SIMON HARRIS
(2024 – 2026)
Dr Simon J. Harris is an artist whose practice is rooted in painting while extending across printmaking, photography and moving image. His work is deeply informed by the visual and philosophical language of cinema, creating painterly surfaces that are glossy and luminous, evoking the materiality of celluloid film. Through this cinematic sensibility, Harris creates images of heightened visual intensity that oscillate between the figural and the abstract. Harris gained his PhD in 2015 from the University of Wolverhampton with a thesis titled Deleuze and Painting: Rethinking the Formal.
THE WEIGHT OF A CLOUD
At HMP Grendon, Harris created a body of work and publication titled The Weight of a Cloud while supporting prisoners to develop a studio practice. His residency was highlighted by the documentary short film, Inside Europe’s Only Wholly Therapeutic Prison (2026).
JAMES LOMAX
(2024)
James Lomax graduated from the Royal Academy School in 2022 and works across multiple mediums. Within his practice he often reuses and reframes found objects by shifting their materiality or changing their function/purpose. By presenting building site hoardings as paintings or reproducing cardboard boxes from luxury stores in cast concrete, this way of working allows him to pose political questions or highlight specific aspects of contemporary culture.
With a strong art historical influence to his practice, his work has a specific interest in institutional critique and exhibition making as well as site-reactive interventions.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Artist James Lomax undertook a two-month residency at HMP Grendon in Spring 2024, concluding with an exhibition of new work titled A Tale of Two Cities.
Featuring framed cast concrete works, c-type photographic prints and repurposed sodium street lamps, the exhibition introduced prison residents to contemporary practice. Lomax also facilitated workshops to introduce casting techniques in the prison’s art studio, producing jesmonite tiles featuring prisoners’ drawings made using caulk.
JAMES LOMAX: A TALE OF TWO CITIES, EXHIBITION IMAGES
DEAN KELLAND
(2019 – 2023)
Birmingham-born artist Dean Kelland works across performance, photography and filmmaking. His practice touches on cultures of taste and histories of class in order to produce engaging observations on collective and mediated identities. Kelland has exhibited nationally and internationally with Ikon and undertaken residencies at New Art Gallery Walsall and Birmingham & Midland Institute.
Kelland holds a PhD from Central Saint Martins (entitled Flawed Masculinities: “Rupturing” 1950s/60s/70s British Sitcom via a Performance-led Interdisciplinary Arts Practice) and has taught Fine Art for over 25 years.
IMPOSTER SYNDROME
Dean Kelland’s exhibition at Ikon Gallery, Imposter Syndrome (20 September — 22 December 2023), featured a number of his new films, prints and sketchbooks that reimagine the psychoanalytic dialogue that has occurred between Pop Art and Prison Art since the 1960s.
Referencing figures from popular culture such as Elvis and David Bowie, Kelland interrogates male identity and flawed notions of masculinity.
DEAN KELLAND: IMPOSTER SYNDROME, EXHIBITION IMAGES
EDMUND CLARK
(2014-2018)
Edmund Clark is an artist with a longstanding interest in incarceration and its effects. His previous subjects include Guantanamo Bay, the CIA secret prison programme and the detention of terrorism suspects in England on control orders.
Clark is a Senior Lecturer on the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography course at London College of Communication and his work has been acquired for national and international collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and the National Media Museum.
IN PLACE OF HATE
Edmund Clark’s exhibition at Ikon Gallery, In Place of Hate (6 December 2017 — 11 March 2018), included photography, video and installation.
Clark’s work is shaped by his engagement with issues of censorship, security and control. He could not make images that reveal the identity of the prisoners or details of the security infrastructure and so his response was to create work that explores ideas of visibility, representation, trauma and self-image.
EDMUND CLARK: IN PLACE OF HATE, EXHIBITION IMAGES
