Elena Lo Presti

[elenalopresti]

I’m a multidisciplinary artist originally from Rome (Italy) and now based in London. My work is focused on slow-making practices and crafts, focusing on the importance of making by hand, of taking your own time with your thoughts and ideas, and going against fast, capitalist structures of production and art-making. Conceptually, I revisit themes revolving around the domestic, the personal, memory and the passing down of traditions. 

In 2020 I founded Craft Forward, a Community Interest Company that aims to explore community engagement and accessibility within the contemporary art world, and create social impact by connecting people through creative projects and interventions, facilitating workshops and bringing arts and craft to communities in South London. 

[elenalopresti]

The Knit Club with Community Arts Box for New Vision for Women asylum seekers (Craft Forward)

Collaborative workshop with Community Arts Box CIC celebrating Eid Al-Adha through knitting, sharing stories, dancing and eating with a group of asylum seekers women.

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The Collage Club at 3Space International House (Craft Forward)

The Collage Club was a collage workshop hosted in Brixton, open to anyone that wanted to explore this craft and connect with other local creatives.

The workshop was suitable for everyone that had never encountered or worked with collage before and for people that regularly make use of it, but most importantly, it was a time to enjoy the process and the freedom that this medium provides while making with fellow creatives.

[elenalopresti]

The Knit Club at 3Space International House (Craft Forward)

The Knit Club at 3Space International House, Brixton in June 2022. 

The Knit Club is a relaxed and welcoming knitting group, open to beginners and experienced knitters to work on their knit or crochet projects together and connect with other local creatives.

This time, we encouraged participants to bring their own projects to work on. The Knit Club is still open to anyone interested in approaching crafting and textile art for the first time, but the session was structured favouring more independent making, rather than working on the same square pattern as we did previously. 

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Blankets for Lambeth 2022 (Craft Forward)

We launched Blankets for Lambeth 2022 the project on the 16th of September and we simultaneously started collecting squares and yarn. This time, we have decided to engage our participants with in person and online knitting workshops, and we managed to reach a large variety of demographics and audiences, with some participants returning from last year’s Blankets from Lambeth and with new people from the community getting involved for the first time with the project. 

From September until early January, we have collected over 560 squares and three finished blankets, resulting in a total of 19 blankets to donate to the community.

Read the full impact report here. 

Gallery of blankets:

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Sat down at the dinner table we look into each other's eyes and we say nothing for San Mei Gallery

“Sat down at the dinner table we look into each other's eyes and we say nothing” was part of San Mei Gallery’s winter fundraiser, where I was invited to make an object for the dinner table, or about the communal experience of being at a dinner table.

“Sat down at the dinner table we look into each other's eyes and we say nothing” is a hand-built bowl made out of unglazed Parian porcelain and inscribed with a short story in Italian, threaded with a crochet cord. With this piece, I am once again reflecting on the value of crafts and small objects in contemporary art, lacing them together with narratives of home, eating, memory and nostalgia.

[elenalopresti]

Before dinner time at Tactile Bosch

“Before dinner time”, 2021. Parian porcelain, cotton crochet lace, almond, hazelnut and milk candy.

“Before dinner time” was part of “Waiting Room”, a group exhibition featuring sculpture, moving image, performance, text and sound works by fifteen international artists. The exhibition theme is a response to the transitory nature of liminal spaces, the uncanny in-between that binds ‘what was’ to ‘what will be’.

[elenalopresti]

The Restaurant in Space for DOOR Creative Studio (Amsterdam)

“The Restaurant in Space”, sound piece, speakers, chalk writing. Part of the exhibition “Not a Sphere” at DOOR Creative Studio.

The Restaurant in Space is a sound work that tells the boring yet miraculous story of life between Streatham and the Moon. It describes the difficulties of making a house into a new home, through the omnipresent power of a graffiti and my personal chili recipe. The artwork aims at positioning the viewer within the narrative of the audio work while simultaneously disembodying them to allow different layers of understanding to emerge. 

Through very human acts and a very human story, I am presenting my own take on how it feels to be displaced and misunderstood, touching on themes of otherness, distortion and speculation, speculating between the similarities of South London and the Sea of Tranquility.

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The Knit Club for Blankets for Lambeth at Pop Brixton - November 2021 (Craft Forward)

Read our full impact report for 2021 here.

On our second rendition of The Knit Club in collaboration with The Brixton Project, we focused on collecting data about the participants’ well-being during the session. 

Knitting has been proven to provide several benefits, some of those are:

· Reduced depression and anxiety · Distraction from chronic pain · Increased sense of well-being · Reduced loneliness and isolation

The residents of Lambeth have been shown to be disproportionately affected by the pandemic, with some of the highest infection and mortality rates, as well as increases in mental health problems and isolation from the wider community due to increased anxiety and restrictions on gathering.

With our workshops we wanted to prioritize participants well-being over skills, aiming to provide them with an experience of community while showing them the benefits of knitting as a practice.

[elenalopresti]

The Knit Club Online - (Craft Forward)

Starting from the 4th of November, we carried out four online knitting sessions across November and December.

The sessions were held on Zoom and were free to attend, and the participants were encouraged to have their own yarn and knitting needles. We utilised a camera on a tripod, so participants saw what we were knitting; each week we shared new stitch patterns to create together during the sessions, following some feedback we received on our first workshop.

