Selected Artists:

Amanda Ansell

‘Isolate yourself on a little island in the sea of space, and the moment begins to heave and expand in great circles, the solid earth is gone, and your slippery, naked dark soul finds herself out in the timeless world… The souls of the dead are alive again, and pulsating actively around you. You are out in infinity.’ (D.H Lawrence, The Man Who Loved Islands).

The man in D.H Lawrence’s short story searched arduously for a serene and isolated island of his own. Each island found was smaller than the one before, until finally, both man and rock were swept clean away into the sea.

My recent paintings depict soap bubble forms that represent stillness and eventual nothingness. Painted in abstract seascapes and evoking the forms of icebergs at sea, these fragile forms remind the viewer of the short-lived and are stark reminders of the fragility of island life, life itself, and the natural world under threat from climate change today.

The purpose of my process: the creation of a bath foam island and its representation through painting, serves to illuminate the beauty of time slowed down: delicate and impermanent.

Biography

Amanda Ansell was born 1976, in Sudbury Suffolk. She completed her arts education in one fell swoop, graduating from Norwich School of Art and Design with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting in 1998. The same year she was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Board bursary for her two year Masters of Fine Art study, at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London.

After studying and exhibiting in London for eight years, Ansell returned to Suffolk in 2006 to take up an artist residency at Firstsite, Colchester. She is currently producing oil paintings in her studio on the Suffolk/Essex border. Recent exhibitions include new works at the Halesworth Gallery, 2008, Eastern Open, 2007 and Kettle’s Yard Open, Cambridge 2006.

More of Ansell’s work can be viewed at: www.axisweb.org/artist/amandaansell

Benjamin Beker

Since moving to London, my work is mostly related to my home country. The “Serbian War and Liberation Monument Installation” is a recent work in which I chose to isolate war memorials from their surrounding and de-historicise them by placing them on to a neutral background. By taking the Monuments out of their context and scaling them all down to the same size I have taken their significance away and made them almost toy-like. My inspirations are work that deals with ideology, architecture and memory.

Biography                                                                                          

Benjamin Beker was born in 1976 in Bonn, Germany and grew up in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and in Hong Kong, China. On returning to his hometown of Belgrade he studied Photography at the BK Art Academy and graduated in 2001. Beker moved to London in 2005 and a year later started a MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2008. He received the National Magazine Award in 2007 and for his final exhibition piece War & Liberation Monument Installation, receiving the Painters and Stainers Award and was short-listed for the Conran Award. Beker’s work has been published in the last edition of the Specialten Magazine and in the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward 08. Catalogue. He now lives and works in London and has been exhibiting in various group shows, such as the Hoopers Gallery Summer Show, and most recently Farmers Market, curated by Fedja Klikovac at the Handel Street Project Gallery in London.

www.benjaminbeker.com

www.handelstreetprojects.com

www.specialten.com

Chris Coekin

The Altogether references and takes inspiration from images depicted on Trade Union banners. These banners originated in the early 19th Century and were produced by anonymous artists and highly skilled crafts-people. Their symbolism represents unity, dignity and struggle. Coekin’s constructed tableaux rely upon directing and performance. The images have been produced in a factory that has been in existence since the early 1930’s. The photographs have been produced digitally using a high-end H2 camera and lit with studio flash. The series forms part of a major new body of work. Coekin often draws inspiration from his personal experiences, instigates subject participation and explores performance.

Biography

Sarah Douglas

My work is about discovering ways to materialise a very personal subject matter through an engagement with paint and the act of painting.

The starting points for my work vary from images and objects to abstract forms and spaces, but the aim for the work is the same - to invest the material with a psychological and emotional charge. This charge goes on to create a pervading atmosphere around the work of tension and disquiet. I draw on memory, metaphor and fragments of experience in the creation of my paintings, drawings, collages and etchings; all of which seek to describe the complex and often abstract terrain of the inner life. 

