Writer and curator Katrina Schwarz explores how London studio, Submit to Love, is working against isolation and for collaboration.

Under a railway arch in East London, a community is thriving; painting; stitching, drawing, working with concentration, humming along. ‘Discovery Through Art’, the studio’s mission, is rendered high on studio walls where every surface is covered in bright paintings. Bold works. A washing line strung in a crowded, colourful corner holds yet more works-in-progress. Submit to Love, another statement of mission, is both the name given to this artist studio and a technicolour, densely patterned slogan created by studio artist Tony Allen.

Tony Allen, *I can’t remember fuck all*, pen, marker, crayon on card. Courtesy Submit to Love Studio.

Tony is prolific, and as focused and dedicated as any artist who has maintained a studio practice for more than decade. “I don’t think about anything else, just art”, Tony remarks. Yet on re-entering the shared workspace, after a morning of close-working, Tony might just sit down in front of the artwork of a studio-mate, mistaking it for his own. “I can’t remember fuck all” another Tony-slogan proclaims!

Submit to Love Studios is home to a group of artists who are all members of Headway East London in Hackney — a charity supporting brain injury survivors, their families and carers. Around 50 artists use the studio on a weekly basis; and the vast majority – like Tony – are self-taught, and only came to art after a life-changing injury or affliction.

Art can unlock new vistas of identity and ability. This is what ‘Discovery through Art’ means in practice; and in this vibrant and therapeutic space, Love has got a lot to do with it. Here, the act of making is repositioned from primarily a rehabilitation activity to a passion project and vocation.

For Tony, art makes him ‘focused and happy; I think about all the good things in my life and the good things I have done.’ Sam Jevon once made lights for submarines; now she refers to herself as an artist; ‘Before my accident I was very fiery, now I am calm. You can see that in my drawings’. Affiong Day describes her time in the Submit to Love studio as ‘like a job I do’:

“You get very absorbed in the moment and don’t think about any of your concerns or worries. That’s what long-term jobs can do for many people. They do a job and think about the work at hand. When you have a brain injury, it completely goes and you don’t have any routine as such.”

It is significant that to a condition so often associated with loss: - of capacity, of employment, of relationships … the work of the studio opposes expansion and acquisition; of new abilities and interests, new identification as an artist and a meaningful framework for making work and marking time.

But then in March of 2020 everything changed and is changing still.

When the impact and potential scale of the Covid-19 pandemic first became apparent, the decision to shutter the Submit to Love studio, and the larger Headway East London provision, was inevitable but also incredibly difficult. Lockdown may be a near-universal hardship, but for those living with long-term disabilities, vulnerability to both the virus and to the adverse effects of isolation were greater yet.

Headway East London moved swiftly; transforming their services and reimagining collaboration and community in lockdown. ‘Everything went online’, Art Studio Manager Michelle Carlile reflects, ‘music, dance, yoga, our whole hybrid service kicked into gear very fast with the arts setting the pace.’

“Literally the day we were told to close, we, as a studio team, gathered everybody's artwork, gathered packs of materials, and literally started delivering art supplies door to door to our artists. Within a matter of days, our artists were becoming equipped to participate in creative projects at home.”

Submit to Love artists and staff sharing their still life drawings from a home studio zoom session, 2021. Courtesy Submit to Love Studio.

As a necessary first step, Michelle and the studio team worked to get their artists online and comfortable with platforms like Zoom. Considering that a number of members did not even use email, the learning curve was made less steep by the keyworkers giving technical support. A printed newspaper distributed throughout lockdown - the Headway Hello - was a point of continuity and connection for members who remained offline, though additional funding was also secured to provide iPads to Headway members.

Throughout lockdown Headway East London hosted three or four online meetings each day; there was football chat, Pilates and music quizzes, in addition to welfare and friendship calls. Initially the Submit to Love studio sent out Creative Community Challenges (CCC) via email, engaging the poets and writers as well as the makers with such playful themes as ‘Fruit Face Tree’, or the recreation of famous works of art with household objects. Zoom sessions quickly followed. The Submit to Love Zoom room replicated the studio environment; artists sharing space together - albeit a digital space - each working in their own ‘window’, but in a genial and supportive atmosphere.

Studio artist and writer Billy Mann describes, with feeling, these home studio sessions. In one sense, he relates, the studio experience has been heightened by digital accessibility; convening on a Friday morning, he met online with artists who, attending the Submit to Love studio on different days of the week, were never encountered in real life:

“Around fifteen faces start to pop into the Submit to Love Zoom Room one by one. It's like watching people arrive at a party. Some of the faces you know, some you don't. All of them shine with expectation. The happy greetings multiply as the screen fills. Calvin's hair is wild today, Ken can't find the audio hookup. We really are becoming quite familiar with Sandra's cooker. Pretty soon Michelle brings some order and describes the prompt for today's session …”

The prompts set by the studio team were varied and vivid; Bauhaus costume-party and The Beatles; papier-mâché puppets and cacti, surrealism and beautiful chickens. In one memorable session, Headway staff member Kat introduced the subject: her sizeable household pet Mr Lizard. Over some-50 sessions, guest artists came to share their work, and studio-artists developed their own online tutorials.

