Showcasing artists working across textile, sound, drawing, printmaking, and writing, RITUAL is a group exhibition that explores how personal and communal rituals inform creative practice, and how artists unconsciously inspire one another through their work and social interactions. The show will run from Friday 8th — Sunday 10th May, with a special performance by Leila Alexander at 2pm on Saturday 9th.
Curated by Christiana, RITUAL is the collaboration of six artists:
Othello De'Souza-Hartley
Katie King
Rosemary Jane Cronin
Leila Alexander
Scary Boots
Christiana Spens
About the artists:
Othello De'Souza-Hartley is a London-based interdisciplinary artist working across photography, moving image, painting, drawing, and performance. The human body sits at the core of his practice, as a direct subject, as a metaphor, and a surface that holds memory. Applying minimal gestures to maximum effect, his work finds meaning within shadows and imperfection. His current research focuses on architecture and the human body, exploring how both surfaces tell stories. He approaches the body and architecture as parallel texts, tracing the marks that time, experience, and resilience leave behind. Through intuitive mark-making, varied textures, and found objects, he meditates on the narratives etched into our skin and surroundings, honouring the resilience, beauty, and quiet complexity embedded within us and our environments.
Rooted in a fascination with light and darkness, his practice draws on the subjective gaze of classical painting, notions of non-duality in Eastern philosophy, the geometry of modern architecture, and the spontaneity of experimental music and contemporary dance. De'Souza-Hartley's practice is not confined by medium or genre. His Masculinity project, spanning photography and film, received extensive press coverage and was nominated for Peer to Peer, a curated snapshot of contemporary photography in the UK and China (2019). His work is held in private and public collections and has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally. Recent highlights include Iconophosis, a group show he curated at Lewisham Art House, featuring eight artists, including himself. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Arts and has studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal Drawing School, London. Find out more at: https://www.othellodesouzahartley.com/
Katie King is a London-based visual artist (b. Aberdeen, Scotland, 1993), who graduated from King’s College, London with a BA in Religion, Philosophy & Ethics and Royal College of Art with an MA in Animation. Their moving image work has won awards at London Short Film Festival and Film Maudit 2.0. In 2024 they had their first solo presentation, Half-Bambi, Half-Cow, with Wilton Way Gallery and in 2026 they were AIR on the Mawddach Estate in Wales. In March, Katie presented Worm Witual at Batsford Gallery, and will exhibit some of those pieces in RITUAL too.
Her practice is a thread of interconnected media that includes textile works, animation, archive image film and public artwork invitations. Each discipline relies on a process of fragmentation and reassembly, utilised as an attempt to connect with an underlying interest in the mysterious magnetic pull of the almost touch between living and dying. A feeling that more often is a paradox of attraction between opposing feelings like vulnerable intimacy and humour, horror and awe. By combining unusual or unexpected elements, she aims to initiate viewers into an alternative logic that requires no prerequisite knowledge, status or intuition in order to access but feels as if you have been there all along. Find out more at: https://www.katieking.world/
Christiana Spens works across drawing, printmaking, and writing, having illustrated books published by the New York Review of Books, and Granta, as well as her own and other publications.
She holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews and is the author of several books including The Fear (2023) and a novel, The Colony (2026). She contributes regularly to Scary Boots, and her work for RITUAL includes drawings featured there, as well as others exploring personal, relational, and social rituals. Her new book The Colony, about an artists’ colony in Scotland, will also be on display, along with the drawing featured on the cover. Find out more at: https://www.christiana-spens.com/
Scary Boots is a print-only art & literature zine founded in 2024 by Elias Myer. Containing prose, poetry, essay and visual art, each issue invites contributors to respond to a specific theme.
Notable contributors across the four published issues include poet, novelist & musician Richard Hell, novelist Katherine Faw, novelist & illustrator Christiana Spens, and artists Sienna Murdoch & Zach Toppin. Find out more at: https://www.scaryboots.com/
Founder and editor Elias Myer is a London-based writer & graphic designer. He graduated from King’s College London in 2012 with a BA in English Language & Literature. He is presenting two works of Objet Trouvé Photomontage connected to the current and previous issues.
Rosemary Jane Cronin is an artist, writer and lecturer with a research-based practice focusing on gender, psychoanalysis and subversion. The work is realised through film, performance, paint, print and sculpture.
Cronin has exhibited at Tate Britain, The Freud Museum, ICA London, National Portrait Gallery, Transition Gallery, South London Gallery and The Wallace Collection. Film piece ‘Reverie’ was selected by the Guggenheim Foundation as part of their Under the Same Sun season in 2016.
The work shown in Ritual explores the performance of femininity as a ritual, be it from the laboured smile with a perfect lipstick edge, to the dainty pose adopted to convey passive beauty. Images cut from 1960s women’s magazines are dissected through the artist’s experience and critique of the performance of the male gaze that women have been performing for the camera, in the workplace and to the world.
A subconscious theme around walking has emerged through the making of new work, and the intense desire to walk after the artist’s experience of difficulty walking through disability. The longing for the freedom to move, dance, stride and step; the ritual of the walk being used to regulate the body, mind and soul.
Find out more at: https://www.rosemarycronin.co.uk/
Leila Alexander is a New Zealand–born multidisciplinary artist working with voice, movement, and immersive media. Her practice centres on the psychosomatic impact of sound on the body, exploring how composition, resonance, and the physical manifestation of narrative can generate shared physiological response in both performer and audience, often operating at the threshold between intimacy and voyeurism. Drawing on professional experience across opera, dance, and screen performance, she works with and against canonical forms, particularly classical music and opera, to interrogate the construction of emotional and psychological states within them.
Treating the voice as both instrument and site, her work repositions traditional material within immersive and site-responsive contexts, destabilising the boundaries between performer and observer. Her flagship work LUCIA, a virtual reality live opera performance, reimagines the ‘mad scene’ from Lucia di Lammermoor, placing audiences inside the protagonist’s interior landscape and challenging historic portrayals of female madness within the operatic canon.
Alexander has performed internationally as a vocalist and performer within contemporary art works, including at the Venice Biennale in pieces by Gabrielle Goliath (Elegy for Two Ancestors), Lee Mingwei (The Art of Participation: Sonic Blossom), and Dom Bouffard ([Un]Expected Witnesses). Alongside this, she maintains an active operatic practice, having appeared at leading venues including Wigmore Hall and Royal Albert Hall, and most recently performed Musetta in La Bohème with Regents Opera, alongside the title role in Dark Lady of the Sonnets for the Shakespeare in Music Festival, where she is Artistic Associate.
Her wider practice spans voice recording and broadcast performance at international scale, alongside screen acting and dance. She was a scholar at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, was selected for the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation programme, and worked with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa on national television. Prior to moving into full-time artistic practice, she trained and qualified as a commercial barrister and solicitor, an experience that continues to inform the structural and conceptual frameworks of her work. Find out more at: https://www.leilaalexander.com/biography