Biography

Jan Dunning

My photographs are made with a pinhole camera, offering an unsettling, enigmatic perspective on ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’ worlds. I make intricate models and sets inspired by memories, myths and daydreams and photograph them in my studio. The resulting work exploits the ambiguous and transformational stance of the pinhole photograph to present confrontations between fiction and reality, the possible and impossible, the natural and unnatural.

My earlier series, Natural Histories (2004-7) was concerned with mythical landscapes and the concept of wilderness, however the images submitted here are from my most recent work (2008) - a study of interior or domestic spaces which have resonance in the imagination; including for example, attics, bedrooms, shelters, dens and nests. These photographs imagine a fictional conflict between nature and manmade enclosures where these spaces are simultaneously inviting and threatening, thereby subverting expectations of the type of security one might find within their boundaries.

Biography

Tim Edgar Biography

Tim Edgar was born in Street, Somerset and was a commercial photographer in Bristol from 1986 until 1996. He then decided to concentrate on his teaching practice and gallery/ publication based photographic work.

He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Photography at The Arts Institute at Bournemouth. He was one of Newport’s first MA Documentary Photography intake in 1996, his dissertation was entitled “The Artist’s Book in Documentary Photography”. He has made several ‘one off’ Artists’ Books, and in 2003 published “Rookery” a 500 edition book with The Arts Institute. It is included in ‘Arcadia id Est’, a University of the West of England touring exhibition of landscape related Artists’ Books.

His series of Photographs entitled ‘Subterrane’, taken in the Caves at Winspit on the Dorset coast, was featured in Plymouth University’s summer 2007 ‘Land and Water’ symposium ‘Landscape and Relic’. It was published this year with 3 other Dorset photographers in the limited edition book “Locale”. www.timedgar.co.uk

Christian Edwardes

A series of ideological islands are a reference to the separation between an idea of utopian ‘place’ and homemade attempts to reconstruct it. In most cases the island metaphor seemed to come to represent a kind of duality; being positioned in and separated from the world. The work comprises of drawings and photographed constructions made from materials found in the home: from the contents of the kitchen cupboards to domestic furniture. The islands set out the possibility of a transformation of space and physical ‘stuff’ through the act of making and representing these objects.

Biography

Christian Edwardes is a UK born fine artist who lives and works in Dorset. He is working towards a practice-based PhD at Chelsea College of Art and Design where his research in­terests include spatial re-presentation through fine art.

He graduated from Liverpool John Moores University in 1995, and completed his Masters Degree at Central Saint Martins in 1997 in Fine Art (Painting). Christian currently works as a Senior Lecturer and Pathway Leader in Fine Art on the Foundation Diploma in Art & Design, at The Arts Institute at Bournemouth.

Christian has exhibited widely in London and the Northwest; working with artists such as Bernard Walsh and Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, and writers such as David Evans and Lee Mackinnon.

Eleanor Engle

My strongest response is to shape. A shape or juxtaposition of shapes that I can see by chance can acquire an intense significance for me. I have come to realise that what Francis Bacon said is true: ‘All shapes have an emotional implication.’

These shapes I see and then draw are the starting point for my paintings. Detached from their original context that might become rearranged, they might become colourful or sombre, relaxed or tense. I hope to learn what the shapes and their relationship mean metaphorically to me. I add a title to try to give a hint of this.

Biography

Susan Eyre

Susan Eyre’s practise concerns the blurring of boundaries between the natural and the man-made environment. Her work explores the appropriation and fabrication of the natural world within an urban context. Acknowledging a desire for an idealised nature and the struggle for control to achieve this, she engages with fantasies, which fuel the quest for the romantic idyll. These ideas inform the construction of scenarios where the natural world is exposed as illusion and make reference to a fragmented and synthetic experience of nature.

Biography

Damien Flood

My work situates itself between fact and fiction. The paintings I create are modern landscapes that reference the history of painting with an underlying fantastical element. A fleeting familiarity can be found in the work that is soon replaced by an ambiguous questioning. I use imagery gathered from many varied sources. One of these underpinning sources is the voyage of the H.M.S Challenger - a research trip that explored the oceans in the 19th Century. The illustrations gathered on these voyages have a brilliant otherworldly feel; although they are of actual plants and creatures they contain a mystery and scepticism. It is this notion of the undiscovered, the other, the foreign landscape that I am searching for within my own work.

