The Crossover Project: Making Art Not Waste

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the London Design Festival we are hosting a dynamic exhibition in collaboration with The Crossover Project featuring a host of talented emerging artists represented by the Bleur Gallery. The Crossover Project is a new initiative connecting the worlds of design, fashion and art through the values of circularity – in a bid to reduce waste. The Crossover Project was founded earlier in the year by sustainable design champion and journalist Roddy Clarke and founder of avant garde gallery ‘Bleur’ Aurelia Islimye.

With alarming statistics, such as 87% of clothing ending in landfill, 141 million tonnes of waste produced by the packaging industry and 8 million pieces of plastic reaching the ocean every day, The Crossover Project is helping to provide ways in which to alleviate some of this while also raising awareness around such critical topics and we are excited to collaborate in creating another exhibition in our showroom.

All the artists being shown have created artworks with our waste paint and other salvaged materials. The exhibition addresses waste in the interiors industry, mass consumption and the fragility of our planet. Keep scrolling to see all the artworks and learn more about the host of talented artists or better come to our showroom until 10th October to view these modern masterpieces – the hardest decision will be on which one to buy for your home.

Artist Jemima Sara has installed a wonderful window painting for the exhibition using our waste paint. Jemima created this painting in reaction to the wonderful sculptures in the window by Yiyan Zhou, both artists represented by Bleur Gallery. Bleur’s mission is to bring affordable fine art to modern lifestyles. People and especially younger generations have become increasingly disconnected from the art world. By redefining art as a lived experience of the many, they are pioneering new ways of bringing fine art closer to the people and democratising access to the arts.

Gallerist and curator extraordinaire, Aurelia Islimye is founder of Bleur, which has a strong focus on emerging talent. Aurelia started Bleur with a strong commitment to tackling two issues in the art world: the lack of diversity in an elitist white cis-male dominated industry and the need for more environmentally conscious approach to art making and selling. Keep scrolling to see all the artworks and learn more about the host of talented artists!

Emmanuel Unaji is a British-born Nigerian multidisciplinary artist whose unique portraits combining collage, drawing and painting has gained widespread recognition in the creative industries and been featured in household institutions including Tate Britain, London Fashion Week and Frieze Art Fair. Coined as ‘new talent to watch’ by several publications and brands such as Forbes, British GQ and Adidas, Emmanuel explores the socioeconomic landscape of the creative sector, carving out his own space, at the intersection of fashion, luxury, street and fine art.

Bold and unconventional, Emmanuel’s signature style is to mechanically deconstruct his portraits to reverse engineer the unconscious bias applied to portraiture. Influenced by popular culture and masters such as Andy Warhol and Virgil Abloh, Emmanuel contemplates the Western canon and questions his place within it.

Taking as his subjects fashion models, cultural or political icons, Emmanuel’s practice is an exploration of the concept of individuality and how we define ourselves in a world obsessed with ownership, social media, beauty and where upholding public personas has become the norm. By stripping back his work layer by layer, Emmanuel fearlessly explores the distance between perception and reality and provokes a reflection in the viewer on our own gaze and what lies beneath the images that we consume.

Eva Merendes is a Greek mixed-media artist currently undertaking her MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School. Influenced by her studies in Psychology, Eva offers an unconventional perspective where art becomes a tool for scientific study of the mind and behaviours to unveil what lies beneath the surface. For Eva, every drawing starts with the geometric shape of a circle. Having grown up on a farm, Eva traces back her interest for round shapes to the observation of nature’s biological cells through the magnifying glass of her father’s microscope. A strong curiosity is the driving force behind Eva’s practice leading to fearless experimentations with different materials and media as she takes us on a journey of complete immersion in her world of colourful circles.

Humanist at heart, her passion for deconstructing human relationships gives her the drive to push the limits of her own experimentations. Closing her own circles, Eva finds in art a way to connect with the present moment, the here and now. But when the unconscious meets consciousness, her inquisitive mind brings out her own anxieties and fears to the forefront pulling her into a spiral of her own making. Life, for Eva, isn’t a straight line – it is a constantly moving open-ended circle. Strong in her own vulnerability, she draws her way out of the spiral and into the process of self-acceptance to shape her own unconventional path, from one curious exploration to the next.

Jemima Sara is a mixed media artist with a MA in Fine Art: Drawing at The University of the Arts, London. Jemima Sara’s distinctive drawings and paintings have been acclaimed by the public and the press and often featured in major publications including Elle, The Evening Standard, Marie Claire, amongst others.

