Soft Encounters

Natalia Janula, Agata Bogacka,Ell Silk, Oscar Yasamee, Olivia Du Vergier
curated by Maggie Murray.

07.03.26 - 04.04.26

Soft Encounters brings together the current cohort of artists taking part in the annual Flatland × De La Warr Pavilion Studio Development Programme, based at Beeching Road Studios.

Now in its third year, the programme is rooted in a simple proposition: that time, space and sustained conversation matter. It supports artists to stay with their work, to test ideas, return to material, and allow things to unfold at their own pace.
Here, soft speaks not to weakness but to an alternative to hardness and certainty – an approach that values care, mutuality and porousness.

Across film, painting and sculpture, the works in this exhibition are shaped by attention to
fragments, repetitions and material resistance.
Images are slowed, looped and revisited; surfaces become sites of projection, observation and
dreaming; sculptural forms chew, bind, sag and misbehave. Rather than pushing towards
resolution, the works hold experience open, allowing uncertainty, gentleness and ambiguity to
remain active.

Olivia Du Vergier’s moving-image works draw on brief, intimate moments from her personal
archive. Through looping and repetition, details are isolated and extended, producing a closeness that is felt rather than declared. These encounters sit between invitation and distance, holding the viewer within moments that are not quite their own.

Ell Silk’s sculptural works bring attention to bodies and systems under pressure. Materials appear chewed, discarded and reassembled through processes of mastication, binding and exhaustion. What emerges is unstable and resistant, moving between compulsion and collapse before settling into a softer, less predictable rhythm.

Oscar Yasamee’s paintings operate as observations from inside systems of looking.
Drawing on banal imagery and familiar cultural tropes, the works hover between control and
dissociation, treating the painted surface as both screen and membrane. Disorder and fragility sit alongside restraint, held within the same frame.

Agata Bogacka’s works create space for observation, notation and reverie. Guided by
acts of gathering and attention, her paintings trace patterns through memory, movement
and emotion. Clay sits quietly at the centre of this practice, grounding it, while the painted
surface becomes a way of listening to the shifting emotional contours of the body.

Natalia Janula’s sculptural installation reconfigures everyday objects so they resist fixed function and stable form. Through hybridity, exaggeration and dysfunction, familiar materials become sensual, excessive or precarious. These misbehaving objects invite new ways of relating – between bodies, labour and material agency.

Soft Encounters is shaped by time spent together in the studio: shared questions, informal
exchanges and parallel lines of enquiry. The exhibition reflects a period of working alongside
one another – close, attentive and unresolved – and offers a prelude to encounters that continue to unfold.

This exhibition has been made possible with the support of the Bridget Riley Foundation,
Rother District Council, Arts Council England, and ArtFund’s Reimagine programme whichhas funded this years FLP x DLWP Curatorial Fellowship.