Whatshesaid, an informal intergenerational collective of five artists established in 2022, present Terra Incognita.

The artists' work in Terra Incognita shares a thread of exchange with the material world - charting and cataloguing the disregarded, the everyday, its surface textures, accumulations, sedimentations. Their practices reflect concerns around sustainability and fragility, the urban landscape and the natural world. Crossings and transformations, both psychological and physical are explored through salvaged, re-worked and resurrected materials.

There are heavily painted surfaces of coarse sackcloth, reminiscent of walls and pillars of long forgotten buildings; single use products re-imagined from waste, stained, stitched and unified in colourful, crumpled, almost animate, heaps; rubbings and castings of overlooked environments, summoning thoughts of absence and loss; printed hangings of fragile paper, evoking alleyways and waterways of ancient ruined cities; dark and mysterious etchings – a smoked burnished conjuring of untellable journeys.

The collective comes together to exchange and develop conversations through making and exhibiting and the works in Terra Incognita have been realised over two years. The exhibition title ‘Terra Incognita’ refers to this engagement with the unplanned and unforeseen, and also to the space and unique light of Thames-Side Studios Gallery.

About the artists:

Claire Month Smith
Claire Mont Smith, born 1949, studied Fine Art at Reading University, Chelsea and Goldsmiths. She has exhibited widely, and has work in private and public collections including the V&A and the Courtauld. Over half the world’s population live in urban environments and this is set to rise to 70% by the middle of the century.  For Terra Incognita, Claire’s screenprint installation reflects on the vulnerability and destruction of these new homelands in a fractious and overheated world, and references the ‘brown paper watercolours’ JMW Turner made of Venice at night.
@claire.mont.smith

Kristina Page
Kristina is a multi-disciplinary artist with a BA in Fine Art from Canterbury and an MA in Art psychotherapy from Goldsmiths. She has a studio at Thames-side and has exhibited in, and curated various group shows in London. She has work in private collections in the UK, US and Europe. Her work is centred within the psychological concepts of ‘being slow’ and ‘getting lost’- states which can be catalysts for personal growth and self-discovery. In Terra Incognita she navigates an imagined dried-up river bed, exposed for the first time in decades. This uncharted land becomes a place recording human activity, where disposed items collect, and form as bodies of waste. www.kristinapage.com
@kpage 4

Mathilde Lebreton
Mathilde is an artist and architect born in France, working and living in London. She graduated in Paris from the Applied Art school of Olivier de Serres and the Architecture School of La Villette. She was selected for the Leyden Gallery Emerging Arts Platform in 2019 and has continued to exhibit in London for the last five years.
Her art practice explores the intersection between urban spaces and natural ground, and she uses the abstract language of rhythm and texture to interrogate this relationship. For Terra Incognita, the paintings are sewing together the boundaries between the physical and emotional, the natural and unnatural in a dynamic struggle. www.mathilde-lebreton.com
@mathilde_lebreton_art

Tanaka Mazivanhanga
Tanaka is a Zimbabwean-born, London-based artist. She holds a BA in Architecture from Kingston School of Art and an MA in Printmaking from Camberwell College of Art. She has exhibited widely and been awarded numerous prizes and residencies.
Tanaka’s practice is dedicated to preserving memories of spaces and surfaces that may one day be lost. Inherent is the subject of migration and the stories it brings with it.
In Terra Incognita she focuses on documenting surfaces, textures, and fragments from the urban landscape as a way of exploring our collective memory and identity. www.tanakamazivanhanga.com
@tanaka.archiprints

Ann Norfield
Ann Norfield is an artist/teacher, primarily working with printmaking processes. She is a founding member of East London Printmakers Studio where she continues to work and teach. Her book Etching - an Artist's Guide is published by Crowood. She has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and has work in permanent collections in London and Germany.
For Terra Incognita Ann considers displacement. Her figures face inhospitable landscapes, both of the subconscious and of the actual.
@annnorfield


Thames-Side Studios Gallery
Thames-Side Studios
Harrington Way, Warspite Road
Royal Borough of Greenwich
London SE18 5NR

Open Thursday-Sunday, 12-5pm, during exhibitions.
For general Thames-Side Studios Gallery enquiries please email info@thames-sidestudios.co.uk
Disabled access. Free, limited parking is available on site.

How to get here:
Bicycle: Thames River cycle path (16 mins cycle from Greenwich).
Bus: 161 / 177 / 180 / 472 to Warspite Road bus stop.
DLR: Woolwich Arsenal (1 minute walk to Plumstead Road and take Route Bus 177 towards Peckham Bus Station or 472 towards North Greenwich Station).
Road: A2 corridor, first roundabout east of Thames Barrier onto Warspite Road.
Train: From Cannon Street or London Bridge to Woolwich Dockyard (8 minute walk) or Charlton (12 minute walk).
Tube: North Greenwich (Take the Route Bus 472 towards Thamesmead Town Centre).
Crossrail: Elizabeth Line to Woolwich (take Route Bus 177 towards Peckham Bus Station or 472 towards North Greenwich Station).