The online sessions worked very well with a lower number of participants, and were especially effective at creating a relaxed and safe atmosphere. The majority of participants weren’t based in London, and this was an important opportunity for Craft Forward to reach people outside of our usual area.

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The Knit Club for Blankets for Lambeth at Pop Brixton - October 2021 (Craft Forward)

The Knit Club was a workshop in collaboration with The Brixton Project that happened on the 10th of October 2021 at POP Brixton, as part of the week-long event The Space in Between, a series of talks, events and happenings celebrating Brixton’s Creative Enterprise Zone.

The Knit Club was open to beginners and experienced knitters to come together, connect, learn more about the craft and its radical history and produce knitted squares to go towards our Blankets for Lambeth project.

Blankets for Lambeth is Craft Forward’s seasonal project where we assemble blankets to donate to homeless individuals in Lambeth. During the first iteration of the project, we assembled fourteen blankets and the project included the delivery of online workshops and talks to help people knit and crochet the squares that would make up the resulting blankets, as well as the creation of a community of individuals from all over the UK (and even some from Europe) that cares, and that came together in these times of hardship to help the most vulnerable of our community through arts and craft.

The Knit Club was open to anyone interested in approaching crafting and textile art for the first time and to any creative who wanted an opportunity to make together and connect with other makers.

The workshop was structured like a relaxed and welcoming knitting group: we started the session by introducing Craft Forward and our values and aims, together with our project Blankets for Lambeth. We then started our making session, where we provided each participant with knitting needles, yarn and a zine with instructions on how to make a 5cm by 5cm square, together with information about Craft Forward and Blankets for Lambeth. We guided the less experienced knitters with their project, while the more experienced ones crafted with more autonomy. We think of making together as a very powerful practice and we encouraged that during The Knit Club: talking and connecting among the participants was facilitated and encouraged during the session, so that by the end the final product wasn’t only a knitted square but an experience of sociality and community.

Full impact report here.

[elenalopresti]

Unfinished bed-time stories for the London Design Festival

As part of my installation re-adapting Unfinished bed-time stories for the show Formalis at the Old Bottle Factory, I have done a durational performance of an hour, knitting a long red thread that connected two ceramic vessels and discussing crafts and slow making with the visitors of the exhibition in the process.

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Craft Forward

Craft Forward creates social impact by connecting people through creative projects and interventions, facilitating workshops and bringing arts and craft to communities in South London. 

We provide accessible creative experiences to anyone who wants to connect to their creative side regardless of their skills, experience or background. We facilitate social safe spaces within our interactive sessions, utilizing simple materials and traditional creative processes (such as knitting, writing, ceramics, collage making) to introduce you not only to a new way of crafting, but also to a group of fellow creative individuals that will be making with you. We think of arts and crafts as smaller, valuable actions that contribute to the community’s well being and that can tackle bigger social issues and in the importance of creating together and creating collectively, redesigning a more inclusive art world and going back to ways of working that are rooted in simplicity, comprehensiveness and accessibility.

Follow us on Instagram and get involved: https://www.instagram.com/craft_forward/?hl=en

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Waste Exchange Workshop at Cromwell Place

Documentation video from the physical iteration of Waste Exchange, a super 8 assemblage workshop. 

Grab a length of super 8 developed in food waste, some utensils and a seat as we gather to collectively dismantle and manipulate the reel. Draw, splice and dent the film before we reassemble and screen the scraps. 

 Participating Artists: Anita Marante Elena Lo Presti Patrick O’Neill Kevin Siwoff Kathryn Attrill Sergei Zinchuk

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Acacia Honey

Acacia Honey is a recorded performance where I walked to Tower of London at 6am to see an acacia tree and reflect on imposter syndrome and honey.

Duration: 3:32 minutes

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Pane, burro e zucchero

Sound work, duration: 2:58 minutes, 2021.

This audio piece revolves around a traditional Italian snack, addressing memory, the formation of community and intergenerational narratives. For me, it's extremely important to amplify the domestic and personal space because I believe that’s where fictitious and reality meet. In a personal space there’s memory, there are dreams, there’s the body, there’s simultaneous awareness of past, present and future.

[elenalopresti]

Unfinished bed-time stories

Unfinished bed-time stories (tra il Mar Tirreno e la Manica) is an installation exploring crafts and slow making, intergenerational narratives and historical artefacts, autofiction, memory and domesticity. The seven vessels were hand-built with flecked white stoneware following the shape of ancient ceramics, and are decorated on the outside with handwritten texts. They were born after thoroughly researching Egyptian canopic vases and Korean placenta jars, all containers for bodily remains. I imagined building containers for “memory remains”, and passing down knowledge through them utilizing the stories carved on them. Subverting the classical decorations on ancient pots depicting mythological tales and heroic adventures, I am writing down a narrative that valorises the small and the intimate, to share a variety of contents relating to my exploration of the domestic in relation to fiction (from cake recipes, to diary pages, to ancient Greek hymns). The songs in Italian and English (performed by Irene Boitani and Stella Kajombo) are vocal renditions of the stories written on the urns, a choral invite to come closer and read more.

Installation at Cromwell Place, London

Mixed media (stoneware ceramics, knitted cord, cotton duvet, cotton pillows, speakers), dimensions variable, 2021.