Sandra St Hilaire video lino-print tutorial, 2021. Courtesy Submit to Love Studio.

Studio artist Sandra St Hilaire collaborated remotely with Headway staff member Emily, creating a video tutorial to demonstrate the technique of lino-printing. Printmaking is a favoured art-form at STL, but one traditionally, In-Real-Life, introduced through a series of group workshops. New techniques such as screen-printing, cyanotype and linocut are taught collaboratively and communally. Here a virtual workshop, conceived by Sandra and Emily over zoom and delivered via video link, went some way to combat the isolation so anathema to learning a new skill. In a community conversation hosted by the Whitechapel Gallery in February of this year, Sandra reflected that the continuation of her involvement with Headway and the Submit to Love studio had been a ’total lifeline’:

“It’s given us a sense of the normal lives that we used to have, meeting up with the people that you used to see once a week. You feel better. For me, most of my usual support like physical therapy has gone online or just stopped. My therapist can’t touch me anymore, but with Headway, I still feel like we’re connected.”

In a palpable example of how collaboration continued, and indeed was enhanced, by the privations of lockdown, in 2019 Headway East London/ Submit to Love were named as the Barbican’s first Community Collaborator. In this new partnership model, devised by Barbican Guildhall Creative Learning, the intention of the Headway engagement is an in-depth collaborative relationship, over a three-year period.

Prior to lockdown the Barbican and Submit to Love were planning such in-person events as a new print-based community workshop, based on the Barbican's exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography. This activity transferred online, and Billy Mann’s ‘Cut-Price Portraits’ - an ingenious printmaking technique requiring only a handful of wax crayons, a plain piece of paper and a source image to trace over - is recommended viewing and available on YouTube.

Billy’s video also formed part of a fundraising drive - the #homenotalone campaign - to recoup an estimated £75,000 of lost income and reflecting the real need of a service that had to change so radically and so immediately. The campaign highlighted and celebrated the togetherness that can be achieved in spite of physical distance. Restructuring the workshops and hosting them online has also created an unexpected opportunity to share the work of Submit to Love with a much larger audience and to reach those who may not otherwise be able to access its services.

A page from Sam Jevon’s colouring book *Fantasy Detail* by photographer Emma Summerton, 2020. Courtesy Slominski Proejcts.

And so other collaborations soon sprung to life in aid of the #homenotalone campaign, the studio artists and the nearly 1,000 survivors of brain injury supported by Headway across thirteen London boroughs. Studio friend and Art et al co-founder Lisa Slominski conceived and delivered a digital, downloadable colouring book with Sam Jevon. Sam’s distinctive way with line; her keenly-detailed black-and-white drawings seemed ready-made for colourful intervention, while empty speech bubbles invited the sharing of thoughts and feelings. The colouring book’s closing image revealed that Sam, like the rest of us in those first months of lockdown, had been playing close attention to Tiger King! (Netflix and Kill!)

A t-shirt range saw four external artists pair with four studio artists. In the case of Headway support worker, and artist, Nancy Haslam-Chance, the conditions of lockdown paradoxically and unexpectedly brought her closer to collaborator and studio artist/poet Affiong Day. Nancy observed: ‘Affiong’s work opens up a whole world of plants, vines, beautiful flowers, singing birds and creepy crawlies. She has told me that since acquiring her brain injury she feels more connected to nature and animals. Lockdown has allowed me to slow down and feel more connected to these things too … Maybe I am beginning to think a bit more like Affiong?

In the final design, created during lockdown and over phone/email/zoom, Nancy’s drawing illustrates Affiong’s poem, which is printed in full on the t-shirt back. She imagines a secret garden and a better world in which ‘bees don’t sting and die’. ‘These are cute bees’, Affiong insists, ‘they love to be stroked, cuddled even’. To imagine the world as different is the gift of the artist, and with time things got different again and better. Lockdown lifted and the Submit to Love studio re-opened but, as Michelle admits, coming back was a challenge for the staff and for the studio members. With social-distancing in place, instead of four or five people at a table, sharing stories, communing, there was now one, a maximum of two, artists at each workstation. Daily numbers necessarily decreased. A one-way system was introduced; shared group materials and resources were replaced with individual art packs and, overall, the members became more dependent, ‘where members would normally support each other to make cups of tea, the staff were now doing it’, Michelle explains, ‘It affected the overall atmosphere.’

A return to the Studio has also meant a return to the gallery and to exhibition opportunities, and collaborations, waylaid by the pandemic.

