Having been friends for many years, Sidonie Roddam (b.1996) and Edie Ashley (b.1996) shared a fascination of mystical patterns, numerology and symbolism. Upon realising an uncannily paralleled experience with the numbers 9 and 6, it left the two friends no option but to investigate further.

Like today’s dance parties, stone circles were used as a place of gathering together and moving as one group. The stones themselves were seen as musical instruments, each having their own frequency. During the Covid pandemic, Sidonie and Edie began a series of excursions to ancient locations of ceremonial magic, including the London Stone, Scorhill Stone circle, West Country crop circles and the chalk White Horses, among others. Their adventures traced ceremonial locations that surround London, imagining other groups that came and went before them. The pre-historians, ravers and new-age travellers that Sidonie and Edie were drawn to, seem to share a longing and enthusiasm towards a utopia, following a thread that leads to a sense of unity.

Circle 96 draws inspiration from these local landmarks and movements. The show focuses on six invented characters that live harmoniously together in a microcosm, somewhere in- between Edie and Sidonie’s studios’ in Ladbroke Grove. The work consists of clothing (Edie) and paintings (Sidonie). Edie uses materials that she has foraged from local markets, car-boot sales and hand-me-downs – giving room for her imagination to leave its trace upon them. Sidonie works with oil paint and large canvases, where the characters can come to life. The clothing reflects the essence of each character, while the paintings hold their positions of play.

Each character has their own set of laws to live by, a code that unites them – will it ever be possible to attain ‘oneness’ when the world is made up of so many polarities? Are the spaces between the characters empty, like the spaces between stones in a circle, or are they full?