COME QUICK DISASTER

Chisenhale Studios is please to partner with Come Quick Disaster an artist-led platform founded in 2018 by artists Henrietta Armstrong and Kirsty Harrris. Established to create opportunities for dialogue, exchange and collaboration, the platform brings together artists at all stages of their careers through critiques, artist talks and curated exhibitions.

Over the years, Come Quick Disaster has built an engaged community of artists, curators and people with an interest in contemporary art from across London and beyond. Drawing on more than two decades of working within London's art scene, Henrietta and Kirsty have developed a broad network of artists, enabling conversations between emerging practitioners and more established voices.

At the heart of Come Quick Disaster is a commitment to making critical discussion accessible and welcoming. Events are free to attend and open to everyone, whether they are practising artists, students or simply interested in engaging with contemporary art. The aim is to create an environment where ideas can be tested, practices developed and lasting connections formed across the artistic community.

Henrietta Armstrong

Henrietta Armstrong is a London based multimedia artist and sculptor, whose practice explores relics, ritual and the apotropaic power of objects. Working across sculpture, installation and public art, she engages with devotional forms, personal talismans and systems of belief embedded in everyday material culture.

Her work draws on religious iconography, obsolete technologies and constructed infrastructures to examine how meaning is assigned to objects over time. Recurring themes include protection, inheritance and the tension between the sacred and the forbidden.

Through repetition, material transformation and scale, Armstrong’s sculptures become acts of ritual in themselves, holding space for reflection on faith, power and the emotional life of objects.

Henrietta Armstrong MRSS (b. 1981, Devon), studied BA Fine Art (Hons) at Sir John Cass School of Art, London, graduating in 2003. Recent exhibitions include: SIN - Vestry St, London. Monuments To A Vanishing (Solo) - HS Projects, London, ‘Entangled: Saatchi Gallery X Liminal Gallery’ - Saatchi Gallery, 36 for Coral - Project Zero X Coral Collective, Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat, French Riviera, The Wicker Arms - Staffordshire St, London, The Soul Has Two Eyes (Solo), Salon - Margate Pride Art Map, Margate, Take A Seat - HA.LF X Bow Arts FRIEZE Takeover, London, The Garden of Delights on Earth - Gallery 46, London, HOW LONG IS FOREVER - G37 Galerie, Berlin, She was selected as a finalist for the National Sculpture Prize and the Soho House Art Prize in 2021, where she created an exclusive print edition with Soho House & Jealous Gallery for Soho Home.Her work is part of the Soho House permanent collection and is held in private collections around the world.

Kirsty Harris

Harris’s practice centres around violent, man-made events that scar the landscape: the detonation of the atomic bomb. She spends hours trawling through military archives of film footage and declassified documents, compiling imagery and data on nuclear tests. Her work manifests across large unstretched oil paintings, cyanotypes, machine woven tapestries, works on glass, ceramics, graphite on raw canvas, interactive audio installations, and massive projections that make the room shake. She returns again and again to that decisive moment, a split second of destructive force, and contemplates it over months of making.

Kirsty Harris (b. 1978 raised in Yorkshire) is a multidisciplinary artist and curator with a studio at Chisenhale Studios, London, UK. 

Harris has exhibited all over the UK and internationally including Beyond the Gaze - Reclaiming the Landscape, Saatchi Gallery, London. There will come soft rains, Charlie Smith London (solo), iManifest, Westbeth Gallery, New York, USA, Summer Exhibition 2022, Royal Academy of Arts, A Foul and Awesome Display, Vane Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne (solo), & Still Different Worlds, Thames-Side Gallery (co-curated), That Lethal Cloud, StudioKIND, Devon (solo), How long is Forever, Galerie 37, Berlin, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, CFCCA, Manchester, UK (solo) Nothing More Was Ever Said, Warbling Collection, London, Kirsty is a member of the Contemporary British Painting group and was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting prize in 2019.

Harris’s work is held in collections all over the world including the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Florida (USA), The Atomic Museum, Nevada (USA) and The Peace Museum in Yorkshire, (UK) close to where she was raised.