Flashbacks: sitting in the south of France during the month of August, staring into the night sky, every night waiting for a shooting start to fall within my field of vision. It never happened until years later in Cuba, when I wasn’t even trying. Valerie's sculpture emits this sense of awaiting and determination, looking beyond what is here in this moment.

Miranda Forrester is a figurative painter from London.

Forrester’s practice explores the queer black female gaze in painting, relating to the history of men painting womxn naked. Forrester’s work is concerned with addressing the invisibility of women of colour in the history of art and combating the fetishization of these bodies.

As physical places are shut, people are locked into their homes and the online business world is booming. Zoom, Shopify, Instagram, Clubhouse have all adapted to engage, advertise and sell to their customers. Zoom parties, Clubhouse talks, Instagram Lives, this is about how social it has gotten in Covid times. I have thought about these tools for Studi0 and how they can or cannot be used in terms of engaging and replacing events in the art sector and here are my thoughts on it:

In the last couples of weeks one thing has been resting at the tip of the world's tongue, NFT. Many hail them as the future of collectables, a beacon of hope burning brightly in favour of a decentralised and democratised art system; others as the worst thing that could happen, a pyramid scheme ready to devour the eager, tech-savvy young artist. But what are NFT’s? Why did one just sell for $69.3 million, and can I make one?

We are immensely proud to be working with 13 amazing female artists (out of 18 artists in total) in our first Studi0 Edition. Representation of women in the art world is, still today, a hot topic that needs to be addressed and we will get into this in another Editorial, but for now we want to celebrate these 13 talented women - please meet:

Balls of dried earth congregating together at the corner of the installation arranged in a circle make me think of the non linear way this work explores repetition, I visualise the cycle, the endlessness and this reminder of eternity pulled straight from the earth on the journey of an artist.

Read up on some thoughts around how music connects with the art and the artist itself. Listen to the Spotify Playlist our 18 amazing artist have put together with their most listened songs while creating.

“My work is driven by a basic interest in corporeality and related questions of volume, surface, form and colour. They are based on a deep engagement with current debates about body norms, gender, desire, but also with pop culture and feminism.”

In our first of these informal intro’s Raffael Bader will be writing about his works in the Chapter One of Becoming Habits.