob

International Residency 2021

Horacio Quiroz, Bianca Fields, Agostino Iacurci

International Residency 2022

Timmy Irani, Mathew Zefeldt, Debbi Kenote

Cob x PLOP Residency archive 

Born out of the necessity for a truly accessible art space with both a well curated presentation of exhibitions, and a wide programme of events, HOME is one of very few black owned art spaces in London. Founded by Ronan Mckenzie to create a distinct space with a new set of understandings of how to contextualise a diverse range of artists, building on personal experiences of institutions and providing a new infrastructure for creativity. 

With a leading focus on supporting Black and Indigenous People of Colour, HOME aligns with the contemporary economic climate, with a considered curatorial and events offerings pertaining to the work of BIPOC artists in a context that thoroughly understands them from the inside out. Alongside exhibitions, HOME presents a community focussed events programme and creative work space which aim to encourage, share and support. HOME is a malleable concept which transforms and responds to the artists it houses and the community it is built for.

Cob collaborated with HOME offering studio space to their first six-week residency initiative for two BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) Women-identifying Artists. Residents Hannah Lim and Courtenay Welcome received a stipend and materials budget, thanks to Glossier for sponsoring the programme.

Parts of Self: End of residency exhibition

Hannah Lim and Courtenay Welcome

8 - 24 July 2021

Parts of Self was the final show of the HOME x Cob Residency.  The exhibition was a celebration of the work made, research undertaken, and time spent in the studios, over these past six weeks. It explores identity, space and form, and how the three interact within the close walls of the studio. The show was also featured online on HOME's website.

Hannah Lim (b. 1998, Isleworth, England) is a sculptor whose practice explores the colonial connotations between East and West, as manifested in Orientalism and its relationship to the Chinoiserie. Recently she has been creating peculiar, somewhat furniture-like structures. These pieces combine motifs and imagery from both Chinese and European furniture design. In doing so she attempts to re-imagine and reclaim ideas and designs associated with the Chinoiserie, which have in the past had problematic colonial undertones. 

The residency has been a great opportunity to start bridging different elements of my practice;  ornaments and ornamental things have historically been used to depict East Asian and South-East Asian women, categorising, personifying and fetishising their identities. I want to explore these ideas, breaking them down and reconstructing them. – Hannah Lim

Courtenay Welcome (b. 1997, Birmingham, England) is an Artist, Activist, Creative Director and Critical Thinker based between Bristol and Birmingham. Her work explores the rich complexities of race, memory, space and time through painting, installation, text and performance. These explorations tackle, mimic, reconstruct and shift the perspective of universal ‘truths’ within the white walls of the Western art world.Welcome depicts the sense of self though lived experiences. Documenting transitions from one embodiment to another, while critically addressing the ways in which these transitions are perceived by institutional means. All informed by a critical infrastructure of decolonisation.

This residency is an opportunity for me to practice different modes of thought and art making. I am carving out space and through this have been confronted with how to depict a sense of self: and its relationship to time, space and consciousness. I’m interested in how to expand the frame to incorporate and reflect the biracial gaze and experience; in how to decolonise the mind and open up the critical landscape for new and better ways to communicate and love now and in the future. – Courtenay Welcome