Hand Over – Rosie Vohra and Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin

A joint exhibition with artists Rosie Vohra and Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin, building on their decade-long dialogue through collaborative collage practice, exploring connection, growth, and belonging.

Hand

Over is a collaborative exhibition by artists Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin and Rosie Vohra. The exhibition explores collage as a process and principle that is inextricably linked to human connection, growth and sustainability. Through reusing existing materials and reshaping them, they create a new body of work that addresses themes of absence, presence, connection, and belonging.

The heart of their collaboration lies in a continuous exchange of drawings, collages, and paintings, either through post or in person, spanning many years, life events, and locations. This ongoing dialogue forms the basis of their creative process, where each work responds to the last, fostering a conversation of back and forth. By relinquishing control to each other for each iteration of the exchange, they embrace play as a central element, allowing for the unexpected to enrich their collaborative dialogue.

Their collaborative process embodies a playful exploration of rupturing, reforming, and repurposing old works as they create new connections and meanings, rooted in their shared understanding of the themes they explore. This collaborative endeavour, rich with the depth of each artist’s perspective, invites viewers to engage with the work on multiple levels.

Rosie Vohra is a multidisciplinary artist working and living in Leeds. Vohra explores the intersection of collage with drawing, painting, textiles, and sculpture. She uses collage as both a conceptual and material tool for deconstructing and reconstructing meaning from existing material. Her work often explores collective storytelling with personal introspection, offering insights into the complexities of human existence and the process of identity formation. Through her work, Vohra advocates for openness and the potential for metamorphosis, providing a framework for embracing multiplicities.

Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin is an artist and arts educator based in Glasgow. Through painting and printmaking she explores the relationships between our internal and external worlds. Her visual language gives colour and form to emotions and experiences, exploring how these manifest and shift in our bodies as we navigate environments, relationships, and changes around us.

Often working on collaged surfaces of paper or fabrics with a previous history – creating structures from old drawings and monoprints – her layered shapes interact and undulate, mapping internal journeys. Negative and positive spaces reflect absence and presence: reliant on each other, they can only exist through an experience and memory of each other. Her work gives shape to the spaces created by loss, and explores what grows from and within them.

Rosie Vohra (b.1992, Hertfordshire) lives and works in Leeds. Vohra studied on The Drawing Year at The Royal Drawing School in 2014 where she was awarded The Sir Denis Mahon Award 2013. Prior to this, she studied Fine Art at Leeds Arts University from 2010-13. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include: Fruiting Bodies, Leeds Arts University, 2023; Flying Inside Your Own Body, Slugtown, Newcastle, 2023; WORMB, Quench Gallery, Margate, 2022; Canopy Kilt, Proudick Gallery, London 2019. Recent group exhibitions include: Leeds Artist Show, Leeds Art Gallery, 2023; The Amber Room, Matt’s Gallery, London, 2023; Post Curse, Freehold Projects Space, Leeds, 2019; Social Event, Platform, Glasgow International Festival, 2018. Vohra’s work is held in public and private collections including: The Government Art Collection, The Royal Collection, Hauser and Wirth and Leeds Art Gallery Collection

Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin (b.1987, London) lives and works in Glasgow. Lockwood Estrin graduated with Honours from Glasgow School of Art in 2010, she received the Armour Award for drawing and painting, and was later awarded a scholarship for postgraduate study at the Royal Drawing School in London. Following this, she completed a two year printmaking fellowship at City and Guilds of London Art School. She has also studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana. She has exhibited widely in London, Berlin, Havana, Glasgow, Edinburgh and around the UK and has been awarded artist residencies in Scotland, Venice, America, and Cuba, including a residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop in NY in 2020. Most recently she had a solo show: Mapping The Parts, at Mono8 Gallery in Manila, Philippines, 2023, was artist in residence with 16Nst Gallery in Glasgow and was commissioned to make a new work for the exhibition and publication Rupture, Rapture: Womxn in Collage exhibited at Patricia Fleming Gallery, 2023.