For the past five years, members of Headway East London have participated in community workshops with Whitechapel Gallery but in Spring and Summer 2021, with the restrictions of lockdown lifted, artists at Submit to Love produced a collective response to the retrospective exhibition ‘Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy’. Filmed in the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition spaces and in front of backdrops created by the studio artists, the resulting production was a splashy and surreal Gesamtkunstwerk, combining choreographed performance, costumes, collage, movement and sound. The resulting short film Just Imagined was inspired by the exhibition’s oceanic aspects and ideas of fluidity, and studio members Ken Hazeldine, Theresa Malcolm, Tirzah Mileham, Donna Rogers, Trevor Small and Sandra St Hilaire worked with artist Cherelle Sappleton and filmmaker Briony Campbell, alongside dance and music facilitators at Headway.

Still from *Just Imagined*, a collaboration between artist Cherelle Sappleton, fillmmaker Briony Campbell and artists from Submit to Love, 2021. Courtesy Submit to Love Studio.

This year, Submit to Love also co-produced a series of projects with the Barbican, inspired by their exhibition Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty. Artist members were invited to see the exhibition and were commissioned to make creative activities inspired by the notion, shared by Dubuffet, that art is by everyone and for everyone. Participating studio artist Chris Miller was published on the Barbican’s website; reflecting on the impact of art on his life and his connection to Dubuffet and to art brut: How I think about this category of untutored art brut then is not just an intellectual debate for me; it is about how I see and define myself. To use an ugly phrase (and Dubuffet celebrated the seemingly ugly) I have got some skin in the game.

In the starkest example of a project both stalled by the pandemic, and embodying collaboration, the exhibition ‘Common Threads’ opened in the Shoreditch gallery of Autograph on June 2021. Ill-fated to open in the week that lockdown first bit in March 2020, ‘Common Threads’ was a partnership between two neighbourly art institutions both committed to the values of diversity, inclusion and representation.

Collaborative studio embroidery part of the *Common Threads* project for Autograph Gallery, 2021. Courtesy Submit to Love Studio.

Since its foundation in 1988, Autograph has built up a collection of photographic material that covers key periods in the formation of Britain’s culturally diverse communities. The collection spans the Victorian-era, the post-war Windrush generation, images made by artists of renown, as well as social documentary, family albums and vernacular photography. This was the rich material, which together with the studio member’s own personal histories, served as inspiration for an exhibition of portraits reimagined in embroidery, applique and fabric print. Starting in 2019, this was intensive work and so to combat the physical challenge, exacerbated by brain injury, an adapted tool – a curved needle – allowed artists to sew using just one hand. Equally important was the support and encouragement, the dialogue, between studio artists and with assistants. Working on larger, collaborative pieces, the studio attendees talked of their past, how they related to the archive and what the photographs meant to them.

Studio artist Yoki explains: ‘You're in a room with the people you like, that understand you so, you seem to go to talk to each other about their week or their problem, or … the sewing was there to distract people from their problem and focus on what can come when you're actually finished.’ Yoki continues, ‘many hands worked on a large-scale embroidery depicting studio member Dolores and her friend Andrea’; a smiling pair in cat-eye spectacles, the source photo in black-and-white was taken in the 1960s when they were training to be nurses. The resulting artwork is rich with colour and detail; layers of distinct and idiosyncratic stitches; patches of fabric and toothy smiles.

‘When I was doing my sewing’, Yoki continues, ‘I stabbed myself up a thousand times, and I had to say to myself, “You know what? Just let it go. The piece will be in a gallery and people will understand what you're trying to say”.’

The postponement of the exhibition in March 2020 was a significant setback, but a number of Submit to Love artists continued to embroider throughout lockdown and while the studio was closed. More than a year later, standing in Autograph’s exhibition spaces, artist Trevor Small beams ‘I feel uplifted when I came inside to see my work. A person like me with a brain injury and I’m working with one arm to see all this skill.’ Trevor had been keeping busy; ‘I was so grateful when [they] send out embroidery threads for me and needles so that I can do my own work all through the lockdown’.

But for now, and may it ever be so, the galleries are open and the Submit to Love studio too, which in early August returned to full capacity. Michelle realises that there may yet be a time in which it will be necessary to revert again to a hybrid, online service but for now, in the studio, they are focused on being present, having fun and making together.

Banner image (darkened and cropped): Sam Jevon, In Charge, 2021, embroidery.

Katrina Schwarz, Curator of the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (UK).

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Submit to Love Studios is home to a group of artists living with a brain injury. They work collectively in an open studio environment and help bring out the best in each other. The act of making is an empowering and hopeful one for the studio. They believe in making something, you’re discovering – new gifts, new culture, new connections and new identities. That’s why their mission is “discovery through art”. Art that is by everyone, for everyone. All artists are members of Headway East London in Hackney — a local charity supporting brain injury survivors, their families and carers.

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