The Eagle

Thibault Aedy, Henry Curchod, Joseph Jones, Gina Kuschke, Lo Lai Lai Natalie, Matt Paweski, Ellie Pratt & Jo Spence 

6 September—4 October

The Eagle By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

South Parade is pleased to present The Eagle. The exhibition takes its title and departure point from a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) and draws together works that explore ideas of power, solitude and fragility within the man-made and natural world.

Artist information and biographies at the bottom of the page.

Through introspection and critical observation, Thibault Aedy’s work confronts the contradictions and absurdities of the human experience. Through rendering abject subject matter in formally palatable terms Aedy provokes a double-take, in order to penetrate the viewer’s psyche. By recontextualising medicinal products and imagery, the body is presented in unconventional ways, with particular attention to the digestive tract and the erogenous zones it bridges. Familiar forms — bones, tubes and bodily substances — now objects that feel at once precise and uncanny, scientific and theatrical. Tangible yet destabilised, the work draws upon dark humour and wordplay to create a tension between sincerity and levity, suggesting that discomfort and gratification can coexist on the same plane.

Henry Curchod’s paintings explore the layered nature of identity, drawing on his rich and diverse cultural upbringing to embrace multiplicity, openness, and constant flux. Figures and scenes arise from fragments of memory, forming shifting constellations of line and colour. Through gestural immediacy, Curchod creates a visual language that balances clarity with ambiguity, mapping interior landscapes without resolving them, and capturing moments of fleeting form, emotion, and reflection.

Joseph Jones produces detailed paintings of cats and flowers that explore sensitive notions of care, compassion, and nurture. Known for his highly skilled and technical painting, Jones’s practice equally engages with philosophical enquiries into the nature of images, self-reflection, and the phenomenon of contemporary representation. Constructed from composite images drawn from his vast archive of found and shared photographs, his works recall the intimacy of 17th-century Flemish painting while simultaneously engaging the vernacular of pop culture and the digital image.

Gina Kuschke sees her paintings as both performance and event. Growing up between South Africa and London, her compositions are a response to her cumulative experience of the world. Engaging with differing histories and contexts through a multilingual lens, Kuschke’s monumental works bridge spaces, places, and time. Interrogating her own collective migratory histories and confluences of culture, Kuschke interacts with the surface to re-establish and reframe memories, dreams, imagined and lived experiences. She often draws from research compiled from her annual pilgrimage to her native South Africa and engages with the work as a site of exchange. Described by Kuschke as “eternally performing events” — the paintings embody an experience of the world that is both inherited and lived by the artist. Her daily painting practice often expands into sound works, installation and works on paper, accompanied by integral research components, including watercolour sketches and writing.

Lo Lai Lai Natalie | 勞麗麗 is a former travel journalist. She is interested in food, farming, fermentation, surveillance and meditation. She has a farming practice, using photography, video and installation as a means to interact with nature. Through interviewing former farmers and their farming partners who chose to stay, from the collective farming group, Sangwoodgoon, her work explores ideas of self-fulfilment, the meaning of life, and the various reasons for leaving or staying in a place. The Messenger – Passerby in Our Battlefields tackles the prominent social phenomenon of emigration in Hong Kong. It offers a valuable perspective on the next phase after emigration, presenting the possibility of a deeper exploration and understanding.

Matt Paweski’s sculptures are characterised by a micro attention to detail and an obsessive preoccupation with material, colour and texture. Whilst he previously created hybrid sculptures of wood and steel, his most recent works are made entirely from aluminium plates and sheets, often joined by rivets and illuminated by vibrant monochromes of vinyl paint applied by the artist’s hand. Paweski’s sculptures challenge conventions between artwork and functional object, often seeming to reference carpentry and furniture-making to allude to functionality alongside bold, sweeping expressions of autonomous eccentricity in the sculptures’ curves, kerfs and cut-outs.

Ellie Pratt thinks about one's own reflection in the mirror as she looks to everyday life to explore the material potential of the feminine psyche. Through playful experimentation with the painterly surface, these works deconstruct and distort the traditional depiction of the female figure to capture a more visceral sense of the body.

