Alchemies: May Cockcroft, Nour Malas, Sarah Martin-Nuss

For May Cockcroft, a Cornish artist based in London, it is the ancient landform and rugged coastline of her native Cornwall that inspires the striking physicality of her compositions. Working with construction and fine art materials, she incorporates plaster, chalk, marble dust and charcoal into the paint, building layers and then excavating the surface. In a process that is both concealing and revealing, her paintings reference the deep alchemy of geology, evoking landscapes that shift over time, redolent of place as a site of memory. 

Nour Malas, a Syrian-Canadian artist currently living in New York, draws on personal and collective history to create emotionally charged, richly coloured canvases that collapse past and present narratives. Her practice is rooted in an intuitive and expressive approach to mark-making, building up multiple, turbulent layers of colour within which barely perceptible figures occasionally emerge from a vortex of paint. Her ostensibly abstract paintings become spaces that allow her to explore issues around identity, the extraction of memory and our perennial search for safety.

Sarah Martin-Nuss is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working across painting, performance and sound. Her practice explores notions of flux, emergence and transformation, whether relating to biological systems, post-humanist philosophy or the rhythms and interconnectedness of our natural world. Working on multiple paintings at one time, Martin-Nuss builds layers of oil and pastel marks that ebb and flow across the canvas. These animated surfaces seem to shape-shift before our eyes; colours grow and intensify, only to retreat and recede like sound waves. Light appears to dissolve and dissipate forms, and with no fixed vantage point, the viewer is engulfed by these painterly visions.

May Cockcroft (born 2002) completed her BA in Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2024 and received her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2026. Cockcroft has exhibited with The Koppel Project, London; Old Bakery Studios, Cornwall; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; The Hockney Gallery, London; Whitespace, Edinburgh; and Edinburgh Gallery Society, Edinburgh.

Nour Malas (born 1995) completed her BFA in Fine Art and Art History at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2017, and received her MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. Recent exhibitions include Patron Gallery, Chicago; Carbon 12 Gallery, Dubai; DIANA, New York; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; and The Arts Club, London.

Sarah Martin-Nuss (born 1992) completed her BA in Fine Art and English Literature from Austin College in 2014 and her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2024. She studied visual arts at the Collège International de Cannes, France, and performance, sound and video art at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has trained with the Meredith Monk Ensemble, and works extensively with the voice as a compositional and performative tool. Recent exhibitions include Pace Gallery, Los Angeles; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; and Prince and Wooster, New York. Collections include JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York; The Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.