Chloe Dewe Mathews is a Peckham-based photographer. After graduating with a degree in Fine Art from Oxford University, her work has been exhibited internationally in France, Canada and Germany – and most recently as part of the Time, Conflict, Photography exhibition at the Tate Modern. In her video installation, Congregation, Dewe Mathews builds on her previous photography series, Sunday Service, exploring collective religious experience in Peckham’s African churches and challenging how we view religious space.

A selection of the Sunday Service photographs are on display in the room behind the video installation space at Bosse & Baum. Located in the area around the gallery, the photos show a range of converted churches in Peckham Rye in some unlikely places – one is situated beside a fried chicken shop and another’s service times are displayed above signs reading ‘any item £1’. The installation’s location couldn’t be more fitting: Bosse & Baum was a converted church space and its entrance is included in the photograph series.

The video installation itself depicts scenes filmed over the last year inside various churches in South London, which is home to the greatest concentration of African Christianity in the world outside of Africa. Dewe Mathews explains that the installation explores ‘the fascinating question of how personal experience becomes something else when in a group – a collective experience. How we all influence each other, affect each other and feed off each other.’ This is evident in the footage, which alternates between communal ecstasy and personal reflection. It is a lively and fascinating record of one of the fastest growing religious communities in London: women hold each other and pray together; we see closed eyes and hand movements as people dance to rhythmic drums in flickering pink and green light; individuals chant over organ music. The worship is very personal – but part of a larger whole.

In Congregation, Dewe Mathews redefines how we perceive religious space. Worship isn’t limited to a background of grand church spires or stained glass windows, but takes place in converted warehouses and bingo halls. The Sunday Service photographs show the unlikely ex-industrial buildings; the Congregation video installation captures the expressive nature of the worship taking place inside, transforming our perceptions of religious space and practice.

Chloe Dewe Mathews’ Congregation is on display at Bosse & Baum until 21st June, Thursday to Sunday 12am – 6pm. Admission free. 

With the work of Laura Callaghan, Rop van Mierlo and Hattie Newman on show, last night's opening of Pick Me Up proved this annual graphic arts exhibition to be too good to miss.

Almost all the work on display--from prints and original drawings, to Lazy Oaf shirts and Studio Fludd necklaces--is for sale, and while this unabashed commerciality may not be to everyone's liking, if illustration and graphic arts are your biscuit, you'll find plenty to interest and surprise you. It's on for two weeks from today; be sure to visit!

Pick Me Up, Somerset House, April 23rd to 4th May. 

This spring, we're proud to announce the Oh Comely subscription box. A curated collection of beautiful, hand-made objects, it's the magazine in object form.

Inside, you can expect things to make you smile and things to cherish for time to come: unique collaborations with our favourite artists. Each box is put together to reflect the theme of the issue, and comes with a copy included.

Next issue, our theme is weather. So we took the blue from the sky and the howl of the wind and packed them up tight inside our Storm in a Box edition. We’ve only made 200 of this one, so it’ll be gone quicker than a British summer.

Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Just wait until it arrives on your door mat!

Order yours here. And look out for a special discount if you’re a current magazine subscriber.

Photos are for illustration only: cup of tea not included, and the magazine will our fresh new issue 25.

Christina Mackie is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist. Best known for her sculptural installations, her work explores the complex interactions between colour, pigment and the natural and material. These themes are ever-present in her new piece, The Filters, which is on show now at Tate Britain.

Mackie’s interest in light and colour is evident in her first piece, the beautiful and striking installation of coloured silk nets suspended from the ceiling over lilypad-shaped pans of coloured dye. Clarrie Wallis, the curator of the exhibition, explained that Mackie 'liked the character of the south Duveen gallery and the way the light illuminates the space. The nets were very much made with that in mind. When I am in the Duveen gallery, I almost feel as if I’m underwater: the lights become the waterline.’

In the open space of the gallery, sunlight pours from the windows and illuminates the red, yellow and purples of the silks. You feel like you’ve stepped into a giant laboratory of colour, mid-experiment: the pools of dye have only just begun to crystallise and ripple with the footsteps of the passers-by; the funnel-shaped silks give the impression of colour pouring from the ceiling, a work still in progress.

Natural and man-made worlds collide in The Filters. The title of the exhibition is suggestive of both shades of colour and scientific processes, and this is visible in Mackie’s installations. How do colour and science interact?

The second installation is a bright yellow frame, holding large test tubes and white silk nets. Wallis explains: 'the sculpture makes me think of a strange piece of marine equipment, waiting to be brought into use'. This concept of 'waiting to be brought into use' seems threaded throughout the exhibition, and the installations appear as research-in-progress or suspended moments in time.

This is the draw of Mackie’s work: it feels fluid, with its experiments mid-flow and full of the promise of movement.

The Filters is on at Tate Britain until 18th October. Admission is free.

Love them or loathe them, beards have seen a massive rise in popularity over the last few years. Where once they were seen as a relic of the past or sometimes even a mark of bad personal hygiene, beards are now being grown left, right and centre in as many styles as can possibly be groomed. 

Photographer Mr Elbank's new exhibition at Somerset House, Beard, celebrates the global beard trend. Featuring over 80 portraits of men sporting spectacular facial hair, Mr Elbank's subjects include actors, models, and other interesting characters such as tattoo artists and a British woman who has been growing a beard since the age of sixteen after being diagnosed with a rare condition that causes excess hair growth. 

