Ling Siaw Lyn

Metabolizer unfolds as a porous space, a shifting field of materials, voices, and rhythms. It arrives quietly through currents of gestures that form, dissolve, and return across practices.

In dialogue with this theme, our research festival moves in a tone of transformation and exchange. The idea extends beyond the body, touching materials, gestures, and the ways research circulates between them. Each work metabolises its own tempo, absorbing, processing, or releasing through sound, image, text, and touch. Threads of memory, materiality, and language form a shared undercurrent that keeps flowing.

Rather than following a defined map, Metabolizer opens a space for fragments and moods to surface. Every encounter—an artwork, a voice, a trace of thought—becomes part of this living rhythm that keeps research in motion.

Ling Siaw Lyn is an artist and painter whose practice explores painting as a vessel of time and perception, tracing quiet echoes between material, resonance and stillness. She graduated from MA Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell in 2025.

Owen Herbert

Every living thing metabolises; processes in the body which create chemical changes, usually to release energy. Many chemical changes are irreversible—true of eggs, flour and sugar turning into cake—just as true when we are changed physically by experiences we have, and alchemically by those we meet. 

This year’s graduating artists invite us to view artist research as a ‘metabolizer’—that is, not only to view their finished works, but also invite us into their unique practices, and share insights gleaned from a body of inquiry which has sustained them over this fifteen-month course; you are invited to take a step forward into their internal worlds. 

I am a recent alumnus of Camberwell. During my time (and all the time) my studio practice walked a fine line between triumph and disaster. I wouldn’t (don’t) allow works to leave the studio unless they also risk undermining themselves through a punctuating joke. But all the time, through a methodology of artist research, my dim obsessions were articulated into questions, bounded by the deep histories of subject specialism, and drawn into esoteric corners by academic curiosity—so creating a body of work. In this context, artist research is, to extend the metaphor, both a catalyst and a starter culture. Metabolisis alludes also to the rate of change (‘a fast metabolism’), which during a Masters is at a sustained peak—it may take these graduates, like me, some time to digest it.

As well as the ‘traditional’ categories of Painting and Sculpture, Camberwell offers Drawing, Printmaking, Photography and Computational Arts at Masters level. Considered chronologically, it is clear that the rate of change itself is subject to change; that the contemporary social and technological metabolism must function ever-faster, most recently—but not only—because of innovations in Silicon Valley, which are being applied on a global scale. These artists characterise this exponential cybernetic quality less as a strain, and more as an opportunity to ‘plug in’—a notion that reveals a contradictory side to artist research; while artist research and subject specialism create specificity, they also encourage gregarity. 

In the hands of an artist, this gregariousness need not be complex; a single thread can carry from glittering eyes evoked in The Brothers Karamazov to the sound of a street-preacher in Peckham—or from lorem ipsum to a self-effacing sculpture made from discarded bath towels. Literary references abound this year, which speaks also to the serious academic approach of these students, who then bravely attempt the metamorphosis back into physical and visual forms.

It is this apparently contradictory relationship between specificity and gregarity which demonstrates the unique position of artists, who are able to reach across disciplinary boundaries and into society, help the social body metabolise change through sensitivity or confrontation, and finally provide enough space—and a rare opportunity—to make up one’s own mind.

This year’s cohort invites you to draw your own conclusions, through research presented at the festival in the form of artist books, zines, talks, workshops, and live events, and here is this collection of video and written essays; synecdochic fragments of bodies of work which began before the course, and which may yet sustain these practices for many years to come.

A warm and humid welcome to Metabolizer.

Owen Herbert is an artist and researcher working across object, live, sound and written work in the field of sculpture. He graduated from MA Fine Art: Sculpture at Camberwell in 2024.