Join this month’s walking route for an autumnal wander around East London. The walk will take approximately twenty-five minutes.
The first stop will be at the Freelands Painting Prize 2025. This offsite exhibition at Greatorex (East London) presents the work of nine graduates selected from art schools across the UK. Launched in 2020, the Freelands Painting Prize champions exceptional painting practice and teaching at undergraduate level. Each year, Freelands Foundation has invited every institution in the UK offering an undergraduate course in Fine Art or Painting to nominate a graduating student for the prize.
Later, the walk will head to Gallery Objects for Bloodsport. Presented by Refusés, the exhibition is the first solo show of London-born artist Samah Rafiq (b. 2000), whose practice explores how consumer imagery and media symbols shape our psyche, between the sacred and the profane. Bloodsport takes as its starting point the enduring image of the gun, a symbol at once exalted and profane, cinematic and real, seductive and destructive. From the glamour of Hollywood action films to its role as an emblem of power and mortality, the gun has become firmly embedded in our collective imagination. In this body of work, Samah pushes the image to its extremes. Weapons appear monumental, gleaming and distorted, transformed into icons that both attract and repel. Through these works, Samah reflects on how instruments of violence are absorbed into systems of desire, status and aspiration, raising the question of whether an object born of destruction can ever truly escape the realm of the profane.
The final stop will be Letters From The Shed at Studio 1.1. At the heart of this exhibition lies a commitment to the small and the personal that speak quietly yet powerfully. In a world often dominated by overwhelming scale and noise, the exhibition embraces subtlety, memory, and the sensory connection between body, place, and time. Their works propose that significance can be found in what is delicate, elusive, or easily overlooked.
