#08 Fayann Smith & Thomas Hensher, I See a Room of Future Billionaires, 2021. B/W photographic print. Edition of One. 22x20 cm

Fayann Smith is a multimedia artist and creative consultant working across experimental writing, events, music, film, photography and performance. She is co- founder of the female led arts group October! Collective.

Her work has been featured in the London College of Fashion Archives at University Arts London, US/Japanese/Swedish/German Vogue, Dazed & Confused, Nylon Japan, Forbes, BBC, The Art Newspaper, Artsy, Art Forum, Pop Magazine, i-D, The Atlantic, Disorder Magazine and many more respected titles.

Selected exhibitions: Koppel Project (2020), Bargehouse - OXO Wharf (2020), with October! Collective as flagship project of the launch of Giudecca Art District, Venice (2019), MACRO (2019) and ‘Merdelamerdlamerdelamerdelamer’ at MAM Gallery (2019) curated by Kendell Geers.

Thomas Hensher is a London based photographer whose landscape and portrait juxtapositions explore the relationship between man and nature. For the past decade Thomas has worked extensively with a variety of artists, particularly within the thriving east London LGBT+ community.

Hensher honed his craft shooting in the underground clubs of London’s most extreme clubbing scenes, before moving onto more personal portrait work with an eclectic mix of colourful and idiosyncratic subjects.

Hensher works extensively in low light, placing his subjects in dark, often anxious compositions that portray the nascent state between despair and boiling melancholy.

His pictures carry the oneric fragments of a half forgotten nightmare, capturing an acute sense of confusion and anxiety within rich, painterly compositions.

His approach to landscapes is also far from conventional, often utilising infrared technology and impressionistic blurs to create otherworldly vistas in once seemingly innocuous settings.

At the heart of Hensher’s work is a desire to elevate the prosaic into the fantastical, an acknowledgment, perhaps, that through the camera reality is amorphous and infinitely malleable.