Fifth Floor
A Digital Exhibition by the First-Year Slade MFA Painting Cohort
About the exhibition
Fifth Floor celebrates the first-year Slade MFA Painting cohort and the community they have built over the past year. Organised by the students themselves, the exhibition brings together work from across the cohort at a significant moment in their development as artists.
Artists 16
Artists 16
Works 22
About the exhibition
Presented by
Vortic Art & Cosimo
Dates
26 Jun - 20 Jul 2026
Fifth Floor celebrates the first-year Slade MFA Painting cohort and the community they have built over the past year. Organised by the students themselves, the exhibition brings together work from across the cohort at a significant moment in their development as artists.
Visitors to the group’s fifth-floor studio space in Woburn Square enter through the industrial 1950s manual lift and, in doing so, leave the streets of London behind. Entering the space, they encounter a wide range of approaches to painting, each shaped by distinct questions, materials, and interests. While distinct from one another, these practices have developed side by side through a year of shared conversation, critique, and experimentation.
Named after this space, Fifth Floor brings together work from across the cohort. The exhibition reflects the different concerns and approaches that have occupied the studio over the last twelve months, while celebrating the community that has formed there. Seen together, the works seek to resist any singular definition of what painting is or should be, instead revealing the medium as an expansive field capable of holding multiple ways of making, thinking and seeing.
Created with the support of Cosimo and Vortic, the exhibition also explores how digital platforms can help artists share their work, providing an opportunity for the cohort to exhibit together and inviting new audiences into the space they have built around their practice.
Beth Simcock
About the artist
Beth Simcock is an artist working primarily in figurative painting, where she borrows the grammar of Pastoral tradition to render subjects from memory, archive, and the dancefloors of gay bars.
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Beth Simcock is an artist working primarily in figurative painting, where she borrows the grammar of Pastoral tradition to render subjects from memory, archive, and the dancefloors of gay bars.
In her creative process, fiction and painting are closely entwined; each reshaping observation, research, and memory into new forms and follies. Her experience of ocular migraines with aura provides a phenomenological reference for the prismatic colour and numinous haze that characterise her visual language.
Thematically, Beth’s work engages an un-worlding project that explores alternative masculinities, often quoting metaphors of the cowboy parallel to her own young adulthood spent working with horses. She searches to locate queer micro-utopia in moments of fleeting togetherness: a glittering weekend in a long summer.
Beth is a graduate of the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. Her debut solo exhibition, The Zodiac, was presented at Modern Art Oxford as part of the CVAN South East Platform Graduate Award in 2021.
Beth has held residencies in the UK and Japan, and her paintings are held in esteemed private collections internationally.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Beth SimcockM on a Pool Float, 2026
Jun
About the artist
A watercolor, pastel and oil painter.
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I paint on cloth, muslin, paper, and linen, letting watercolour sink in. Work stays close to the female body, and female-centered eros.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Jun Her__, Begun before Beginning, 2025
Masha Barks
About the artist
Masha explores the tensions and overlaps that shape relationships between humans, non-human persons, and their shared ecologies.
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Masha graduated with first-class honours in BA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (2022) and is currently completing her MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art. Recent residencies include Turps Banana (2024) and Colart (2026). Her work has been featured in Frieze Magazine and Cold Magazine and shown at venues including Willesden Gallery, One Paved Court Gallery, and Camden Open Air Gallery, in London; and internationally at Wild Horses Gallery, Copenhagen, and Bon Génie, Geneva. She collaborated on the workshop with the Zoological Society of London and the Grant Museum of Zoology to reimagine the Studio of Animal Art at London Zoo (2026).
Masha works primarily in oil painting, drawing on internet aesthetics and the visual language of furry fandom. Using found imagery from online archives, I restage amateur discarded photographs, considered poor image, reversing hierarchies of gaze and power. These works are deliberately strange, suspended between identities, where queerness and animality become sites of intimacy, projection, and storytelling. My paintings construct theatrical, often tender scenes that foreground interspecies care while muddying the distinction between fantasy and reality. By repurposing marginal or discarded visual material, I transform digital debris into a space for reimagining, where identities and subjects stay in flux.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Masha BarksInput Error (Horses), 2026
Fiona Berry
About the artist
Fiona Berry is a multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, sculpture, photography, text, assemblage and film.
