Penny Goring is an artist and poet living in London. For over 30 years, she has produced her work at home with modest means of production, recently focusing on doll-like sculptures made from hand-sewn fabrics and digital collage using MS Paint. Goring channels experiences of anxiety, grief and desperation into myth-making by weaving fable into memory, imagination into history, the personal into the political, until the works become universal expressions of the contemporary state of emergency. Her relentlessly direct poetry is entangled throughout, appearing in titles, drawings, collages and stitched onto her fabric sculptures.

Recent exhibitions include: Cold Hunt Corsage, Arcadia Missa, London, 2025, Sudden Explicit Everywhere, Treize, Paris, 2024, Chronic Forevers, Galerie Molitor, Berlin, 2023, Penny World, ICA, London, 2022. Recent books: Hatefuck the Reader, and Fail Like Fire, both available from Public Knowledge Books and selected bookstores internationally.

Aurelia Guo is a writer and researcher living in London. She is the author of World of Interiors (Divided, 2022).

UK research-based artist Rachel Pimm works with words, objects and photography to trace origins and tell material stories with a focus on the animal, vegetable and mineral as they transform. They look to ecology for the political, feminist, decolonial, the sick and the queer.

Recent work, often collaborative, has been in programmes including Mixed Metaphors, Arts Catalyst, Sheffield (2023), Artangel’s Afterness (2022), The Great Exhibition of the works of Cash Crops, Serpentine Galleries (2019), and Plates, Whitechapel Gallery (2020). Residencies include Loughborough University Chemical Engineering, Gurdon Institute of Genetics at Cambridge University, Rabbit Island, Michigan, USA, Whitechapel Gallery Writer in Residence (2019-20) and Artangel’s inaugural Making Time (2023) and St. Johns College Oxford (2024). Recently they were in residence stewarding an Indigofera plant for CICC (Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes) at Ambika P3 with Serpentine Galleries. They work as Associate Lecturer at various educational institutions including Camberwell College of Art and spend time on anti-policing and pro-Palestinian community organising, gardening and direct action projects around Oxford and the UK. They live and work off grid on a boat on the waterways. They love to eat wild food.

Tai Shani’s artistic practice, comprising performance, film, photography, and installation, uses experimental writing as a guiding method. Oscillating between theoretical concepts and visceral details, Shani’s texts attempt to create poetic coordinates in order to cultivate fragmentary cosmologies of marginalised nonsovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of reproductive labour, illness and solidarity, her work is invested in recovering feminised aesthetic modes – such as the floral, the trippy or the gothic – in a register of utopian militancy. In this vein, the epic, in both its literary long-form and excessive affect, often shapes Shani’s approach: Her long-term projects work through historical and mythical narratives, such as Christine de Pizan’s allegorical city of women or the social history of psychedelic ergot poisoning. Extending into divergent formats and collaborations, Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-)structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present. Tai Shani is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. Her work has been shown extensively in Britain and internationally.

The event is seated.

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1. Credit Linda Nylind
2. Credit Amy Gwatkin
3. Credit Lori E Allen
4. Image courtesy of the artist