Nadège Mériau

"Nadege Meriau spins a varied practice from a photographic core which frequently sees new systems emerge from the conjunction of natural and human, as in many works touching on the world of the bee. The lightboxes of Petites Morts and the small Daguerreotype-like prints on metal of The Fall stem from an ongoing collaboration with snails and mushrooms. The Fall show the constellation-like results - made in around twenty minutes, snails being 'fast' according to Meriau, of placing them on a flatbed scanner. She also gathers mushrooms from her local woods, positions them face down – led by aesthetic instinct, not scientific investigation – and then leaves the fungi to do their work overnight through touch, movement and the release of oxygen. Their intimate encounters with the photographic device climax as they propel their reproductive spores. The ‘little deaths’ so recorded do indeed have a ghostly air as well as evoking the contrasting mysteries of sexual attraction and asexual reproduction. We might also be reminded of the chance processes introduced into many approaches to abstract painting, and of the frequency with which Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘the rhizome’ is invoked in explaining contemporary art." Curator Paul Carey-Kent

Aysen Dennis loves her flat. Two bedrooms, a neat kitchen-diner, a cosy living room, lots of light, a separate toilet and bathroom, and a much broader hallway than in the poky million-pound Victorian houses that surround her in south London – all for £110 a week, plus £30 heating and service charge. Her flat is warm, and no one can see into it. “I feel free in my home,” she told me recently. “I can take off my clothes without worrying about curtains.” She still has the original 1960s kitchen cupboards, miracles of space-saving and clever joinery. South London hipsters would love them.

The Aylesbury Estate is a modernist high-rise estate in Walworth, south London. The sprawling estate is made up of 2,704 dwellings and, in its prime, housed 7,500 residents, making it one of the largest housing estates in Europe. A symbol of post-war, state-sponsored housing in Britain, the Aylesbury Estate is now the subject of a new exhibition at London’s Geffyre Museum.