Lead Curator, Collective Care, London College of Fashion, UAL, 2024

As Lead Curator of Collective Care, Dr Leila Nassereldein shaped the presentation of Charlotte Hodes’s Conversations en Plein Air through a considered process of selection and deselection across the artist’s intricate papercuts and hand-painted porcelain works.

Created in the wake of the pandemic, Hodes’s papercuts gather women within provisional landscapes of conversation, leisure and communal life. Their silhouetted figures appear at once self-possessed and interdependent: separated across the picture plane, yet continually reaching towards one another. Drawing on the art-historical language of the picnic, the works recast women’s sociability not as incidental or decorative, but as a space in which intimacy, knowledge and collective life are produced.

Nassereldein placed these delicate, predominantly wall-based works in dialogue with Hodes’s painted porcelain plates. The pairing brought the flatness of the papercuts into a more spatial and material register. Plates carry their own histories of domestic labour, ornament, hospitality and communal eating; here, they also became signs of women’s time and leisure, with the table understood as a place of sustenance, conversation, pleasure and exchange.

This curatorial juxtaposition allowed the installation to move between image and object, representation and use. The porcelain extended the picnic beyond its depiction, evoking the vessels through which gathering is materially organised. At the same time, the precision of Hodes’s hand-cut and hand-painted surfaces foregrounded forms of women’s work historically assigned to the decorative or domestic sphere, while refusing any separation between craft, intellect and artistic ambition.

Within Collective Care, Conversations en Plein Air presented collectivity not as the loss of individual autonomy, but as something made through repeated acts of attention, conviviality and shared time. The installation gave formal elegance to the social labour of being together.