Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age

Jürgen Baumann is a Swiss artist who lives and works in Winterthur. He works predominantly with casting and relief in resins, plaster and polystyrene glazing. His works protrude into space, transgress thresholds and disrupt domestic or familiar forms with mythic creatures or fantastical characters. Baumann’s manipulation of light and his interest in screens and flat planes as spaces to be animated and punctured generate effects of eeriness and liminality in his sculpture.

Before studying Fine Arts, Baumann trained as a mechanical designer. He completed his Bachelor and Master of Arts in Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts, with an Erasmus semester at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland, and an artist residency in Cairo, Egypt. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions across Switzerland, including shows in Zürich, Biel and Aarau, and in group exhibitions throughout Europe, with recent shows in Leipzig, Cologne, Basel, Paris, Warsaw and Krasnodar. Baumann has received the Förderbeitrag des Kantons Zürich, and his work has been acquired by the City of Winterthur and the Canton of Zürich.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, UK) works predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video game development. Her practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell and archive the stories of Black Trans people. Drawing on ancestral histories and lost gods, Brathwaite-Shirley uses interactive technologies to create participatory spaces that challenge hegemonic narratives and encourage active engagement where multiple players communally construct a narrative pathway. Brathwaite-Shirley’s projects offer players the opportunity to navigate choices that confront their assumptions and biases, fostering deeper conversations about identity, privilege, and systemic oppression.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s work has been exhibited at Serpentine, London (2025); LAS Foundation, Halle am Berghain, Berlin (2024); Studio Voltaire, London (2024); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024); Villa Arson, Nice (2023); and FACT, Liverpool (2022).

Nina Davies’ (b. 1991, Canada) work considers dance in popular culture, particularly its dissemination, circulation and consumption. Working primarily with video, sculpture and performance, Davies considers the technological roots of dance phenomena such as TikTok dances and video game choreography, focusing on the commodification of the dancing body and speculatively reframing contemporary dances as the folk dances of the future. Davies’ work oscillates between fiction and non-fiction, often using a fiction podcast from the near future to comment on our lived encounters with today’s technological culture. Her work offers new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices and the digitisation of the human body.

Nina Davies studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art, London and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been exhibited at FACT, Liverpool (2025); Western Front, Vancouver (2025); The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2024); and Matt’s Gallery, London (2023).

Joey Holder (b. 1986, UK) makes research-driven installations that generate fictional worlds in response to contemporary, real-world events. Holder often works with computational geneticists, marine biologists, behavioural psychologists and investigative journalists to address themes including future farming, disinformation, folkloric creatures, synthetic biology and deep-sea ecosystems. Her work is interested in the limits of human knowledge, the unknowns and unclassifiable character life on and beyond earth. Holder’s installations invite us to observe the porous boundary between humans, animals and machines. She suggests the impermanence and interchangeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds, claiming instead that ‘everything is a mutant and a hybrid’.

Joey Holder studied at Kingston University, London and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been exhibited at Galleria Sculptor, Helsinki (2024); X Museum, Beijing (2023); Matt’s Gallery, London (2018), and the Design Museum, London (2018).

Joe Moss (b. 1991, UK) creates sculpture, video and events informed by networked culture, where competing fictions collapse into one another. His work situates the viewer within thin fictional structures which reveal their artifice through moments of contrast or revelation in the increasing pace, overlap and repetition in our everyday encounters with social and technological narratives. Deploying AI and complex laser cutting techniques alongside traditional mosaic, his recent work draws on Leila A. Villaverde and Roymeico A. Carter’s theory of ‘the proleptic’: the collapse of past, present and future, where fiction, reality and progress blur.

Joe Moss studied at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art, London and the Slade School of Art, London. He was a participant in the Conditions Studio Programme, Croydon, and New Contemporaries (2024), with solo shows at Matt’s Gallery (2026), Chemist Gallery (2026), and Well Projects, Margate (2024).

Most Dismal Swamp is a project emerging from the curatorial, artistic, and research practice of Dane Sutherland (b. 1985, UK). The project’s multimedia work involves collaboration with a wide network of artists and combines performance, sculpture, computer generated imaging, AI processes and writing. These projects are conceived as multi-user shared hallucinations – a term borrowed from online roleplaying games in which a shared set of highly specific rules help construct an immersive fictional world. A rigorous ‘acid pessimism’ animates the work of Most Dismal Swamp: an acerbic yet playful immersion into composite hallucinatory lifeworlds, gamespaces, and protocols – what Sutherland calls the ‘folkless lore’ of modern life – that constitute the hostile architectures of our shared platform-mediated crises.

Dane Sutherland completed his PhD at Edinburgh School of Art. Projects by Most Dismal Swamp have appeared at Autotelic Foundation, London (2025); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023, online); and Mira Digital Arts Festival, Barcelona (2021).

Steph Linn is a London based North American artist who uses sculpture, installation and publications to examine the history of knitting and computation. Philip Speakman (b. 1993, UK) is an artist based in London. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Slade School of Art researching the use of anomalous fictions as tools of online political myth-making. Their work together explores the persistence of vernacular and folkloric traditions and the politics of their contemporary reproduction, ranging from the mechanisation and digitisation of craft and textile production, to the folktales which emerge online.

Steph Linn studied at the Slade. Philip Speakman studied at Central Saint Martins and the Slade. This will be both Linn’s and Speakman’s first institutional group show.

Isaac Lythgoe’s (b. 1989, Guernsey) sculpture repurposes ideas from narrative and storytelling traditions. His work considers prospective technologies and how they might influence our future societal structures. By combining a wide variety of materials – fibreglass, car paint, 3D printed plastics, welded metal, cow stomach leather, oak and cherry wood – he invites an uncomfortable hybridisation of the animal, the human and the inanimate. Activated by notions of ethics, romance and mortality, Lythgoe’s objects consider the integration of synthetic and biological systems as the most prescient grounds for change to the human experience. These ideas are approached both conceptually and materially; works appear as stories and characters, playing out in a blend of symbolic organic materials and new media techniques, the handmade and the machined in continual flux.

Isaac Lythgoe studied at Wimbledon College of Art, London and the Royal College of Art, London. His work has been exhibited at Duarte Sequeira, Seoul, KR (2024); Production Residency at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, FR, (2024); Somerset House, London, UK, (2024); and MUDAM, Luxembourg, LX, (2023) amongst others.

Rustan Söderling (b. Gothenburg, 1984) is an artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam (NL) whose work focuses primarily on moving image and animation. He is often concerned with history as a narrative that can be taken apart, revised and reassembled. Drawing inspiration from British and northern European folklore, as well as popular science fiction, the past and the future collapse into the indeterminate present in which many of Söderling’s films are set. Forests, ancient burials, and lost objects examined with an anthropologist’s imagination collide with technology to invoke a shifting tension between the virtual and the artefactual.

Rustan Söderling studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and completed a two-year residency at De Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include: Konstepidemin, Gothenburg (2024); LAAK, The Hague (2023); Gossamer Fog, London (2022); Like A Little Disaster, Polignano a Mare (2025).