ABOUT APARTMENT HD
NHL +447384408956
JDD +447885185662
Together, two lines of enquiry converge in Apartment HD, a collaborative investigation into the spiritual, visual, and psychological textures of contemporary space.
Artist Statements
Natasha Lara Hughes
Natasha’s practice emerges from a deeply personal trajectory shaped by lived experience, including her escape from a situation of captivity and abuse that impacted both herself and her infant daughter. Her work operates as a form of visual testimony—an articulation of survival, resilience, and transformation. Through image-making, she seeks spaces of stillness and transcendence, evoking the quiet persistence of faith that sustained her through profound trauma.
Her compositions are marked by a dynamic minimalism: environments that are at once charged and contemplative, energetic yet serene. These works offer moments of pause and reflection amid the relentless velocity of contemporary life. Drawing upon architectural forms, geometric restraint, and the poetics of light and line, Natasha investigates the relationship between the human body, consciousness, and constructed space—both interior and exterior.
A longstanding engagement with abstraction underpins her approach. In contrast to her more purely abstract painting and sculptural practices, her two-dimensional works often hover in a liminal zone between figuration and abstraction. Almost-recognizable forms surface and recede, referencing memory, spatial disorientation, and fleeting perceptual encounters. The result is a pictorial space imbued with a subtle vibrational energy—what the artist describes as a "universal song," an underlying frequency resonating within silence itself.
Recent interdisciplinary collaborations have expanded her practice, deepening her engagement with photography. This medium now informs new developments in drawing and painting, enabling a cross-pollination of methods and conceptual frameworks. These evolving bodies of work can be explored further in the Artworks section of the website.
James Dean Diamond
James Dean Diamond’s photographic practice explores the city as a field of transformation — a place where matter, memory, energy, and perception continually collide. His images are a flux of density and erasure, revealing the metropolis not as a fixed reality but as a constantly shifting psychological and emotional landscape.
Through fragmentation, layering, and abstraction, Diamond dissolves the boundaries between photography and painting. The urban environment becomes both physical substance and invisible force: architecture, movement, light, and human presence are reduced and reassembled into atmospheric compositions that suggest the hidden energies beneath the surface of everyday life.
Diamond’s distinctive visual language emerges from a lifelong neurological and ocular condition that alters his visual perception. Rather than treating this as a limitation, he has developed it as a creative methodology: a means of encountering the world through distortion, intensity, and heightened sensory awareness. His photographs exist between recognition and abstraction, transforming familiar environments into spaces beyond dreams, that are simultaneously estranged and deeply intimate.
Through his evolving practice of “photozographia,” Diamond positions photography as an encounter between observation and imagination. The city becomes not merely a location, but a psychological terrain — a space where perception, memory, and emotion are continuously reconfigured. Transcending conventional street-style documentation, this photography reimagines the city as a living, breathing force - a realm of infinite untold narratives.
His visual language is informed by the improvisational structures of jazz, the atmospheric qualities of experimental electronic music and minimalism, and the material investigations of contemporary painting. In dialogue with artists including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Olafur Eliasson, and Daidō Moriyama, Diamond explores the relationship between abstraction, embodiment, and lived experience.
Combining the immediacy of street photography with the spatial concerns of painting and music, Diamond’s work creates a cinematic vision of urban existence — one in which the visible world becomes a threshold to something deeper, more unstable, and more poetic.
BIO CVs
James Dean Diamond
James Dean Diamond is a British artist working across photography, sound, and installation. He studied Photography at the London College of Printing and completed an MA in Fine Art at the University of Brighton.
Diamond’s interdisciplinary practice explores the relationship between perception, memory, and the transformation of the photographic image. His work has been exhibited internationally across Europe and the United States. Diamond’s work is held in numerous private collections internationally, including collections of prominent figures within the contemporary art and museum communities. His photographs are represented in the collections of collectors associated with major cultural institutions, including members of the Tate community. Diamond has been featured in a range of critical international publications and photographic platforms.
From 2019 to 2022, Diamond was Artist in Residence at the University of Sussex, where he developed a body of experimental photographic and sound-based installations investigating the relationship between image, space, and perception. This work was nominated for the 2023 Prix Pictet Award.
Diamond has also been recognised for his technical innovation within photographic practice, receiving sponsorship from Polaroid for his pioneering use of Polapan and Polagraph instant films, through which he explored new approaches to colour, materiality, and image formation.
