Artist Studios
Metroland Studios is host to a rotating family of artists and cultural practitioners living in, or connected to, our neighbourhood. We offer free studios to make being an artist possible for the community we support.
Studio Residents at Metroland
Metroland Studios is host to a rotating family of artists and cultural practitioners living in, or connected to, our neighbourhood. We offer free studios to make being an artist possible for the community we support.
At Metroland Studios we have both long-term residents who are doing collaborative work in the community alongside us, as well as our yearly Peer-to-Peer residency, which supports artists to develop their practice with the community. Everyone who takes up residency at Metroland Studios becomes an active member in our community. Residencies rotate but when we invite new artists to take up residency in our studios, we don’t say goodbye to the artists who are moving on, they continue to be an important part of our family. All of our residents past and present are invited to join us for monthly lunches, exhibitions and events, and to pop in and say hello whenever they’d like.
Currently at home in Metroland Studios are:
Adam Farah-Saad
Adam Farah-Saad lives and works in London. He uses a range of media and cultural references to evoke coming-of-age memories tied to a sense of place and time, to relationships, love and loss. Adam was a commissioned artist for the 2020 Biennial ‘On the Side of the Future’, and was part of the Curatorial Committee for the 2022 Brent Biennial ‘In the House of My Love’, alongside Jamilla Prowse and Abbas Zahedi. Since 2021, he has been a resident in Metroland Studios in Kilburn. Recent solo exhibitions include Public Gallery, London, UK (2023); Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2021); and South London Gallery, London, UK (2018). His work is part of the permanent collections of Tate, UK and the Arts Council, UK. Adam Farah Saad and Elvis Universe’s exhibition the face of you, my substitute for love was shown at Metroland Studios in 2024.
Adam is one of Metroland’s longer-term studio residents. Adam shares a studio space with Elvis Universe.
Amanda Colares Silva (she/her)
Amanda Colares Silva is an artist and maker born and based in London.
Her body of work focuses on portraying emotional experiences and story telling through sculpture and printed costume for the body. Through her practice she explores motifs which trigger universal emotions and personal nostalgia, accompanying her physical projects with written work. Amanda has been artist in residence at UN7TSEVEN, shortly after graduating from Central Saint Martins with her degree in Fashion Design with Print. Her work has been featured in magazines such as The Face (UK), HERO Mag (USA) and ALLA CARTA (Italy), as well as features in Vanity Fair Italia and Vogue Digital.
Amanda was part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
BETA SOUND
BETA SOUND is an audio studio that encourages improvisation and experimentation with sound, with an emphasis on collaboration and exploring new methodologies of creating. BETA SOUND is founded, run and facilitated by Bill Daggs and Elian Gray.
CVAN London
CVAN London is a free-to-access, research-led, sector support and advocacy network for artists, arts professionals, art galleries, arts organisations, studios and art schools across London. CVAN London was established in 2020 and has become an important advocacy and lobbying body for the visual arts sector in London. CVAN London works with multidisciplinary research to develop ways to sustainably care for people, places and environment, and evidence the value of the arts. CVAN London has a base at Metroland Studios, as well as programming workshops and events open to their London wide network and Metroland’s community.
CVAN is one of Metroland’s longer-term studio residents.
Daisy Jones (she/her)
Daisy Jones is a multidisciplinary artist concerned with the representation and cultural consumption of blackness. Her practice is an ongoing investigation into the ways in which blackness survives and thrives within structures that were built to oppress it. With her work often responding to significant moments within contemporary culture, she primarily uses filmmaking and writing to re present moments to us that otherwise risk disappearing into the ether.
Daisy was part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
Eileen Perrier (she/her)
Based in London, Eileen Perrier’s work has been exhibited extensively since 1999, including shows at The Photographers’ Gallery, Tate Britain, The Whitechapel Gallery, and in the touring exhibition Africa Remix, which visited the Hayward Gallery in London and The Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. Eileen collaborated with Tate Britain on their education programme – BP Family Festival: Close Encounters of the Art Kind. Her portrait commission, Portraits of a Global Law School, is displayed at Kings College London, and she created a Double Portrait for The Foundling Museum’s permanent collection. Her recent work includes participation in a group exhibition at Somerset House titled The Missing Thread: Untold Stories of Black British Fashion.
Eileen was part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
ESEA Unseen
Kim Chin (she/her) and Sue Man (she/her/they)
ESEA unseen are Kim Chin and Sue Man, who met through London’s creative-music-social circles during the early 2000’s. They built their careers in visual arts, fashion, and textiles in different parts of the globe and knew that one day they would collaborate on a project combining their unique perspectives and unexplored personal narratives. Through organising and producing interventions fighting for intersectional social and climate justice, they reconnected with each other to use experimental textiles, conversations and social engagement as a vehicle to heal, connect, and build resistance. By working with arts, learning, and community networks, these experiences are assembled to create projects and events where people can come together, celebrate their experiences, and imagine spaces of cultural exchange that thrive beyond structures of colonial oppression.