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Fiona Berry (b.1996) is currently studying an MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Art. She graduated in Intermedia Art from the University of Edinburgh (2018) and completed the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School (2019). She has collaborated with archaeologist Dr Frederika Tevebring on her display at King’s College London’s Curiosity Cabinet (2023) and showed work with Alice Black Gallery, London (2023) and Artground Gallery (2024). Recent residencies include Borgo Pignano (2024, 2025) and Dumfries House (2022).
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Fiona BerryThe Tree of Life, 2025
Kaiqi Lyu
About the artist
Kaiqi Lyu (b. 1994, China) is a visual artist currently based in London. He completed his Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts in Painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.
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Kaiqi Lyu (b. 1994, China) is a visual artist currently based in London. He completed his Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts in Painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.
His practice explores the relationship between the everyday, memory, and time, and how these experiences can be observed and traced in art. Fire is a central visual language In his works, through which perception, memory and temporality are made visible. He draws inspiration from diverse sources, including ancestral worship, paper offerings, chronophotography, and manga. In his paintings, he uses unpainted edges and dry brush to create a subtle glow, presenting things in a state of continuous burning and fading.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Kaiqi LyuPaper Memory, 2026
Hallam T Wood
About the artist
Hallam Wood (b.1996) is an artist whose practice centres around painting and drawing.
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Hallam Wood (b.1996) is an artist whose practice centres around painting and drawing. He also enjoys going on very long walks. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths in 2019 and has lived in London ever since. About his practice he says:
“I am interested in the meeting place between looking, thinking and feeling. I hope for my paintings to have the quality of half formed sentences, balancing on the edge of articulation and incoherence”
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Hallam T WoodNima Talking, Lucinda Working, 2026
Esther Forse
About the artist
Esther Forse is currently studying for an MA in Fine Art at the Slade.
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Esther Forse is currently studying for an MA in Fine Art at the Slade. She paints with oil on panel, focusing on film sets, models, and other landscapes and objects of a not-straightforward nature, and working with photos and videos from various archival sources. This allows for exploration of the relations between painting and: realism, documentation, thought, history, spectacle, transcribing, translating, mediating, editing, and the current status of memory and imagery across various media. People are carefully painted out to create still, depopulated scenes; though their shadows and reflections often remain.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Esther ForseCloud Study (Illumination), 2026
Rose Turner Mullan
About the artist
Rose Turner Mullan’s practice expands out from painting and intersects with fashion, costume, performance and installation.
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Rose Turner Mullan’s practice expands out from painting and intersects with fashion, costume, performance and installation.
She graduated from The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford in 2017.
Turner Mullan is interested in the implied figure or persona contained within a costume or outfit. She is currently using a collage of different dressmaking motifs; fold, ruffle, pleat, alongside tropes of ‘expressive painting’; pour, drip, stain, in works where the elements are repeated and reconfigured across a series.
Turner Mullan’s practice is one that is led by a play with materials and their shifting registers as they are combined and separated back out again. She views fabric as a readymade motif within her work as well as providing a surface to build narrative on top of through painting, cutting, pining and draping.
Her current attitude when making is one of provisional flamboyance.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Rose Turner MullanChrome Pleats, 2026
Ruby Waage Townsend
About the artist
Interdisciplinary fine artist, arts educator, creator of worlds.
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Ruby Waage Townsend (b.1996, Leicester, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist, world-weaver, fairytale writer & schildermanneke.
Working across painting, performance, installation, and myth, their practice treats painting as a performative act—one that conjures enchanted realism, unstable identities, and shifting power dynamics. Drawing on folklore, lived experience, and dark humour, Ruby creates immersive worlds where comedy and tragedy entwine, the beautiful brushes up against the grotesque, and fairytales are rewritten with prosthetic snouts and cabbage heads.
They are currently completing an MFA in Painting at The Slade School of Fine Art and graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from De Montfort University in 2023. Ruby has undertaken residencies including AA2A at Loughborough University, Ilkeston Contemporary Arts, UK New Artists People, Place, Practice, and the CMR residency in Redruth, Cornwall.