His practice continues to investigate the boundaries between photography, abstraction, and embodied experience, positioning the photographic image as both a record of the visible world and a means of exploring what lies beyond conventional perception.
Selected Career Highlights
2025
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Featured in Shifter Media, USA.
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Selected for international exhibitions through Singular Art, Paris, including collaborations with:
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Galerie Valymeric, Lyon
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Quai de la Photo, Paris
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Paraventi Giapponesi Gallery, Milan
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Sophia Stef Gallery
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Snap Collective
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2024
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Represented by Singular Art, Paris.
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Co-founded Apartment HD with Natasha Lara Hughes (Royal College of Art).
2023
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Nominated for the International Prix Pictet Award.
2019–2022
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Artist in Residence, University of Sussex.
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Developed experimental photographic and sound-based installations.
2022
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Arts Mentoring Programme, in association with Gagosian Gallery and IntoUniversity.
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Invited speaker, Ogilvy & Mather Christmas Lecture.
2021
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Interviewed by Vanity Fair.
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Works acquired by collectors associated with the Tate Modern acquisitions community.
2018
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Featured in Elephant Magazine and Lens Scratch.
1995–1998
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Sponsored by Polaroid for photographic innovation using Polapan and Polagraph films.
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Cover feature, Design Week.
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Student of the Year, The Journal of British Photography.
1994
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Winner, Kodak Student Award.
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Selected Publications & Commissions
Editorial
Financial Times – How To Spend It | Vogue Greece | Harper’s & Queen | The Telegraph | The Guardian | Madame Figaro
Commercial Clients
Levi’s | MTV | BMW | Volvo | Hyundai | Hewlett Packard | Donna Karan | Selfridges | Swatch | Credit Suisse | The Royal Exchange | Converse
Education
MA Fine Art — University of Brighton
BA Photography — London College of Printing
University of the Arts London — Student of the Year
HND Electronic Engineering — Portsmouth University
HND Accountancy & Finance — Southampton University
City & Guilds Certificate — Mechanical Engineering
Natasha Lara Hughes
Natasha Lara Hughes studied at Chelsea College of Art and was awarded a scholarship to pursue her Master’s at the Royal College of Art. Her multidisciplinary practice has been shaped by living in Paris, Rome, New York, Tokyo, and most recently the Andalusian region of southern Spain. Selected by Blains Fine Art (later Blain|Southern), she has exhibited at L'École des Beaux-Arts Paris, Hoax Gallery London, and Peeps Gallery. Her current work spans drawing, painting, sculpture, writing, and photography.
Apartment HD works are represented online by Singulart, and they have recently contributed to group exhibitions with associated galleries across Europe and America, further expanding the dialogue around their evolving visual language.
2025
- Article in Shifter Media - USA
- Online group shows in association with Singular Art with the following galleries:
- Paraventi Giapponesi – Milan
- Galerie Agnes Nord – Paris
- Quorum Gallery – Nantes
- Test Gallery – Milan
- Paragone-Concept – Lyon
- Sophia Stef Gallery- New Jersey
- Charmoli Ciarmoli – New York
2024 - Attained representation with Singular Art Paris
2023 - to 2000 Lecturing and teaching art in various educational institutes
2005 - 39 Mitchell Street - London - Deck of Cards - Group Show
2004 - 39 Mitchell Street - London - Pub Crawl - Group Show
2004 - Lecturer Education Department at the National Gallery London
2000 - Internship in the Impressionist Department at Sotheby's London under Oliver Barker
2000 - Hoax Gallery - London - Crush - Group Show
1999 - Blain London – Dealers Choice
1999 - L'Ecole de Beaux Arts – Paris – Group Show Royal College of Art
1999 - Peeps Gallery - London - Charlie's Friends - Group Show
1999 - Hoax Gallery - London - Stewed, Screwed and Tatooed
1996 - Braas - Frankfurt - Group Show
1987 to 1994 - Worked in Fashion and advertising industry in London, Paris, Milan, New York and Tokyo with Storm Model Management
Education
2005 - PGCE Roehampton University - Specialising in Art
1998 - Ma Fine Art Painting - Royal College of Art London
1995 - Ba Fine Art Painting - Chelsea College of Art London
1994 - Art Foundation Course - Woolwich College London