In their independent practices:
Kim is a print maker-curator influenced by reflexivity and intentional acts of reciprocity. Galvanised by feminist-queering writers, biomythographical approaches help detangle her intersectional British ESEA-Caribbean identities in relation to others. This makes space for breaking ancestral cycles of trauma through different modes of creative translation.
Sue is multi-hyphenate, Swedish born and raised with Chinese heritage, repurposing family trade in hospitality as a tool to radically mobilise intergenerational narratives in underrepresented communities. Alongside her collective and individual textile practice, with clay, Sue creates unexpected modern forms summoned from what already exists in nature.
ESEA Unseen were part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
Elvis Universe
Elvis Universe is an artist, poet, activist, mental health advocate, amateur philosopher and self-proclaimed gangster of love. He contributed work to Arcadia Missa’s HOW TO SLEEP FASTER ISSUE 14: Mental Health And Art in Crisis (2024). Elvis Universe and Adam Farah Saad’s exhibition the face of you, my substitute for love, was shown at Metroland Studios in 2024.
Elvis Universe and Adam Farah-Saad share a studio space and are longer-term residents at Metroland Studios.
Francesca Telling (she/her)
Francesca Telling is an artist, facilitator and learning practitioner. Francesca’s practice investigates how the social histories of displaced communities are seen in objects and images. She uses sculpture, photography, writing and time-based media to explore the grief embedded in migration narratives – asking what it means to collect things in the context of survival and assimilation, and how this is recorded.
As a facilitator Francesca explores structural inequalities in education, collaborating with children and young people to reimagine learning environments and their authority. Her work is informed by anti-racist approaches and activated by locality, usually emerging through combining dialogue with participatory documentation. Francesca is currently supported by Grand Plan Fund to develop research into oral history and diasporic labour across London’s archive sector.
Francesca was part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
http://francescatelling.com/
JAYKOE (he/him)
JAYKOE is an artist based in Brent working across disciplines including installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, and video. His connection to Brent is integral to his practice, extending beyond his live-work studio in Kingsbury (a 2017 initiative with Brent Council), to active research and collaboration in the borough’s cultural landscape. His family’s migration from Ireland created further roots in the area. A pivotal moment for him unfolded while performing on a Stonebridge pirate radio station. The synergy of the view across London, a dramatic sunset, the people, and music, directly inspired his master’s degree research. Participation in the first Brent Biennial deeply reinforced the reciprocal cycle of inspiration and appreciation he feels for the diversity and vibrancy of Brent.
JAYKOE was part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
Krysa
Kasia Kuzka (she/her), Mateusz Piekarski (he/him), and Arsalan Isa.
A fanatical movement collective, Krysa work across dance, theatre and performance art, often reflecting on their queer Polish upbringing and life in London.
Their recent work has included: damp and housing conditions, Polish wedding rituals, sugar in post-Soviet countries, and mushroom picking societies. They are guided by camp, grotesque and humorous gestures.
Krysa were part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
Keep up to date with Krysa on their instagram
K2K Radio
K2K provides a platform for anyone to share their voices and passions with the world with opportunities to also meet and connect locally at events and gatherings. Since 2012, the tribe has blossomed and now has a dedicated station manager, a super studio tech team, media consultants and a multitude of regular, besides new, DJs presenting a mix of great tunes, random endeavours, local and global focus plus wonderful conversation with a heart sprinkle of banter. They offer free radio production workshops, train budding studio managers and aspiring presenters to allow them to experiment and flourish to industry standards.
K2K is one of Metroland’s longer-term studio residents.
Linett Kamala
Linett Kamala is a DJ, Artist, Academic, Creative Producer & Founding Director of Lin Kam Art. She works across various disciplines including installation, paintings, public art, DJ soundscapes and performance.
Linett is known as the Notting Hill Carnival ‘Sound System Queen’, being credited as one of the first female DJs to perform on a sound system in the mid 1980s at the event and now serves as its Board Director. Today she continues to champion inclusion within sound system culture, advocating for underrepresented groups, including her two initiatives; Lin Kam Art Sound System Futures Programme developing the next generation and Original Sounds Collective; amplifying the presence of women in sound system and moving the culture forward.
Lin Kam Art enriches all lives through festival and sound system culture via public art, takeovers, events, workshops, residencies and programmes. Deeply rooted in community empowerment the socially focused company engages with thousands of people across all ages each year through a range of interventions.