Recent highlights include a commissioned portrait of Baroness Doreen Lawrence (2023) for De Montfort University. Their work is held in permanent and private collections, including De Montfort University Board Room, Ilkeston Contemporary Arts, and Sir Peter Soulsbys private collection. They are a recipient of the Irving Wernick Scholarship and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant.
Alongside their studio practice, Ruby delivers workshops, curates exhibitions, and produces site-responsive and community-led projects with organisations including Ilkeston Contemporary Arts, UK New Artists, Soft Touch Arts, and Pedestrian. They are a member of the Working Class Creatives Database and live and work in London, UK.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Ruby Waage TownsendDe Zwanenrijders, 2026
Ruby Waage TownsendKludder , 2026
Ruby Waage TownsendDe Moerasdieran, 2026
Ruby Waage TownsendElectric Shock (1967), 2026
Ruby Waage TownsendDamp, 2026
Ruby Waage TownsendTeefje, 2026
Doy Kim
About the artist
Multidisciplinary artist creating virtual worlds where fear and anxiety transform into speculative hybrid ecosystems.
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Doy Kim is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting and installation. She constructs layered virtual worlds that explore the boundaries between reality and fantasy, and between life and death.
Her practice begins from personal experiences of loss and anxiety, which she transforms into speculative environments where fear is displaced into new forms and roles. Through these worlds, she transforms fear and anxiety into speculative environments in which threats are displaced into new forms and roles.
Her work draws on contemporary concerns such as the environmental crisis and the complex relationship between North and South Korea. Through these worlds, she examines the hierarchical relationship between humans and nature, reflecting how natural systems are reconstructed and distorted through artificial processes.
Her recent work focuses on artificial nature, imagining hybrid ecosystems composed of industrial materials, extinct species, and fabricated life forms.
Through painting and sculptural elements, she creates environments that feel familiar yet subtly distorted, reflecting the unstable relationship between the natural and the artificial.
Her major solo exhibitions include [Eingang] (2023, Künstlerhaus Bethanien) and Seedling (2021, Daegu Art Factory).
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Doy KimHow to Gently Embrace Anxiety, 2026
Ellathea Jackson-Harris
About the artist
Ellathea Jackson-Harris is a multidisciplinary artist based in London.
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Ellathea Jackson-Harris is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Her practice is heavily facilitated by the critical selection of archival material and documentation from sites and occurrences of intrigue. She is interested in memory, memorabilia, movement and withdrawal; seeking to explore subjects' capabilities to evoke varied responses through negotiating processes of visual association, compilation and reframing. Predominantly working across painting, drawing and sculpture, her practice uses varied materials and surfaces as modes of interrogating conditions of time-keeping.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Ellathea Jackson-HarrisEntry Points (1), 2025
Youran Liu
About the artist
An oil painter who deconstructs traditional female narratives to explore self-identity and the contemporary female condition.
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Youran Liu is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. She holds both her Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts in Oil Painting from the China Academy of Art (2014-2021), during which she also completed an artist residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Her artistic practice is primarily represented by Tang Contemporary Art in Asia. She held a major solo exhibition, The Body of Cybele, with the gallery in Bangkok (2023). Her work has been showcased at premier international art fairs, including The Armory Show in New York, Art Basel Hong Kong, and ART021 Shanghai, among others. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions across major art hubs in Asia, such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Her painting practice seeks to deconstruct female imagery within traditional narratives, exploring the boundaries of female identity. Working from personal perspectives while situating them within broader social and cultural contexts, Liu draws inspiration from diverse sources, including folklore, fairytales, and mysticism across different cultures. She integrates Eastern traditional aesthetics with contemporary visual language, extending the possibilities of painting as a medium. In her recent works, she investigates the relationship between energy transformation and painterly language, approaching painting as a site for spiritual inquiry and a dialogue with cosmic forces.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Youran LiuBirth, 2025
Gaurav Gupta
About the artist
Gaurav Gupta is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, painting and printmaking.
Online
Gaurav is a visual artist and educator, and a graduate of the City and Guilds of London Art School. His group exhibitions have included Art Mumbai, Mumbai (2024, 2025); Gorst Road Studios, London (2024); Cite, Lea Bridge Library, London (2023); Frieze (Cork Street), Jhaveri Contemporary, London (2023); India Art Fair, Delhi (2023). Solo exhibitions include Confluence, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (2023).
