Wiggle Room at PAUSE/FRAME

Artists

Francesco Felletti

Natasha Brown

How do artists disrupt, engage and provoke within a cityscape that commodifies creativity as a catalyst for urban change? Wiggle Room poses crucial questions about the implications of artistic occupation and the socio-political agency of art in ever-evolving urban contexts.

The residency opens up a broader examination of how artistic labour intersects with urban economies, challenging the London gallery's role within a wider cultural ecosystem. Wiggle Room’s site-responsive practice serves as a critical counterpoint to the rapid commodification of art spaces, inviting us to consider: can the gallery model, often complicit in cycles of gentrification, be reconfigured into a platform for critical, communal reflection? By incorporating community outreach and engaging local histories, Wiggle Room encourage a reconsideration of artistic interventions as both reflective and resistant acts.

The collaboration between Natasha Brown & Francesco Felletti (Wiggle Room) exemplifies PAUSE/FRAME’s vision of creating encounters that pause, challenge and frame our understanding of art's place in the city. Since completing their MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2022, Brown and Felletti, working under the collaborative name Wiggle Room, have developed a body of research-driven projects that engage with the intersections of public and private spaces. Their practice operates at the liminal boundary between playful intervention and critical examination, producing temporary, adaptive artworks that respond to local narratives and community contexts. During their residency at PAUSE/FRAME hosted by The Koppel Project, the artists are set to interrogate the transitory nature of London’s universal gallery pop-up model and question the implications of this trend on spatial environments and their inhabitants.

Wiggle Room’s approach emphasises a site-responsive methodology, beginning with an exploration of Wimbledon’s historical and social identity, delving into the layered past of the gallery's location and its surrounding urban landscape. In a city like London where the built environment and its occupants are caught in a cycle of displacement and renewal, the artists seek to expose and complicate these dynamics. Their research will reflect on how the city’s shifting architectural chessboard contributes to the erosion of local stories, with new developments intruding on spaces once filled with human history and memory.

Central to this project is a critical reflection on the artist’s role in these transformations. By embracing the paradoxical position artists often occupy within the cycle of urban beautification and gentrification, Wiggle Room aims to create a body of work that both acknowledges and disrupts this process. The final exhibition will present a conscious "disturbance," a fracture that questions rather than endorses the mechanisms linking artistic output with the capital-driven reshaping of urban environments. Brown and Felletti's installation will confront the purpose and impact of artist residency models, asking do artists bring meaningful interventions or do they simply serve as precursors to further commercial development? Can their presence be reimagined as a service or is it more accurately a spatial disturbance?

Natasha Brown is a UK-based South African artist invested in both making and teaching. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand (2015-2018) and an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2020-2022). She pays attention to the affective nature of teaching spaces and is dedicated to research into alternative and accessible pedagogies, with a specific interest in workshops involving themes of sincerity and practical illusion. Her personal painting practice informs her work as a foundation and adult education tutor.

Francesco Felletti is a UK-based Italian artist interested in the connections between people and the spaces they inhabit. He holds a BA in Multimedia and Technological Arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (2016-2019) and an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2020-2022). Through socially engaged practices and multimedia installations, he investigates environments and the subtle spatial clues they reveal, staging elements of the hidden, obsessive, absurd, and humorous. His current focus includes gentrification, exploring the social, historical, and political impacts of art practices.