Biography

Freya Gabie

I am interested in creating objects and environments that seem to have shifted from their origin. I re-model identifiable and often mundane materials in an attempt to immortalise them in state of flux. The objects that I make ask to be explored in a new way, through methods of casting, carving, splicing, stacking and sometimes breaking I deliberately alter objects. I subtly bully materials to reveal new qualities that are often perverse and, at times, funny. I want the object to dissipate away from its former nature, giving a fragile, new account of itself.

Biography

Thomas Haywood

“It felt like paradise. Immediately the first day I thought…”

This work follows in the wake of the myth of a utopian island, presenting the viewer with traces of what may have been a fleeting paradise. On an idyllic island we are left with the residue of a restless search for the perfect existence, and the lifetime spent in the gap between dreams and reality. At the heart of the work is an examination of the differing ways that words and images work on the viewer’s imagination to invoke a time and place.

Biography

Kaori Homma

In my recent works I have been contemplating on the ontological notion of ‘east’ as in East of Eden, where human conditions can be described as somewhat disinherited and displaced, and yet at the same time carrying the memory of its origin.

I am interested in the perceptions of the demarcations as well as the similitude found between the West and the East, which are often perceived as a polemical position. And yet once referred to the above notion of the “east” this polarity becomes more fluid. The connotation of the transience and ephemeral associated with my methodologies are important, as they are witness to my attempt to catch the glimpse of these fleeting ideas.

Kaori Homma Biography

Kaori Homma was born in Japan in 1962 and graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Tokyo University of Art and Design. Homma gained an MA in Fine Art Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art and is based in London.

Homma’s work contains a wide range of traditions, practices and ideas inherent in the context of both East and West. Exhibitions include: East of Eden 000, Le Pave d'Orsay, Paris; Great Purpose of Landscape, London; TAMA VIVANT II 08, Tokyo; Beneath the Surface, Artlink, Hull, Life is only half the story, Christ Church, Spitalfield, London; ISOBAR - survey of contemporary drawing practice, Fieldgate Gallery London, Wall Space, London; Kafka International Ltd, UEL, London; Do not look down, Nunnery, London; Aughinbaugh Art Gallery, Pennsylvania, Daiwa Foundation, London, Rare, Artworks MK, Milton Keynes; Pulp Fantasy, 20/21 Arts Centre, North Lincolnshire; Mitaka City Museum Tokyo, Bury St. Edmunds Art Gallery, Angel Row Gallery Nottingham. Galerie Humanite Tokyo. www.kaorihomma.co.uk

Jo Lathwood

My practise is driven by three objectives:

• Our constant human endeavour to find an answer
• Making for the sake of a communication free from money or pride
• Showing a truth that can be universally understood

Revealing and sharing the process in which I create works is an essential part of my practise. I am interested in the concept of aesthetic accuracy giving credibility and status to objects. I want to promote the idea that we can surpass our perceived limitations through stimulating our imagination.

Jo Lathwood Biography

Sharon Leahy-Clark

These drawings sit between fantasy and reality; a parade of grotesque, carnivalesque forms that could be of animal, human or insect origin. The materials used mean that the marks made cannot be easily erased. As nothing can be taken away, the images can only be built upon thereby creating a sense that the forms are growing in an unrestrained, anarchic way with the possibility that they will out-grow the boundary of the paper and escape. In the wider context the work plays with the notions of editing, processing, and homogenising to create ‘perfection’, revealing an attempt to create a poetic, inclusive view.

Biography

Sharon Leahy-Clark was born in London where she lives and works. She studied Painting at the Royal College of Art (1999-2001) receiving several awards including the Helen Chadwick Memorial Prize; BA (Hons) Fine Art at Middlesex University (1996-1999) and BSc (Hons) Sociology at the Polytechnic of North London (1983-1986).

