Christopher Stead

Lives and works in London, UK

Christopher Stead is a London based multi-disciplinary artist, curator and documentarian of Britishcounterculture. In 2016 Christopher graduated with a First Class BA Hons in Fine Art at the City and Guilds of London Art School, where he received the Painter-Stainers Scholarship Prize and Brian Till Art History Thesis Award. In 2023 he graduated from the Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art, London with a Masters Degree. Stead is the co-founder and director of the London based curatorial collective Pigeon Park, which was created in response to the post-pandemic threat posed to artists’ working conditions in the wake of the Covid crisis. Driven by a fear of ‘institutional’ boredom, Stead questions cultural hegemony and the inherited hierarchies that pervade the socio-political cul de sac that is Brexit Britain. Informed by both ecological and economic positions, discarded materials such as single-use plastics, electronic wires and industrial nets are recovered and upcycled to create a bubbling stock. The recycled matter grows and gathers in a fertile manner into a reusable source, which can be repurposed time and time again.This shape-shifting practice focuses on the conditions of post-pandemic materiality by turning life’s lemons into lemonade through the agency of found matter. Gleaned detritus and mined materials are woven together, creating spectral nervous systems which index the entanglement of past, present and lost futures. This regenerative practice reimagines spaces of other into storage vats of regional, cultural and collective memory, inviting human presence, participation and play. Highlights of recent exhibitions include’ Autonomic Ambience Vol 1’, Ruttkowski;68, Cologne, Germany (2023, solo); ‘Ghost Notes’, Fold Gallery (2023, duo); ‘You Turn Me Inside Out’, Fold Gallery, London (2022, solo).