Sean Steadman

GIANT ATOMS

06 June 2025 — 05 July 2025

Project Native Informant, London

Sean Steadman will present his sixth solo exhibition with Project Native Informant, titled GIANT ATOMS, in our Unit 3 space, opening during this year’s London Gallery Weekend.

LGW hours:
Friday 6 June 2025: 11:00 - 18:00
Saturday 7 June 2025: 11:00 - 18:00
Sunday 8 June 2025: 12:00 - 17:00

Unit 3, Project Native Informant,
48 Three Colts Lane, London E2 6GQ

Project Native Informant presents GIANT ATOMS, the sixth solo exhibition by British artist Sean Steadman, coinciding with London Gallery Weekend. Through painting, drawing and printmaking Steadman creates complex compositions through iterative processes informed by many threads of art history, and an interest in the natural sciences and technology.

GIANT ATOMS features woodcut prints made this year using blended European and Japanese techniques. Each print is comprised of multiple layers, starting with a foundational wood block which is hand-printed using a barren, applying an ink made of starch paste and watercolour. This systematised yet hand-coloured process creates subtle unique variations in each print. Steadman views these works as bridging his painting and printmaking practices, achieving painterly marks and complexity of surface while maintaining the repeatability of composition from the underlying carved blocks.

Labelling the origin of each work’s forms is difficult because they are worked on intuitively and iteratively, not from source material. However, animal and bird-like figures, spirals, lattices, and heads have absorbed a plethora of influences—occasional family resemblances to the pastoral, vague hints of Samuel Palmer, fragments of esoteric or medieval printmaking, futurism, and Japanese Ukiyo-e.

For Steadman, printmaking serves as his primary laboratory for generating ideas. The medium requires working semi-blind and back-to-front, offering less control than direct mediums like drawing or painting. He describes making these works as “trying to turn falling snow into cursive script”—chaotic experimentation involving guessing, hoping and testing to achieve the right combination of colour and marks.

The physical process is demanding, particularly for larger works, requiring action painting-style ink application on the floor at speed to outpace drying times. Steadman employs intuitive, adapted techniques to achieve his desired touch and precision. All works were printed by the artist alone in his studio without conventional printing studio assistance, resulting in a DIY methodology that defines this body of work.

Steadman has written an accompanying text to this exhibition that considers the tradition of romanticism and its relevance in thinking about art today. It details how the artist shares the romantic view that art is a way of connecting with the vast, incomprehensible forces of nature that our everyday perception can’t fully grasp, and that this pursuit should be replenished as a central concern for artists. This exhibition suggests a rejuvenated and updated expressionist or romantic-type perspective is appropriate to digest the complexity and scale and chaos of today.

Sean Steadman

British artist Sean Steadman is first and foremost a painter. Steadman is invested in the medium’s specificities and its ability to draw out new visual forms. His practice arises from research into the history of image production, from the prehistoric to contemporary visual culture. His process is essentially intuitive and dialectical: after an initial drawing phase, Steadman works on the entirety of the canvas’ surface, applying, erasing, layering until a suitable starting point is achieved. This initial phase is deliberately fast and decisive, so as not to allow critical reflection. The actual making of the image occurs through what Steadman refers to as the “digging down, where the painting is as much uncovered as it is built up from the outside”.

As seen in his solo exhibitions 1,000,000,000,000 and Cascade, all at once, the paintings appear corseted, perforated, entangled, swollen, or torn, insisting on aggregation through anarchic exposure. Through multiple phases over many months, the final composition can often deviate wildly from the original starting point; however this first phase anchors the works later developments. Steadman’s paintings marshal space, even if their structures are utterly mercurial. They are dialectics of schisms, sediments, breakages, the pulverulent and protuberant of colour and composition.

In 2024, Steadman presented a solo exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong prior to his solo exhibition with the Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne.

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