As it is Now

As It Is Now is a trunk show featuring emerging UK-based artists. This marks the first time Messums ORG has showcased its artists in New York.

As It Is Now gathered works that explore our complex relationship with the environment, a theme central to these artists’ creative and critical practices. The exhibition invited reflection on humanity’s uneasy place within an ecosystem we have long sought to control—a human-first worldview that has historically “othered” non-human life and justified its exploitation.

These pieces offer moments of exploration: fresh, beautiful inquiries into the potential of a more symbiotic relationship with the natural world. Here, observational art is more than seeing—it is a way of being. These artists create work in conversation with the landscape and with each other.

As it is Now runs alongside a solo exhibition from painter Peter Brown’s Works in New York and presents work from Antony Williams, Tuesday Riddell, Tyga Helme, Tom Waugh, Makoto Kagoshima, Sammy Hawker, Laurence Edwards and Jelly Green.

 

 

Biography 

Jelly Green

[ 1992
- Present ]
Jelly Green (b.1992) is a contemporary British-New Zealand painter. Her work is defined by her passion for the natural world. Having spent extended periods immersed in the global web of jungles and rainforests from Brazil to Borneo and Sri Lanka to New Zealand, Green’s large-scale works revel in the magnificent primordial canopies, while unflinchingly bearing witness to the brutal decapitation and destruction of the arboreal world. Her most recent work is focussed on the wildfires that threaten many of the earth’s forests: the paintings capturing the savage, elemental forces unleashed at the critical moment when the fire takes hold.
Artist Profile

Sammy Hawker

[
- Present ]
Sammy Hawker is an Australian-based visual artist working predominantly on Ngunawal/Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country [Canberra Region, ACT]. Through practices of reciprocity (facilitated acts of co-creation) Sammy’s works explore the potential of interspecies dialogue, giving voice to the presences of more-than human worlds. These works raise questions about how sentience and memory is inscribed within materials, sites and bodies. Sammy’s multi-disciplinary practice embraces text, sculpture, photography, sound and moving image. These works form a vast and ongoing archive, documenting sites and moments of exchange.
Artist Profile

Tom Waugh

[
- Present ]
Tom Waugh makes sculptures from stone and marble that depict discarded, mass-produced objects. Plastic bags, cardboard boxes, and tin cans are squashed, crushed, and wrinkled, documenting the casual imprints of human use. Using the processes and techniques of classical marble carving, and paying close attention to form and surface detail, He achieves a high level of realism in his work.
Artist Profile

Tyga Helme

[ 1990
- Present ]
Trained at Edinburgh College of Art and The Royal Drawing School in London, where she won the Machin Foundation Prize, Tyga uses nature as a metaphor for feelings of being overwhelmed. She couples minute observation of the teeming forest floor – where the emerald green of a bramble leaf sits in stark juxtaposition to an array of cold blue silver leaves – with the flux and movement of unceasing gro
Artist Profile

Antony Williams

[ 1964
- Present ]
Williams works almost exclusively in egg tempera – a painstaking, exacting medium in which egg is used instead of linseed oil as the binding medium. He trained at Farnham College of Art and Portsmouth University and is a member of the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Pastel Society.
Artist Profile

Laurence Edwards

[ 1967
- Present ]
One of the few sculptors who casts his own work, Laurence Edwards is fascinated by human anatomy and the metamorphosis of form and matter that governs the lost-wax process.
Artist Profile

Tuesday Riddell

[ 1992
- Present ]
Tuesday Riddell’s work takes us down to the forest floor and a glorious insight into the world that captures her imagination, that ethereal nocturne where all cycles of life and death carry on with rarely a watchful eye.
Artist Profile

Makoto Kagoshima

[ 1967
- Present ]
Makoto Kagoshima, based in Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, illustrates whimsical and heart-warming motifs on clay, making each ceramic object a unique, one-of-a-kind piece of art. After graduating from the art college, Makoto worked in the Conran Shop in Fukuoka and didn’t become a full time potter until the age of 35. 
Artist Profile
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