Desk Scheme Users
LADA’s Desk Scheme was launched in 2017 when LADA moved at the Garrett Centre as an opportunity to provide subsidised desk space for artists, producers, curators, researchers and writers. The scheme has accommodated lots of London-based or visiting creatives and helped build lasting local, national and international relationships and networks.
We are not currently taking applications for new Desk Scheme users. Keep an eye on our Opportunities page for future applications.

Current Desk Scheme Users
Delaine Le Bas is a cross disciplinary artist creating installations, performance, text works, photography and film. She was born in Worthing in 1965 and studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art. Delaine was one of the sixteen artists who were part of Paradise Lost: The First Roma Pavilion in Venice Biennale in 2007. She created the project Romani Embassy in 2015 as a response to the everyday exclusions, institutional racism and segregation that Roma, Gypsies and Travellers continue to face. In 2019 she was part of FutuRoma at Venice Biennale, designing costumes for Rewitching Europe and creating the installation and performance Witch Hunt III that included an 8-metre-tall goddess. Her work has been featured in the Gwangju Biennale (2012); Critical Contemplations in Tate Modern (2017); ANTI – Athens Biennale (2018); Berlin Biennale (2020); as well as in the solo exhibition Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna (2023). Delaine has also worked with her late husband, the artist Damian Le Bas, on the series of installations Safe European Home? (2011-2017). In 2017 they produced the stage artworks and costumes for Roma Armee at Gorki Berlin, and in 2023 the objects relating to their shared life and experiences were presented in the House of Le Bas installation at the Whitechapel Gallery. One of Delaine’s most recent commissions was for Radical Landscapes for Tate Liverpool (2022). In 2023, she performed tHIS iS nOT vaLENCIA oRange oR caRmEN with Lincoln Cato at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern as part of the exhibition popular, which also featured Delaine’s ongoing installations and performances Witch Hunt. Delaine was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2024 for her presentation Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna.
Kate Mahony works in front of people. She is interested in performance and liveness, with themes spanning from inside-out methods to wrongness, alternative education, making noise and normative behaviours. Her practice has come out of framing performance within a ‘gig economy’ that is an artistically unrestricted and often unpaid platform. By catering to the ‘gig’ at hand, Mahony’s performances are quick, cheap and site responsive. For the past ten years Kate has been creating and curating live performance and moving image works that have embraced immediate/DIY ways of making, as well as fronting two bands, Rainham Sheds and Shake Chain. She is currently working and delivering workshops which consider and teach how to perform or ‘un-sing’ with a ‘hysterical voice’. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at intuitions such as SET, Nottingham Contemporary, SPILL Festival, Bluecoat Gallery, Goethe University and UICA (USA). Kate’s practice is cross-disciplinary in approach, from co-curating a performance programme out of a lock up single-car garage in Bethnal Green (LUPA), to creating a DIY crew of amateur filmmakers to capture a Live Action Roleplay (LARP). From 2019 – 2022 Kate has been the lead artist for City as Studio at Modern Art Oxford, a professional development programme for young artists creating lo-fi performance and moving image works. Kate graduated from Goldsmiths College with her BA in Art Practice in 2012; School of the Damned in 2016; and MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford in 2017. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University.
Ornela Novello (b. 1985, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an artist and writer who works across installation, performance, text, photography and film. Rooted in the interplay of ideas, systems and experiences, her work examines how we perceive, navigate and interpret the world, and questions our place within it. Ornela holds an MA in Interior Architecture and Design from UC Berkeley and a postgraduate degree in Communal Arts and Art Therapy. She recently completed a two-year sculpture programme at MASS/Turps, expanding her exploration of form and materiality in contemporary practice. Ornela currently lives and works in London. Recent group shows include A.P.T. Studios (2024), Tremenheere Sculpture Garden (2024) and Thames Side Studio Gallery (2024).
Anelena Toku is a London-based artist from São Paulo, Brazil who works with multi-sensory projects involving installation, experimental music and sound, video, photography and olfactory practices. She lived most of her life in São Paulo, one of the biggest cities of Latin America, but being born in Brazil gave her the possibility to experience a relation to nature with its particular abundance and diversity, and its constant struggles after hundreds of years of exploitation. Consequently, she is interested in the study of nature that treats it not as an object or landscape, but as a complex presence with which we can relate through our personal and collective memories combined with the memory contained in each element that is considered ‘natural’. Anelena has collaborated with artist Vitória Cribb in the films VIGILANTE_EXTENDED (2022) and Bugs (2023), and with artist EPX in the Nuvens Ocres EP (2023) and in his multi-sensory musical performance Atrocity Shop (2024). In 2024, she collaborated with artist Laima Leyton in the performance part of her exhibition Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest at the South London Gallery. She also performed the work Sea Echo in La Becque (Switzerland), as part of the programme Modern Nature that paid tribute to Derek Jarman, his garden in Dungeness and his activism. Her installation casa/rio has been exhibited at the Centro Cultural Vila Itororó in São Paulo and in Chicharra Festival in Spain. Fronte Violeta, her duo with musician and sound artist Carla Boregas, have been part of CTM Festival (Germany) and Fjärde Scenen (Sweden), and were laureated with Palma Ars Acustica prize alongside Martha Kiss Perrone for the piece O Que Não Está/What is not.
Over the last twenty-five years, Dr Aaron Williamson has created over 300 performances, videos and installations in Britain, Europe, Japan, China, Australia, Scandinavia, USA, South America, Canada and many other countries around the world. Aaron has a PhD in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex (1997) and has published widely (his monograph Performance / Video / Collaboration was co-published by LADA and KIOSK in 2007). He has been awarded, among others, the Helen Chadwick Fellowship at the British School at Rome (2000-2001); a three-year AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at BIAD, University of Central England, (2004-2007); and the Stephen Cripps Studio Bursary, Acme Studios (2013-2014). Aaron’s work is informed by his experience of becoming deaf and by a politicised and progressive sensibility towards disability. At a University of California San Diego lecture in 1998, he coined the term ‘Deaf Gain’ as a counter-emphasis to ‘hearing loss’. In 2019 a retrospective of Aaron’s work was exhibited at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester, featuring performance documentation, short and 15mm films, his work with the Disabled Avant Garde, and the large-scale commissioned installation work Inspiration Archives. Aaron was a Research Fellow in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University (2019-2023) and is currently working on a full-scale exhibition and retrospective at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton to open in October 2025.
LADA gathers artists, scholars and organisers of all levels to meet, make, share and think together—we need this togetherness so much.
Past Desk Scheme Users
BULLYACHE
Gareth Llŷr Evans
Leyneuf Tines
Carrie Foulkes
Benjamin Ord
Emily Russell
Deborah Pearson
Sally Rose
Fox Irving
Sarah Wishart
Tink Flaherty
Manuel Vason