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Gaurav GuptaCyclic 1, 2025
Tabitha Rose
About the artist
Tabitha Rose is a painter, with an artistic practice broadening into drawing, writing, hand sewing and printmaking.
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Tabitha Rose is a painter, with an artistic practice broadening into drawing, writing, hand sewing and printmaking. She is currently collecting things magpie-like (talismans, story, poetic quotidian, half-memory, ruralness, land-space-ness, seasonal intimacy) and cultivating a space to arrange them, where imagined figures act as a compass for the fragile internal logic of the paintings. Her work follows a girlish phenomenology in attempt to make sense of the world, where meaning is given to that which might otherwise be meaningless, but is always anchored in a duality of fragility and endurance, with hope given more space.
She has big plans for knitting and is currently studying (shedding~reforming) MFA Fine Art at Slade School of art.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Tabitha Roseeverything tastes better (grab a knife), 2026
Jennifer Louise Martin
About the artist
Multi-disciplinary artist.
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Currently studying an MFA in Painting at The Slade, UCL, Jennifer Louise Martin (b.1980, London, UK) is a multi-disciplinary artist rooted in painting but works across film and installation. Jennifer graduated with a Bsc in Psychology & Neuroscience at Leeds University as well as completing a Postgraduate in Fine Art at Byam Shaw & Foundation Course at Central St. Martins. Jennifer is interested in how various mental states alter our engagement with reality, the way that psychological shifts can imbue seemingly banal everyday objects or even surface patterns with a kind of confused aura to hint a melancholic undertow. Childhood objects, photos, memories and textures inform her work to underpin our universal human experiences. The paintings present a portrait of a feeling, projection of mood and atmosphere, through the use of colour, brushwork and erasure. The experimental films explore a range of phenomena, fashioning the material of life with visuals that are sometimes overlaid with jarring sounds to create a sense of unease.
@jenniferlouisemartin
www.jenniferlouisemartin.com
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Jennifer Louise MartinSocial Construct , 2026
Zeha Imran
About the artist
Visual artist, art educator, and nature lover.
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Zeha Imran is a painter whose practice explores the shifting relationship between memory, observation, and imagination. Working from personal photographs and lived experience, she creates paintings that inhabit states of transition, where figures, objects, and landscapes drift between presence and absence.
In her process, painting becomes a conversation between the canvas and the artist; images emerge through intuition, material experimentation, and responses to the world unfolding around her. Through layered surfaces, fluid gestures, and moments of transparency, she investigates paint as both a conceptual and emotional language.
Thematically, Imran’s work engages with liminality, displacement, and the instability of perception. Her paintings seek to capture fleeting moments that resist fixed narratives, holding space for uncertainty, memory, and transformation.
Imran completed her BFA in Painting with Honours from the National College of Arts and is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Ruskin Art Prize, Qatar Art Fair, Conrad Dubai, and the French Embassy. In 2024, she participated in the Eutopia Artist Residency and was part of the Windsor & Newton Artist Residency, London, in 2026.
Works presented in Fifth Floor...
Zeha ImranBLOOMER, 2026
Zeha ImranCOSMOS, 2026
Through layered gestures and saturated fields of colour, this painting navigates the space between control and contingency. Sweeping marks interrupt and conceal one another, creating a visual rhythm of emergence and erasure. The work resists stable representation, instead foregrounding painting as an event—an accumulation of decisions, revisions, and material encounters. Dense passages of orange and yellow hover against muted greys and violets, generating a tension between luminosity and opacity. In this shifting field, meaning remains unresolved, inviting the viewer to linger within the painting’s continual state of becoming.
Walks, runs, pilgrimages, journeys. The eternal state of movement. The eternal state of becoming. Here, in this dream-like image a tree or monument-sculpture sits atop a hill or stair-ed monument. Drawn in coloured pencil with a density of colour on this scale, requires an endurance and patience in the process , akin to the qualities needed in the travellers seen at the foot of the image in the shadows. Revealed to them a mirage. An oasis. The shade beneath a monumental tree in the blistering heat. Guarded by a figure of authority, or is it a lizard creature? Beyond the tree, hovers a door. Beneath the figures, triangles are patch-worked together, giving the woven pencil lines the feeling of a tapestry.