The photography of Jo Spence (1934–1992) deals with issues of class, power, gender, death and dying. Spence began her career as a commercial photographer, specialising in family portraits and wedding photos. She pushed the medium beyond this narrow subject matter to explore its political function, challenging the social and structural barriers working against female artists of the time. Out of this emerged her collaborations with the Hackney Flashers, a collective of female documentary photographers. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982, Spence later developed the technique of “photo therapy’’ using photography as a therapeutic tool to document her battle with the disease.

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Thibault Aedy (b. 1998, London, UK) lives and works in London. He received his BA in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Arts (2023). Recent exhibitions include Body Count (two-person exhibition with Miriam Simanowitz), 96 Robert Street (London, UK, 2025) and Caressed and Polished and Drained and Washed (two-person exhibition with Dilara Koz), Filet Space (London, UK, 2024).

Henry Curchod (b. 1992, Palo Alto, US) lives and works in London. He received his BA/BFA from the University of New South Wales (2014). Recent selected solo exhibitions include Rome is no longer in Rome, CLEARING, (Los Angeles, US, 2025), WATERPLAY, Gallery Vacancy (Shanghai, CN, 2024), OH FORTUNA!, CLEARING (New York, US, 2024), Paris Internationale, Gallery Vacancy (Paris, FR, 2023) and Trouble on the event horizon, Mammoth (London, UK, 2023). Recent selected group exhibitions include MAISON CLEARING, CLEARING (Basel, CH, 2025), Mystical Me, Corridor Foundation (Shenzhen, CN, 2025), Memories of the future, Almine Rech (London, UK, 2024), Portrait of a man, X Museum (Beijing, CN, 2024), Glad Rags, Jan Kaps (Cologne, DE, 2024), Friends in The Arts, TANK Shanghai (Shanghai, CN, 2023) and Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide, AU, 2023). Henry Curchod’s work belongs to the collections of X Museum, Beijing, Start Museum, Shanghai, Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, Dangxia Foundation, Beijing, Tiantai Museum of Art, Qingdao, M WOODS Museum, Beijing, and Nixon Collection, London, UK. Curchod has received awards from the Art Gallery of South Australia (Ramsay Art Prize, 2023) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sulman Prize, 2023 and 2014).

Joseph Jones (b. 1985, London, UK) received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2010). Recent solo exhibitions include Natural Language, Ehrlich Steinberg (Los Angeles, US, 2025), Joseph Jones, The Artists Room (London, UK, 2024) and Index, Roland Ross (Margate, UK, 2024). Recent selected group exhibitions include Again & Again, Overduin & Co. (Los Angeles, US, 2025), Postales, Galeria Gato (Lima, PE, 2025), Ordinary Things, Workplace (London, UK, 2025), Post-Fair, Ehrlich Steinberg and 4649 Tokyo (Los Angeles, US, 2025) and Prelude of Gaze, SHOPHOUSE (Hong Kong, HK, 2024)

Gina Kuschke (b. 1992, Cape Town, RSA) lives and works in London. She studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2014) and received her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2024). Recent selected group exhibitions include In Dialogue with Ilse D’Hollander, Verduyn (Flanders, BE, 2025), Art Brussels, Night Café (Brussels, BE, 2025), Takes On The Sublime, Night Café (London, UK, 2025), TERRA II, Apsara/Aora (Burgundy, FR, 2024), Scene V: Pas De Quatre, Matt Carey-Williams (London, UK, 2024). Recent performances include a two-day sound installation composed, produced, and installed by Kuschke: Notes on the Sublime (Night Café, London, UK, 2024). In spring 2025, she was selected for a two-month residency with the Porthmeor Residency Programme, Borlase Smart John Wells Trust, St Ives, Cornwall. Her work belongs to prominent private and public collections across the USA, UK, EU, UAE and MX, including The Nixon Collection, London and The Iris Collection, Mexico.

