Nestled in amongst each other, combing through found fragments from the world around us, six artists form Comb collective: Hamish Halley, Andy Rhys Williams, Crimson DM Lily, Bethany Husband, Joshua Clague and Lily Ashrowan. Founded on friendship and love, varying practices are connected by a shared investigative approach: meticulously collecting, untangling and arranging their findings in different ways. From the comb handle, holding the collective together, out spurt six prongs:
Hamish Halley utilises textiles to investigate questions surrounding custodianship, heritage and interspecies relations.
Andy Rhys Williams works with mosaic and glass to produce pseudo-achaeological sculptures that question how gestures of extraction, preservation, distortion and demolition express our perceptions of value.
Crimson DM Lily seeks to untangle the hectic knots of Capitalism’s omnipresence intercepting and disrupting our being, by working across textiles, drawing and writing.
Bethany Husband retells personal and mythic histories through drawing and text, considering how these methods of recollection disperse and re-situate meaning.
Joshua Clague utilises installation, text and performance to riff on pop cultural icons and open up lived experiences, editing them down to their most essential elements to create points of resonance.
Lily Ashrowan works across film, photography, writing and performance to explore thinking of movement as a syntax, and language as a medium that can be treated choreographically.
These artists unearthed and developed their interconnected practices and friendships at Goldsmiths University. Four years on, Comb as a collective was conceived at a group residency in Phenzhopehaugh June 2025.
Comb offers a hive of support and trust, with bi-monthly crits, group residencies and shows, each member helps to prop-up one another, encouraging each other to grow.