It is an overlap between the experience of the everyday and ritual practice. Immersed in a glowing red light, things suspended between disappearing and reappearing. Through this imagined act of burning, the fleeting nature of everyday life is given weight and visibility.
How to Gently Embrace Anxiety is a research-based project that began after encountering the partially 3D-reconstructed skeleton of the extinct quagga at the UCL Grant Museum. The reconstructed yet incomplete body produced a strong sense of unease, revealing how extinction is mediated and reassembled through human systems of knowledge.
This led me to question the boundary between nature and human intervention, where life is classified, reconstructed, and controlled. I became interested in how far such manipulation can extend, and what it means to live with or consume altered forms of nature.
The project developed through research into extinction, museum display systems, and genetic modification, particularly GMO foods designed for heightened sweetness and consumption. I focused on how desire and control intersect in artificial food systems, and how nature is reshaped by human expectation.
In response, I produced paintings imagining the quagga’s environment and diet as speculative plant and berry forms, later translated into sugar-based sculptural objects in collaboration with the Institute of Making—Experimental Kitchen. The work connects extinction, reconstruction, and GMO culture, questioning the hierarchy between natural and artificial life.
The work exists between fairytale and lived experience, with its feet rooted in reality and its head somewhere else entirely. Figures emerge between worlds: fragments, dreams, psychodramas. Identities split and multiply; characters are performed, repeated, concealed.
Through self-portraiture, costume, and cut-out painting on cardboard, I use paint as a transformative device to move through lived memory, nightmares, longing, grief, and the unstable process of becoming. These figures are not fixed selves but shifting performances: attempts to understand what remains after rupture and what might still be possible.
Many of the creatures draw loosely from Dutch folklore and invented mythologies: swamp beings, punished dogs who become punishers, liminal creatures suspended between desire and consequence. They occupy a space between survivorship and spectacle, carrying both heaviness and an impulse towards movement, dance, and transformation.
The use of cardboard references class and impermanence whilst resisting ideas of preciousness and permanence in painting. Investment is placed into materials that may not endure. Time within the work is similarly unstable; grief collapses temporal distance, pulling the past closer than the present and making the future difficult to reach.
These paintings function as snapshots of otherness and acts of performance. Nothing is fully revealed. Each figure appears posed, suspended for the viewer. Yet something unsettles the performance: perhaps the eyes disclose something else entirely, or perhaps they ask a question,
Do you see me?
Will you listen?
Hovering between space and abstraction, COSMOS reflects an ongoing dialogue between memory, observation, and material process. Layers of translucent colour and gestural marks create a space where forms appear only to dissolve again, resisting stable interpretation. The horizon acts as a temporary anchor within a shifting field of movement, light, and atmosphere. Through paint’s capacity for both concealment and revelation, the work explores moments of uncertainty, transition, and becoming.
This piece reinterprets the archetype of the witch—a figure historically shrouded in mystery, danger, and even fear. I have reimagined her birth as a manifestation of both softness and strength. Painted at a scale slightly larger than life, the work aims to invite viewer empathy while clearly distinguishing her from real human beings.
My visual language is deeply influenced by ancient Chinese mural paintings and late 20th-century animation, which have shaped my ongoing research into the expressive power of high-saturation palettes and dynamic curves. In my recent practice, I have focused on two core elements: curves and red. To me, curves serve as the trajectory of energy, representing a flowing tension that feels both timeless and detached from reality. Meanwhile, red acts as the temperature of that energy. It is an emotionally direct and culturally complex color, bridging life, death, and flesh, while simultaneously carrying connotations of romance and vitality.
Through constant deconstruction and restructuring, I attempt to guide the viewer to explore the profound magnetism of the female connection to natural energy, as well as the complexity of their inner worlds, while establishing a narrative that transcends time.
This is a painting of a childhood photograph from 1991 where the artist herself is present. The final year group are posing for the school play HMS Pinafore group portrait. The painting has a pastel colour palette to ignite nostalgia and memory with some of the faces left blank to signify social conformity. The softness of the brushwork and erasure of the facial, create an unsettling atmosphere and is a depiction of a psychological landscape rather than actual people asking the question - how do we remember people?