Lo Lai Lai Natalie | 勞麗麗 (b. 1983, Hong Kong) lives and works in Hong Kong. She received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2006 & 2017) and is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Her work has been featured in screening programs at major institutions including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, DE, 2025), M+ Museum (Hong Kong, HK, 2023), Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, US, 2021), Centre Pompidou (Paris, FR, 2020) and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, CN, 2020), among others. In 2025, her work has recently been featured at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (Taipei, TW), Pingshan Art Museum (Shenzhen, CN) and the Goethe-Institute (Hong Kong, HK). In 2024, she participated in Lahore Biennale (PK) and Gwangju Biennale (KR). Her work has received significant recognition, including Finalist, The Format25 Open Call (Derby, UK, 2025); Honorary Mention, Ars Electronica State of the ART(ist) (Linz, AT, 2024); Award for Young Artist (Visual Arts Category), 16th Arts Development Awards (Hong Kong, 2022); Gold Award (Media Arts), 26th ifva Awards (Hong Kong, 2021); and the WMA Commission Grant, WYNG Foundation (Hong Kong, HK, 2018—2019). Her work can be found in the Sigg Collection and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Matt Paweski (b. 1980, Detroit, US) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent selected solo and duo exhibitions include ESSAYS ON ABSTRACTION (part. 3) (two-person with Lecia Dole-Recio), The Fold Gallery (Los Angeles, US, 2025), Table Setting, Volume Gallery (Chicago, US, 2024), MATRIX 191, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, US, 2023), TEEM, Gordon Robichaux (New York, US, 2021 and two-person with Sanou Oumar, 2018), Herald Street (London, UK, 2020, 2017 & 2014), Tre sculture e un disegno, Octagon (Milan, IT, 2019), Park View / Paul Soto (Los Angeles, US, 2018), Lulu (with Ella Kruglyanskaya) (Mexico City, MX, 2018), Ratio 3 (San Francisco, US, 2016) and South Willard (Los Angeles, US, (2015, 2013, 2012). Recent selected group exhibitions include Goldsmiths CCA (London, UK), White Columns (curated by Mary Manning) (New York, US), Gordon Robichaux (New York, US), Queer Thoughts (New York, US), La MaMA Galleria (curated by Sam Gordon) (New York, US), Bodega (New York, US), Harris Lieberman (New York, US), Wallspace (New York, US), Parker Gallery (Los Angeles, US), South Willard (Los Angeles, US), PHIL (Los Angeles, US), Cherry and Martin (Los Angeles, US), Thomas Duncan Gallery (Los Angeles, US), 356 Mission (Los Angeles, US), Richard Telles Fine Art (Los Angeles, US), Octagon (Milan, IT), Librairie Yvon Lambert (Paris, FR) Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR), kurimanzutto, (Mexico City, MX).

Ellie Pratt (b. 1991, Kent, UK) lives and works in London. She received a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art (2013) and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2015). Recent selected solo exhibitions include South Parade (London, UK, 2023), James Fuentes (New York, US, 2023) and PM/AM (London, UK, 2021) and group exhibitions at Stems Gallery x Volery Gallery (Dubai, UAE, 2023), Particle Collection x Philips (Miami, US, 2022), The Artist Room Gallery x Phillips (Seoul, KR, 2022), Lawrence Van Hagen Art, Palazzo Barbaro (Venice, IT, 2022), Workplace (London, UK, 2022), Linseed Projects (Shanghai, CN, 2021) and V.O. Curations (London, UK 2020).

Jo Spence (1934–1992, London, UK). Her works have featured in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including (selected) The 80s: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain (London, UK, 2025), Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, Wellcome Collection (London, UK, 2019); Stills Gallery (Edinburgh, UK, 2016); All Men Become Sisters, Muzeum Sztuki ms2, (Lodz, PL, 2015); Tate Britain BP Spotlight, Tate Britain (London, UK, 2015), Not Yet, Reina Sofia (Madrid, ES, 2015), Work (Part III): The History Lesson, White Columns (New York, US, 2013, Documenta 12 (Kassel, DE, 2007) and Beyond the Perfect Image, MACBA (Barcelona, ES, 2005). Her work is included in numerous important collections such as: The Centre Pompidou (Paris, FR), The Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow, UK), MACBA | Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona, ES), Mead Art Museum at Amherst College (Amherst, US), MOMA | Museum of Modern Art (New York, US), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid, ES), Paul Getty Museum (Malibu, US), Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto, CA), Tate Collection (London, UK), Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), Wellcome Trust (London, UK) amongst many others.