In November 2025, I exhibited Thank You For Your Patience While I Try to Find The Right Words as part of the End of Year Show for The Other MA (TOMA) at The Old Waterworks in Southend-on-Sea. All images here ©Anna Lukala
The exhibition marked the end of my 18-month journey with TOMA, or perhaps more accurately, the end of this particular chapter.
TOMA is an artist-run alternative art school based in Southend, created in response to the loss of local opportunities for creative higher education. Its 18-month programme offers a different model of postgraduate learning: one rooted in artists learning alongside one another, sharing ideas, questioning their practices and building relationships rather than competing for space within the art world. For me, that ethos of collaboration over competition was one of the most important parts of the experience.
My time with TOMA has been life-changing. I have learned an enormous amount about myself as an artist, but also about myself as a person. I have been challenged, encouraged, confused, inspired, reassured and, at times, thoroughly knocked out of my comfort zone.
It was an honour to make and show this work alongside such an amazing cohort. The 2024/25 artists brought their different practices, perspectives, humour, knowledge and experiences into the shared space, and the conversations, collaborations and friendships became as important to my experience as the formal learning itself.
I am immensely grateful to everyone who shared their work, their ideas and their time with us, particularly the visiting artists, whose generosity and insights opened up new ways of thinking and working. I am equally grateful to the team at The Old Waterworks for providing not simply a venue but a ready-made artistic community. TOMA’s relationship with The Old Waterworks is central to the programme, with the space hosting the programme’s sessions and workshops.
The work
Thank You For Your Patience While I Try to Find The Right Words is both a painting and a reflection on my experience of TOMA.
The title came first as an acknowledgement of something I had been feeling throughout the programme. I had, and still have, so many thoughts about my experience, most of them immensely positive, but finding the right words to articulate what had happened to me has proved difficult, which is why I’m only getting around to writing about it now.
Anyway, the work itself became a way of thinking through that difficulty rather than trying to resolve it.
Throughout the 18 months, I had been exploring ideas around layering, memory, place, language and miscommunication, alongside a persistent sense of being difficult to define. My practice has increasingly become concerned with the ways we carry and reshape our histories: how experiences accumulate, how different voices coexist, and how meaning can be obscured, interrupted or transformed.
For this final TOMA piece, I wanted to bring those ideas together on a larger scale and, importantly, to celebrate my actual artistic practice of painting.
The work therefore draws together themes that have become central to me: memory, place, language and materiality, and the ways in which we perceive, layer and reshape our experiences through mark-making, gesture and the calligraphic line.
A record of transformation
The work contains layers of stories and experiences that I brought with me to TOMA. Some were visible from the beginning; others emerged gradually through the programme. There are new voices and new layers too, traces of conversations, encounters and challenges that have left their mark, literally and metaphorically, been made on me.
Making meaning through material
The work moves between vibrant colour and a more subdued, milky palette: sometimes clear and emphatic, sometimes difficult to discern, like a reflection in a puddle.
I have been refining my palette while simultaneously thinking about how things become muted, muffled or obscured, and how, sometimes, they have to be shouted. I wanted the surface of this work to be deliberately unstable.
Packaging paper, hand-painted bubble wrap, discontinued blind material, string, wool and cord are torn, crumbled, tied, layered and constructed into and over the painted surface. These are materials I would normally use to protect my paintings, but here they become part of the work itself.
If the experience of TOMA involved putting myself in a vulnerable position, exposing my work, my thinking and my uncertainties to other people, then perhaps the materials that usually protect the work could become part of that vulnerability.
The protective becomes exposed. The layers become messy.
The canvas begins to feel as though it cannot quite contain everything that is happening within it.
I have also introduced reflective silver leaf, which catches the light and shifts according to the viewer’s position. It asks the viewer to look beyond the surface of the painting while also bringing something of themselves into the work.
There are elements of theatre and drama too: ruffles, shadows, folds, interruptions and intrusions. I have indulged my longstanding obsession with line, shadow, crumbles and mark-making, while also trying to resist the urge to make something simply pleasing or decorative.
The work is decorative but it is also messy. It is carefully planned and constructed but it was also precarious. It falls, tumbles, gets tied up and threatens to escape. It is a painting that wants to move beyond the pictorial plane and into the viewer’s space.
Finding the right mark
One of the things I have been thinking about is the relationship between making a mark and finding the right words.
I explore mark-making tools almost as though I am choosing vocabulary: searching for the right instrument to make the right gesture, knowing that some marks communicate more successfully than others.
That connects to something much more personal in the work. Throughout TOMA I have returned repeatedly to questions of shyness, messiness, verbosity, confusion and misunderstanding. To wanting to be understood while not always knowing how to communicate what I mean.
There are different voices in the work. Some are loud, some are hidden. Some interrupt others. Some are muffled. Some are tied together. There is the question of what I am prepared to reveal and what I am still shy about. The work is about falling and tumbling, but also about being tied in and wanting to break free. About hiding and revealing and trying to communicate. It’s striving, as I am, to be comfortable with the fact that perhaps I do not need to be easily defined.
We carry former versions of ourselves beneath the surface. We accumulate experiences, relationships, memories and histories. We overwrite some things and preserve others. Sometimes the old marks show through, whether we want them to or not.
That is what I wanted this final piece to do. To show the evolution and disruption of my painting practice that has been initiated by my experience of TOMA.
To make visible some of the mess and risk involved in being an artist.