Pitikasem aka Duke 

My studio practice is focussed exclusively on paint; I make paintings about painting – its histories and possibilities. A fascination with the painted surface, and what can happen in that created space, is a clear thread across my career, from art school in Thailand, through to postgraduate training in Manchester. In recent years, my practice can be seen as a series of explorations in surface disruption. This began with experiments in dissolving the pictorial space of classic works from the European tradition and continues in the current exhibition, which explores the use of depth in abstract pattern making. It’s on the surface that our perceptions are enticed by repeated blocks of colour, pixel-like, leading us into spaces, architectures, virtual worlds. My work seeks to disrupt environments as well as visual perception. The painted surface has agency, it disrupts, messes with our expectations of the world around us. 

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Chalermchon aka Waan

I studied and taught printmaking in Thailand for many years. My position within an art school gave me space to develop and work across different forms, painting, installation. Now resident in the UK, and lacking the space of art school or studio, printmaking has become central to my practice. As a technique, dry point seems to work with a fugitive practice, one which needs to fit-in with parenting and the limits of domestic space. My practice is a series of moments. I’m struck by something I see, like the stacks of unused shopping baskets during lockdown. Or the effect of walking past terraced houses in the UK; the rapid sequence of magnolia interiors. These things stay with me, distil into graphic elements, textures, patterns, repetitions. Landscapes become graphicscapes. Eventually, there’s a moment when I scratch the image onto a plate – there are no moments in-between where the image is sketched on paper or developed. Lack of time is a good discipline, I make the print, it’s done, move on.