She is also President of the University of the Arts London Alumni of Colour Association, Associate Lecturer in Performance: Design and Practice at the University of the Arts London and in BA (Hons) Live Event Management at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance.
Linett is one of Metroland’s longer-term studio residents.
You can keep up to date with Linett on her website and Linktree.
Ngo Chun Tse (he/him)
Ngo Chun Tse is a Hong Kong-born, London-based artist. He is working across the mediums of moving image, text, installation and lecture performance to address three principal subjects: historiography of decolonisation, the production of images and hauntology of diasporic experience. His recent work Séance (2023 – ongoing) is a video essay exploring the micro-histories of Asian cinema and media. In Sekaikei (2022 – ongoing), he focuses on the intersection between technology and philosophy in digital image production. He received his BA(Hons) Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in 2016 and an MFA Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art, University College London in 2022.
Chun was part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
Heiba Lamara
Since 2013 Heiba Lamara has worked as an artist-researcher exploring independent print and archival practices and publishing as a creative practice for social change. She is Assistant Editor of OOMK (One of my Kind) a zine and publishing collective focused on the spiritual, political and artistic practices of women artists.
Her focus is on self-directed project-based research around print, oral histories, archives and coloniality translating these into zines, artist books and participatory workshops and exhibitions that offer readers/participants an entry point to developing a closer relationship with underexplored topics related to the cultural history of marginalised communities. Driven to provide accessible print spaces under austerity measures, she co- founded the community Risograph print studio Rabbits Road Press in 2017.
https://www.rabbitsroadpress.com/
Other Cinemas
Other Cinemas is a film-based project initiated by Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah to find better, more equitable ways to make and share films. The project seeks to create a deeper connection between the creation of films and their exhibition by organising free, high-quality, film events and taking them to the community in Brent. These free film screenings always showcase the work of Black and non-white filmmakers and aim to speak to, and create space for, these communities. Other Cinemas also runs a free film school for aspiring Black and non-white filmmakers to help support filmmakers and most importantly to create a space for them to work in ways that centre their voices and their communities. The film school is now running for the fourth year and the film screenings started, formally in 2019, and informally much earlier in the filmmakers’ practice. Other Cinemas also create and produce films of their own, with a focus on working collaboratively and with care.
Other Cinemas is one of Metroland’s longer-term studio residents.
You can keep up to date on their instagram, Arwa’s website, or the Other Cinemas website.
Rose Nordin (she/her)
Rose Nordin is an artist and graphic designer working with expanded notions of publishing. Through type design, flag making, installation and metalwork, Rose is interested in printed and material language for governance and devotion.
During her time at Metroland, Rose will be expanding on her research into the animistic properties of letterforms, considering the states and effects of topicality on the book and regional poetic forms. She is specifically interested in processes of healing and extraction of leeches and the potential of the eroded or perforated page. Rose was previously Artist in Residence at Jan Van Eyck Academie (NL) Research Associate at iniva (UK), Social Practice Fellow at the University of Chicago (USA) and is an associate lecturer at the University of Arts London.
Rose was part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
Tom James
Tom is an artist and writer based in Kilburn, and a current resident of Metroland Studios. He creates participatory projects where people can learn real skills, imagine new ways of living, and actually get their hands dirty to give them a try. Most of his recent work has been in response to the climate emergency, and the world we’re creating for ourselves and our children. This work started off pretty hopeless, but is getting more hopeful by the year.
His current project is Absolute Beginners: a new kind of factory in Park Royal Industrial Estate, where local young people can learn how to make everyday products in radically sustainable ways. Previous work includes The Clearing, a collaboration with Alex Hartley to create an inhabited vision of the future in the grounds of Compton Verney Art Gallery; and King’s Cross Gas Workshop, in which he turned Arts Catalyst in King’s Cross into a temporary, off-grid gas works. Tom’s work has been featured across the British press, whilst his cult fanzine about Sheffield, GO, is part of the permanent collection of the V&A.
Tom is one of Metroland’s longer-term studio residents.
Zish (he/they)
Zish is a Brit-ish artist investigating the inter-dimensional nature of images; mental, still, moving and sonic. Their practice engages in re-looking and researching areas of uncanny conceptual density in Pop Culture that resonate with Artaud’s Physical Knowledge of Images.
During Zish’s time with Metroland Cultures, they will develop the next iteration of their expanded cinema project: Kin-Aesthetic Mother Tongue (a.k.a a Ritual to Derive Divinity from Displacement), Image Theory, Performance Lectures and their Sonic Image practice. Zish has previously exhibited at South London Gallery as part of New Contemporaries 2022, studied Academic Practice at UAL via Shades of Noir (an independent pedagogical program grounded in Black Feminism and Intersectional theory) and was a member of Open School East’s 2020 cohort.
Zish was part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.