First Thursday Lates: Live Performance Sand Suit 2.0 with Lydia Newman
Thursday 6th March 2025 , 6:00pm to 9:00pm
An afterhours chance to explore the East London Art Prize Shortlist Exhibition, featuring a live performance from Lydia Newman and her painting ‘In the Wake of Ruin, She is Here’ (2024). In ‘Sand Suit 2.0’ (2025), Newman explores personal and ancestral memories, inviting the audience to co-facilitate her process of excavating and releasing what contorts her soul’s expression as she embraces rewilding.
Bow Arts’ East London Art Prize celebrates the talent and diversity of art made in east London. This exhibition will present 12 incredible artworks shortlisted for the second iteration of the Prize. Read more about the exhibition here.
Lydia’s shortlisted work In the Wake of Ruin, She is Here (2024) is the first in her four-part series In the Wake of Ruin. Weaving elements from her practice, the painting examines inherited ideas about race, globalisation, class and gender, rooted in the foundations of colonialism as experienced by a descendant of the Black Diaspora. The piece spans timelines, referencing over ten previous works, such as the posture of a downward-facing woman from her 2021 live performance FACEFORWARD (2021). Set against a surreal, crumbling cityscape, the work explores the relationship between our internal and external world structures, examining how Lydia has been contorted by societal structures that fail to nurture life.
In her 2021 performance FACEFORWARD, Lydia created a Sand Suit – an external, embodied manifestation of memories and experiences, both lived and ancestrally inherited. She used the sand suit as a tool throughout the work to explore the tension between survival and thriving, highlighting the endurance demanded of her as a Black British woman while grappling with exhaustion and sadness within a capitalist paradigm.
The original Sand Suit was lost during the pandemic, thrown out by a cleaner who must have thought it was rubbish – perhaps they were not entirely wrong. Yet some of the meanings and memories it held still have resonance.
Lydia’s enquiry has spiralled upwards from constantly reaching toward ‘thriving’ to embracing and allowing her ‘rewilding’. She has observed how personal and ancestral memories have left physiological imprints that continue to travel along well-worn neural pathways, shaping how she moves through and connects with the world, inhabiting her soul’s true expression.
In this performance, Lydia will create Sand Suit 2.0 (2025) to excavate and release the things distorting her shape as she moves through life. Through her practice, Lydia has found that setting intentions, building something to share publicly, and ‘performing’ live initiates alchemical internal change.
Lydia welcomes your presence and invites you to co-facilitate this process as the courage she summons to stand by herself and before others is integral to activating this transformation.
Please note, the performance will take place between 7pm-8pm in the Nunnery Gallery.
The Nunnery Café will be open for the duration of the event, selling drinks and a range of tasty snacks and refreshments.
More about Lydia Newman
Lydia Newman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, live performance and creative workshop facilitation. With a background in drama and performance making, her work is deeply interconnected, with each discipline bleeding into the others – images from live performances often appear in paintings, while the forms and themes in paintings inform the shapes and concepts in performances. Newman’s current body of work explores her identity as a Black British woman, reflecting on the oppressions that intersect with race, class, and gender in a broader societal context. Acknowledging the masks we need to adopt to navigate western capitalist society, her work seeks to create opportunities for us to listen to our deep inner knowing, rewild and begin to liberate ourselves, moving towards a more holistic and playful reality.
Newman completed an MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2021, having previously studied Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. Between these programmes, she focused on creative facilitation, delivering self-development programmes grounded in creative practice to communities in the UK and internationally within the charity and NGO sector. Recent performances and exhibitions include Coercive Contortion, The TATE INSTITUTE (2024); The Renovation Revisited, All Hail Disordia, The Anatomy Theatre, Summerhall (2023); Tangled Series, Gallery 32, Barcelona (2023); A Primal Scream, Black Discourse, as part of online exhibition The Body is My First Mother (2021) and site-specific audio journey The Multi-story Time Park, Ilford Shopping Centre (2021). Newman was also a performer in Lygia Clark’s Corpo Coletivo & Elastic Net, Whitechapel Gallery (2024).
Access information
The Nunnery Gallery and Café have step-free access throughout from street level, including to the accessible toilet, and is service animal friendly. This venue does not have a hearing loop system. Accessible parking is not available on-site.
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this venue or event, would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of visiting, or would like this information in an alternate format including Easy Read, please email nunnery@bowarts.com or call 020 8980 7774 (Ext. 3)
Access requirements could include things like providing equipment, services or support (e.g. information in Easy Read, speech to text software, additional 1:1 support), adjusting workshop timings (e.g. more break times), adjustments to the event space (e.g. making sure you have a table near the entrance) or anything else you can think of!
Transport Information
Nearest station(s): Bow Road (District and Hammersmith and City lines) is a 6-minute walk away, and Bow Church (DLR) is a 3-minute walk away. Bus: 205, 25, 425, A8, D8, 108, 276, 488 and 8 all service the surrounding area. Bike: Bicycle parking is located at Bow Church Station. The nearest Santander Cycles docking station is at Bow Church Station.
Address: Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ
Opening hours: Tues-Sun, 10am to 4pm
Read more about the East London Art Prize
East London Art Prize
The East London Art Prize celebrates and promotes the incredible talent and diversity of art made in the cultural hive of east London.
