Founded in early 2025 by curator and collector Gigi Surel, Teaspoon Projects is a curatorial initiative dedicated to collaborative storytelling and inclusive, dialogic art experiences. Its latest exhibition, “Duets”, presents new work by Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell and Dwayne Coleman, co-curated by Mariana Lemos and Gigi Surel. On view from 15–24 May, the show explores intimacy, memory, and intergenerational relation through materially grounded, deeply personal practices.
The title “Duets” evokes an exchange—of voices, materials, gestures. It suggests a call and response in which each artist’s work becomes a note in a shared composition. Campbell and Coleman explore how memory moves across time, settling into form, surface, and texture, articulating personal and collective histories through layered processes.
Campbell works with jute rope, flags, and tintype photographs to unravel inherited symbols and reconstruct them into new emblems of identity. Knotting becomes both method and metaphor, a means of navigating the entanglements of migration, empire, and belonging. Her sculptural installations register the tension between displacement and rootedness, intimacy and distance.
Coleman’s practice engages fabric as a site of memory, layering dye, bleach, pigment, and rust onto stitched surfaces that evoke both domestic labour and emotional resonance. His canvases resist neat categorisation, revealing memory as fragmented and embodied, interwoven with class, care, and everyday survival.
At its core, “Duets” is about relation—between people, practices, and generations. It resists commodification and honours the intimate, the unspoken, and the unarchivable. Visitors are invited to book solo viewing sessions for contemplative engagement, with optional voice-recorded context available in the gallery. A publication featuring readings and performances will follow in June, extending the exhibition’s resonance beyond its temporal frame.
LARRY’S LIST had a quick chat with the two artists to know more about their thoughts about this current exhibition.
How long did you prepare for this exhibition?
Maya (M): We had been speaking for months about the idea of working together, towards a duo show. But it feels like we had been preparing before that in a sense, as we have our studios in really close proximity and have always been having conversations around the work.
Dwayne (D): The preparation began long before the show was titled. We knew each other’s work anyway by being at the Royal Academy Schools together, so we had a head start. Conversations shaped the show; we shared a rhythm, exchanging thoughts often as we worked things out. It wasn’t just about making individual pieces; it was about being in dialogue, staying open to each other’s processes, and letting that exchange shape how the work evolved.
What do you expect the audience to experience in the exhibition?
M: I like to keep that open, and not force too much of a narrative or expectation onto what someone’s experience will be. Hopefully someone visiting will be able to feel the dialogue between the works, and that the show is the product of many conversations and friendships, among both the artists and curators!
D: I hope they feel the intimacy of exchange. Not just between me and Maya, but between material and meaning, absence and presence, memory and site. The works are layered—visually, emotionally, historically. I want people to sense that these pieces come from lived places, from gestures and landscapes marked by labour, neglect, and transformation. I hope they feel the tenderness and weight in that. It’s quiet, but it hums.
Which is the most special work that you are showing?
M: I wouldn’t say there’s a work that’s the most special, but the new floor-piece “Crawling” (2025) feels like a change in direction and is a way of working that feels different to other parts of my practice that I’ve spent longer with.
D: They’re all special to me. They’re odd-balls, each work has its own personality, but they’re all part of the same dialogue. Some are quieter, some are louder, some hold things back, some offer more, but together, they make sense. They reflect different aspects of the same set of ideas.
“Duets”—Duo exhibition of Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell and Dwayne Coleman
Date: 15–24 May 2025
Location: 65A Charlotte Street, London
Read more: Teaspoon Projects
Instagram: @teaspoonprojects
