Extra Ordinary People

Eastside Projects’ EOP @ South London Gallery

65 Peckham Rd, London SE5 8UH, UK

Saturday 19 October, 3pm–5.30pm

Lucy Hutchinson, still from: Act 1, Constructing the Powerhouse

For the Art Licks Weekend 2019, Extra Ordinary People (EOP) will be hosted by SLG for a showcase of new performance, sculpture and video work by members of EOP, the associate programme run by Eastside Projects, Birmingham.

Artists Ambie Drew, Lucy Hutchinson, Emily Roderick and Emily Warner and Luke Routledge exploring alternative realities and digital dystopias through their work, offering multiple readings ‘interdependence’, the theme of Art Licks 2019.

EOP is an associate programme run by Eastside Projects, Birmingham, that supports the development of work, ideas, connections and careers. It produces a dynamic programme of opportunities and events for artists, writers, curators and designers at all stages of their careers.

I Exist On The Internet is a new experimental video work commissioned by Vivid Projects that explores how we live online through our ‘digital selves’. Utilising her internet conceived alter ego, Ambie Drew examines a fragmented existence in the synthetic digital realm. We exist in a human body, but what does it mean to exist online? What is artificial and what is authentic when manipulating ourselves through the filter that is the world wide web? Visualising the interdependence between our consumption of data and our physical and digital identities and more specifically, the third space in between the two. We thought there were windows but actually it’s made of mirrors.

Act 1, Constructing the Powerhouse is a computer-animated video which acts as a starting point for a larger project informed by Lucy Hutchinson’s research into the relationship between 17th witchcraft and The Northern Powerhouse initiative. The work draws connections between regionalism, printmaking, biotechnology, and magic; and uses multiple voices and perspectives interdependently to create a speculative future at a site in the North of England.

Emily Roderick and Emily Warner present exxxtteeenssioon, a new collaboration, a performance that translates and tangles their artistic processes. Blending and building, spewing out and fixing up, they ask how do we resist the systems that orientate and inform us? Performatively exploring the capacity of their attention, Emily and Emily point their interests toward physical adaption, digital dysfunction and the reductive structures that frame understanding. Enter the arena for double distraction, agitated scrolling and orange overwhelm, by the artist tandem who are performing out of synch, in connection and occupied with a reflection. exxxtteeenssioon was originally commissioned by Vivid Projects, Birmingham.

Wormhole is the first collaborative animation between Luke Routledge, Phoebe Rutter and Rachel Rutter. The work uses hand drawn animation to expand one of the possible worlds populated by Routledge’s bizarre characters. Based around parallel universes and their potential connections, as well as the concept of interuniversal travel; the circular tale combines medieval folklore with sci-fi tropes to create a darkly humorous cartoon strange loop.

Figure on Tree Stump is the latest in a new series of automaton sculptures which pushes Routledge’s practice firmly into the territory of the uncanny valley. The work uses open source 3D printed elements as found objects to create an animatronic figurative assemblage; a part human, part digital homunculus.Drawing heavily upon the conventions of both painting and sculpture, Routledge’s work treads a tightrope – shifting between reverence and irreverence of the canon of art history. The figure sits upon a tree stump reading a newspaper; upon closer inspection however, a hidden Picasso pastiche porno reduces proto-cubism to a seedy in-joke.

Parent supervision advised.


Ambie Drew, Lucy Hutchinson, Emily Roderick, Luke Routledge, Emily Warner


Eastside Projects

Venue/event info


Under 16s

Eastside Projects’ EOP @ South London Gallery

65 Peckham Rd, London SE5 8UH, UK