About the studio

Yulia Mahr’s new artist studio has opened its doors in the idyllic Oxfordshire countryside. A home for her multidisciplinary practice spanning lens-based art, sculpture, and installation, the studio exists on the site of a transformed alpaca farm positioned at the periphery of a 31-acre woodland.

Within this verdant setting, Yulia’s creative processes unfold organically, interwoven with the tapestry of the surrounding landscapes. The fusion of her lens-based works, experimental sculptures, and an extensive collection of reference books grace the triple-height expanse of the studio— an understated canvas that allows creativity to lead and flourish.

Yulia describes her process as almost like “composting”; materials are gathered, left, then revisited. Almost everything within the studio undergoes multiple layers of processing before a final work emerges from the “compost of general ideas progressing in the studio”. Speaking of her typical way of working, Yulia says “I start to put things together in different ways, to layer things and to rephotograph things over and over again, putting different sculptural elements together. And then I leave it again for a while and I come back to it. And when it’s almost amalgamated into something, then I add something else”.

Yulia’s studio is located within the multi-disciplinary arts production space, Studio Richter Mahr, co-founded by the artist alongside her partner Max Richter in 2022. Here, it sits alongside a state-of-the-art recording studio and mixing room, writing rooms, and visiting artists-in-residences within SRM. Similar to artistic communities such as the Black Mountain College, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Bauhaus school of design, the wider artistic facility is rooted in the understanding of the transformative power of community. Together, visiting artists and the SRM team share a daily lunch, made from the produce grown on the land, providing opportunity for the exchange of ideas and future plans.

Of its location, Yulia says “It had to be the countryside for it to embody what we wanted it to. You’re so in the web of things in the city that even if you build the ideal conditions, it’s hard to take yourself out of that mindset. Whereas if you locate yourself in the countryside, where you’re much less linked, it becomes a lot easier to create and create something like this.”

Primarily built using organic materials and designed to be carbon neutral, the space is powered by solar panels and heat pumps that generate enough electricity in the summer to return the surplus back to the national grid. Waste is kept low, extending to the consumption of produce cultivated from the on-site garden.