Choosing self-expression through art rather than speech, Jemima Sara draws her way into finding her own voice. By uniquely introducing text and a dark playfulness in her work, she invites the viewer to join her on her journey of self-enquiry. Not afraid to ask difficult questions, she uses her practice as a mirror to explore themes of the body, sexuality, childhood, and her own identity through self-representation. Under the apparent rawness of her work, Jemima Sara’s creative process is a direct response to her mental health, confronting her own fears with courage or reflection.

Taking inspiration from everyday conversations, women, identity, self-observation and social media, she tells stories of becoming a woman, whilst resonating with the feminist tenets of the: personal as political. Letting her frustrations out on paper, she draws strength from freedom of speech and self-affirmation to take back control of her life and celebrate its imperfections. Through her work, Jemima Sara relentlessly deconstructs our constant search for perfection and holds the space to allow people to be themselves and feel seen and heard.

Tyler Watson is a British post pop figurative artist with a degree in Fine Art from Middlesex University and MA in Fine Art from The University of Hertfordshire. Influenced by British and American 1960s Pop art movement, Tyler’s distinctive paintings have attracted the attention of the iconic department store Liberty London where they are featured and collaborations with well-known brands such as Paul Smith.

Taking inspiration from the everyday life, Tyler reimagines the most domestic and mundane of objects to draw attention to them and allow us to rediscover these objects in a new light. By consciously removing his own emotions from his work and using bright colours to catch the attention of the viewer, Tyler leaves the subject matter to speak its own truth.

Challenging traditional views on what is considered as subject matter, Tyler’s work is a direct response to rediscovering his own environment and the elements within it. In doing so, Tyler’s practice encourages us to pay more attention to what lies in front of us reflecting on the importance of everyday life and our tendency to overlook the mundane.

Nicole Chui is a London-based embroidery artist whose distinctive style combining freestyle embroidery with photography and digital media has been widely praised by the press and household names. In 2019, Nicole was named one of the ’25 future faces 25 and under’ by Evening Standard Magazine as part of their London Progress 1000 list. In 2020, Nicole released her limited edition sneakers named “Vixens” in collaboration with Nike, and was selected as ‘new artists to watch’ by Elephant magazine and Crxss Platfxrm.

Honesty, power and imperfection are key themes in Nicole’s practice. Finding inspiration in eavesdropping on conversations, being emotional, and anything visual that is maximalist and over-colourful, Nicole’s lived experience drives her practice as the hand-embroidered work is created from an emotional reaction.

Nicole’s work is messy, brash, and disruptive. But her work is also about embracing the strength in vulnerability in her desire to inspire others to embrace their raw emotions. Through her bold colours and patterns, she aims to disrupt perfection and encourage people to break boundaries.

Yiyan Zhou is an award-winning artist whose multi-disciplinary creations range from delicate sculptures which bring porcelain and metal together to intricate ink drawings on paper. Originally from Eastern China, Yiyan studied Art and Design at Shanghai Normal University. In 2007, she left her life behind in Shanghai to follow her dreams of creation and study Photography and Fashion at Studio Berçot. From working in graphic design to high fashion, Yiyan started making her own creations in 2015. Since then, her work has been acclaimed for her beautiful and unique designs and won the national prize of the Young Creative Craftsworker’s Award by the Ateliers d’Art de France in 2015 and has been invited to exhibit in the most prestigious Parisian institutions including the Carrousel du Louvre, the Grand Palais and Galerie 12 Drouot.

In her studio on her boat in Paris, Yiyan lets us into her world rocked by the peaceful waves of the Seine and surrounded by nature. There, far from the noise of the city and from her years in high fashion, she gathers her thoughts and picks up her tools bringing the innate clay to life. Her search for mastery leads her to leave the boat for months to learn from France’s best artisans. For Yiyan, the creation process is an entangled dance in which both the artist and the creation shape each other and for a short period of time, they become one. Escaping space and time, the purity of her lines encapsulates the memory of this moment of pure creation.

Through the compelling rawness of her art, Yiyan calls into question the relationships between humans, nature and our modern society and shapes a kinder world where weaknesses become strengths and differences become complementary.

The exhibition is on in our showroom until 10th October so make sure to stop by if you can! All the works are for sale so please click here and visit the Bleur website to view more information on the pieced and how to purchase. We look forward to continuing to work with The Crossover Project and keeping the conversation going about waste in the interiors industry.