About
Hannah Kate Absalom, Em Doodles, Meej Douglas, Hollie Palmer, and Bodie Stanley are working under the collective This Cruel Temple. The collective have been collaborating on various projects over the past two years during their MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, sharing overlapping interests in ritual and world-building. This Cruel Temple officially formed and began exhibiting together in 2024.
Each artist within This Cruel Temple has a site-responsive, multi-disciplinary practice, encompassing sculpture, installation, painting, tufting, ceramics, film, sound, and poetry. The collective's works transform from individual pieces into one iconographic world, through an act of fictioning, creating a space filled with portals to unwelcoming yet ludic realms.
The body, within these works, is often absent, iconographised, or decayed, but the site is brought to life through performance. Dada-ist group texts further unite the work, constructing an abstract mythology.
The Artists
Absalom (b.1998, Northumberland) utilises the uncanny and grotesque to investigate the intersection of religious iconography, horror, and queerness. The sacred and the surreal becomes blended, lending from the camp and overly saturated graphics of classic horror and sci-fi. Absalom is inspired by the term Gesamtkunstwerk and through the act of fictioning creates spaces, sites of ritual, and mysticism in which artworks become semi-sculptural and installational within theatrical sets.
Em Doodles
All pieces and fragments of Doodles’ (b. 1999, London) practice are enmeshed through the regurgitating of memories and language into sculptural, sonic, and linguistic modes of creation. The work is fed by the wider context of mortuary practice, biopolitics, and ecology. With particular interest in the role of the corpse in conjunction with the trans body, Doodles posits the systemically stifled power of bodies that are in a state of transition.
Meej Douglas
meej douglas (b. 2000, London) is an artist working with film, sound, text, and performance. ineffability largely concerns the artist; a curiosity about sense and meaning being derived through something visceral and felt, rather than what is told and understood intellectually. an attempt is made to uncover the sludge-like, hidden recesses of personal thought and feeling, short-circuiting the shortcomings of clinical language, via poetic, crumbling filmmaking and texts, repetition, myth-science, cut-up, and a biomythographic approach to subject matter.
Hollie Palmer
Hollie Palmer’s (b. 1999, York) practice unravels the interplay between personal memories and emotional bonds with landscapes and happenings that tether us to our sense of home. Ultimately how do personal experiences, places, and play form a sense of feeling at home? Peering back into her childhood, evoking the playful, humorous vision of her parent’s house, the comfort and nostalgia it provides; alongside childhood fears to the present day. Palmer feels that home is not bound to one abode, instead a thread entangles each place we live, culminating in cherished memories that can sometimes leave a bittersweet taste.
Bodie Stanley
Stanley’s (b. 1988, London) key interests stem from a deep commitment to social engagement and accessibility within the arts and art institutions. Environments, journeying, and psychogeography are significant influences on the artist’s practice, especially in understanding how certain spaces can inadvertently reinforce societal segregation through physical barriers to lack of transport and amenities. Exploring the impact of sound has been consistent focus in Stanley’s work. He is intrigued by how sound can represent the world around us, evoke emotional responses, and even possesses healing properties. Stanley aims to infuse playfulness and nostalgia into their work, inviting people to interact with it.