A new show at Incubator shares the private notes and studio scraps of rising artists, cultural icons, and fashion designers
An artist’s studio is, by nature, a private space – a place where trial, error and unruly process unfold away from the eyes of others, long before finished work reaches the gallery. A new exhibition opening today at Incubator in London, however, offers a rare glimpse into these little-seen worlds.
Inviting nearly 50 contributors from different generations and across a variety of creative disciplines to take part, the brief was simple: submit a single item pinned, taped or otherwise affixed to the wall that has shaped their thinking in recent months. Together forming a collective studio wall of sorts, there are sketches, references and hurried notes-to-self from Tracey Emin, Michael Armitage, Christian Marclay, Paul Simonon, Francesco Risso, Claire Keegan, Bella Freud, Harland Miller, Talia Byre and Amanda Harlech, to name just a few.
The exhibition presents a refreshing shift in focus away from completed work, instead pausing in the moments of private thought, planning and personal reference that come before. For Angelica Jopling, founder of Incubator, it was an opportunity to share one of her favourite aspects of the curatorial journey – visiting artists in their workspaces. “I’m lucky enough that I get to see this side of artists’ worlds often – in fact, studio visits are one of my favourite aspects of Incubator,” she tells AnOther. “It’s an intimate and vulnerable space for the artist to invite an outsider into. I find there’s something precious in revealing what shapes an artist’s thinking, whether it’s a reference image, colour swatch, sketch, postcard test print, note to self, or any small artefact.”
Incubator got its start four years ago with a series of rapid, ephemeral solo shows celebrating the work of unknown art students. Since taking up permanent residence on Chiltern Street, championing emerging talent has remained the backbone of its programming. Its displays have helped launch the careers of artists like Mary Stephenson, who went on to have a solo presentation at White Cube’s Paris gallery and appear in a JW Anderson campaign this year. Incubator has also flown the nest with a temporary space in New York, with plans for another pop-up in a new city in 2026.
Notes from the Studio breaks away from the gallery’s usual order of service, not only because the works on view aren’t technically artworks at all, but also in its mix of rising artists, artworld icons, writers and fashion designers. “For all of these practices, we are so accustomed to seeing the finished product – be it an artwork, an album, a runway collection or a novel – we rarely get to see what brought these artists there,” says Jopling. “It’s like lifting the curtain of the Wizard of Oz and finding the precious and often mystical seed of an idea.”
These works were affixed to studio walls just for the artists, who presumably thought they wouldn’t be seen by anyone else. Many might have hesitated about sharing private or unfinished work, but not YBA legend Tracey Emin, who has spent her career transforming diaristic scrawlings into wrought lights and weaving her innermost thoughts into caustic paintings.
“It’s been in my studio for over three years,” Emin tells AnOther of her note for Incubator, a deep-sea blue watercolour collage made when she was in the midst of a battle with bladder cancer (the artist went into remission last year). Emin is set to open a major retrospective at Tate Modern in February 2026, titled A Second Life, which will trace a map through her early works, illness and recovery. “It’s a collage made from cutouts of drawings from my sketchbook. I found the shapes strangely sexual. I wrote Strange Diamond because of the shapes. ‘Diamond’ also refers to someone who is very special. I like this object, just exuding in my studio.”
Each ‘note’ has been assembled on the gallery wall with the original tape it was first stuck up with. Losel Yauch – a Tibetan-American painter based in New York who has shown with Incubator twice – shared an early mapping of one of her shadowy, pastel-shaded dreamworlds, which sees a crudely drawn cat find shelter under a kitchen table. “I don’t sketch things out often but I couldn’t work out the layout and just scribbled this down,” she says. “The proportions came out kind of elongated and strange. It’s definitely not an objectively good drawing, but I ended up actually really liking it and held onto it. It’s nice to have a small version or sketch to keep in my studio even after a painting sells and goes off to its new home.”
On view until January, the display closes out the year before the gallery unveils a sequence of solo shows in 2026, spotlighting rising artists Harry Grundy, Katherine Qiyu Su, Xiaochi Dong and Charlie Gosling. For now, Notes from the Studio offers a rare chance to linger in the beauty of the unfinished, and to glimpse the inner thoughts of a variety of remarkable creative minds.
Notes from the Studio is on show at Incubator in London until 31 January 2026.
