An afterhours chance to explore this year’s East London Art Prize Shortlist Exhibition (6-9pm), featuring a new live performance by exhibiting artist Lydia Newman between 7-8pm.

Bow Arts’ East London Art Prize celebrates the talent and diversity of art made in east London. This exhibition will present 12 incredible artworks shortlisted for the second iteration of the Prize. Read more about the exhibition here.

Lydia’s shortlisted work In the Wake of Ruin, She is Here (2024) is the first in her four-part series In the Wake of Ruin. Weaving elements from across her practice, the painting examines inherited ideas about race, globalisation, class and gender, rooted in the foundations of colonialism as experienced by a descendant of the Black Diaspora. The piece spans timelines, referencing over ten previous works, such as the posture of a downward-facing woman from her 2021 live performance FACEFORWARD (2021). Set against a surreal, crumbling cityscape, the work explores the relationship between our internal and external world structures, examining how Lydia has been contorted by societal structures that fail to nurture life. In her 2021 performance FACEFORWARD, Lydia created a Sand Suit — an external, embodied manifestation of memories and experiences, both lived and ancestrally inherited. She used the sand suit as a tool throughout the work to explore the tension between survival and thriving, highlighting the endurance demanded of her as a Black British woman while grappling with exhaustion and sadness within a capitalist paradigm.

The original Sand Suit was lost during the pandemic, thrown out by a cleaner who must have thought it was rubbish — perhaps they were not entirely wrong. Yet some of the meanings and memories it held still have resonance.

Lydia's enquiry has spiralled upwards from constantly reaching toward 'thriving' to embracing and allowing her 'rewilding.' She has observed how personal and ancestral memories have left physiological imprints that continue to travel along well-worn neural pathways, shaping how she moves through and connects with the world, inhabiting her soul's true expression.

In this performance, Lydia will create Sand Suit 2.0 (2025) to excavate and release the things distorting her shape as she moves through life. Through her practice, Lydia has found that setting intentions, building something to share publicly, and 'performing' live initiates alchemical internal change.

Lydia welcomes your presence and invites you to co-facilitate this process as the courage she summons to stand by herself before others is integral to activating this transformation.

The performance will take place between 7-8pm in the Nunnery Gallery.

The Nunnery Cafe will be open for the duration of the evening, selling drinks and a range of tasty snacks and refreshments.