The exhibition is on at Somerset House until the 29th of March. Admission is free. For more information, visit the Somerset House website. 

John Hurt © Mr Elbank

Brandon Baker © Mr Elbank

Harnaam Kaur © Mr Elbank

We're very excited to share that from now on, every issue of Oh Comely will feature a guest illustrator. For this issue, Bristol-based Harriet Lee-Merrion took the reigns; her work graces the pages of Issue 24, which is out now. 

Harriet's work is controlled, dreamy and metaphorical, featuring moments from inner life and human consciousness. Inspired by the issue's theme of Lost & Found, she produced this wonderful original drawing depicting species that have become extinct in Britain, as well as the illustrated bust below to go alongside our writers' piece on happiness. 

Lost: Lycaena dispar butterfly, Clytra laeviuscula beetle, Cystopteris Alpina, Arnoseris minima. 

Here's a short extract of editor Rosanna Durham's conversation with Harriet: 

How do you describe your illustration work?

My work is minimal and I use limited colour palettes. Really, I just use a very fine architect’s pen and ink. I make images out of things that aren’t tangible. I try to come up with visual metaphors that don’t illustrate the subject directly but still let feelings through.

Are there any artists who you consider to have been an influence on your work?

Ukiyo-e prints from the Japanese Edo Period, which lasted from the 17th til the 19th century. There’s a beautiful, floating viewpoint in that work and that comes into my illustration quite a lot. It’s an isometric perspective where you feel like you’re looking down on the image. I also like Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli‘s work, and Frida Kahlo too.

Your pared-down and minimal style makes your illustration distinct. What led you to that aesthetic?

I went away to Finland in my second year of studying illustration at Falmouth. It was purely a fine arts university with just sculpture, printmaking and painting—the main pillars of fine art, and no graphic design or illustration. There I specialised entirely in printmaking and spent half a year just doing etchings. Now I work in linear design and with not much colour, so that’s probably how I got there.

Issue 24 is out now - you can buy it here or subscribe here. 

Our subscription welcome packs are selling like hot-cakes, and we've had a ball putting them all together here in the office. 

Inside, you'll find four of our favourite photographs, a pretty snowflake charm and a secret challenge, all tied up with Oh Comely cheer. Order any subscription before the 16th of December, and we'll pop one into the post for you, for free!

To warm you up, here's a little about each photographer featured in the package: 

Li Hui

Li is a self taught photographer who began snapping seriously in 2009. Her photos are still and evocative; her photo of a girl's head hidden by dandelion seeds and light was printed in Issue Eighteen of Oh Comely. 

Olivia Larrain

Based in Chile, Olivia studied fashion and textile design before realising that she'd become more interested in photography. Quiet and moody with a touch of darkness, her photos capture perfectly the magic of small adventures. 

Dahiana Gambos

Also based in Chile, Dahiana photographs her friends, street animals and her city. Her photos are youthful and honest, featuring muted colours, portraits and shy smiles. Her photo of two girls with their arms flung to the wind was featured in Issue Twenty Two. 

Maria Vittoria Piana Brizio

Maria is an Italian photographer who studied etching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. She photographs empty streets and imposing buildings, as well as the incidental people in amongst them. Her photo "Walking on a Dream" was featured in Oh Comely Issue Fifteen. 

Photos from top: Li Hui & Maria Vittoria Piana Brizio. 

I really didn’t expect to cry the first time I opened Women in Clothes, the personal style anthology edited by Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be), Heidi Julavits (The Believer) and Leanne Shapton (Swimming Studies). But there I was, choking back tears at six in the morning while I waited to board my flight at Heathrow. The section was entitled “Mothers as Others” and in it, contributors provided captions for photographs taken of their mothers before they were born. Reading one after the other and poring over the photographs to try to see what each woman had described about their mother’s character was profoundly moving. It isn’t often that we get to consider and appreciate our mothers in this way – outside of their assigned role, as women that we admire, perhaps in spite of our personal conflicts.

Women in Clothes was initiated by Heti in a moment of bookish frustration. Unable to find a reference book about why women dress the way they do, Heti enlisted Shapton and Julavits to help her create one. The three came up with a survey designed to get women to think more deeply about personal style. They received thousands of responses, commissioned essays, interviewed hundreds of people, and continued to ask one another questions like: “What are you trying to achieve when you dress?” and “Are there any clothing items that you have in multiple? Why do you think you keep buying this thing?” and finally “In what way is this stuff important, if at all?”

Coming in at 515 pages, Women in Clothes is a tome. Like a yearbook, it feels both collaged and structured, which allows the reader to delight in stumbling across one-off projects, most often essays or illustrations, while being comforted by the recurring features like the photomontages of various collections (bobby pins, striped tops, clogs). Its breadth is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The book contains a wide range of voices but inevitably there are a number of conversations that resort to old clichés - where contributors use vocabulary soaked up from advertisements and fashion magazines, where discussions feel banal and tedious - and this is where I find myself skipping pages, looking for the next essay or photo feature that has something more to say. Thankfully, these aren’t hard to come by. The photo series of actress Zosia Mamet (Shoshanna from Girls) imitating poses from women’s magazines across the years is a wry commentary on female representation, particularly with the tongue-in-cheek nod to ancient Greek sculpture. In keeping with the book’s spirit, the photo series invites us to think differently, and to think more, about women in clothes.

The editors, from left: Sheila Heti, Leanne Shapton and Heidi Julavits.