Selected exhibitions include: Jerwood Drawing Prize, Jerwood Space and touring (2008); British Glass Biennale 2008; Ruskin Glass Centre, Stourbridge (2008); Celeste Painting Prize (finalist) Truman Brewery, London and touring (2007); Creekside Open (selected by Victoria Miro), APT Gallery, London (2007); Different Languages/Different Alphabets, Bury Museum and Art Gallery, Lancashire (2005); Margate Rocks, Margate, Kent (2005); Aftershock 1A Space, Hong Kong (2004); Faith, CAS Gallery, Osaka, Japan (2004) and Mostyn Open 12, Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales.

Alastair Levy

My work is mainly concerned with the quiet subversion of everyday things. Through a process of experimenting with, and manipulating these kinds of objects, I make interventions that put a skew on our experience of the familiar and the mundane. It is often the peripheral aspects of a particular activity that end up becoming central to my output. There is a performative aspect to much of this work in which the final piece acts as a document or record of a previous action.

Biography

Alastair Levy was born in London in 1979. He completed a Foundation Diploma at Central St. Martins in 1998 and then studied for a BA in Film, Photography and Imaging at Napier University in Edinburgh. In the summer of 2008 he graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art.

Recent exhibitions include I know that this crayon I am holding is blue at the Tricycle Gallery, Matter of Time at the James Taylor Gallery and Salon 08 at VINEspace (all 2008). He is currently in the process of putting together a show scheduled for 2009 with three other recent graduates from the Royal College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art.

Martina Lindqvist

Rågskär is a Finnish island that I have visited almost every summer since I was a child. In memory, the island is an uncanny and traumatic space where the opposition between real and unreal dissolves. The island as I know it can only be touched in pictures by circumventing the usual way of the camera, and each image is consequently an interpretation and recreation in miniature of a snapshot taken on the island. Rather than be tied to the physical properties of reality, these images make visible something akin to an introspect world that often eludes the scope of photography.

Biography

Tom Lovelace

The acts of installation and intervention are integral to my practise. The industrial landscape provides the stage in which I craft, install and intervene with the world of machines and construction sites to create ephemeral objects and environments that exist solely for the camera. The point at which the production of functionless objects and processes intersect with photography is fundamental to my work.

Site 407 investigates the idea of ‘repetition’ within an industrial and personal context. The photographs depict a site that is based upon a series of wells that I systematically created over a period of three months. This meditative process was undertaken alone and with no purpose other that to construct a factual place that now only exists within a fictional, visual form. 

Biography

Tom Lovelace was born in Cambridge in 1981. He studied at The Arts Institute at Bournemouth, graduating in Photography (BA First Class Honours) before reading Art History at Goldsmiths College, London. He has since exhibited around the UK and has recently displayed work at the RWA (Bristol), Surface Gallery (Nottingham) and been selected for the IPG/Terry O’Neill Award 2008.

Christian Mieves

Geographically the beach represents a transgression between land and sea, while culturally it may stand for a similar infringement of boundaries. The importance of the image of the beach in my own work is motivated by ideas of repetition, deformation and transition.

In my paintings, the Arcadian settings of the beach elude trajectories of progress, referencing instead a primordial state, seeing the beach as a place where new and/or foreign agents first appear. The failure associated with shipwreck denotes the metaphorical return to a semantically uncertain field. Evoking both positive and negative associations, I view the beach as both origin and dramatic breakdown.

Biography

Christian Mieves was born in 1973 in Emsbueren, Germany. Based in the UK since 2003, he completed a Masters in Fine Art at Newcastle University in 2005 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and is currently finishing a PhD at Newcastle University, also funded by the AHRC.

His paintings have been shown in exhibitions in Germany, Mexico, Spain and UK. Most recently at Pheonix, Exeter (2008); Foro R-38, Mexico City, Mexico (2008); Long Gallery, Newcastle (2008); Red Wire, Liverpool (2007); St. Aidan's College, Durham (2007) and The Gallery, Gateshead (2006). He is currently preparing solo exhibitions for South Square Gallery in Bradford and his final PhD show at Newcastle University (both 2009). He is also co-organising the conference ‘Re-visiting the Beach’ (the subject of his doctoral thesis), to be held at Newcastle University in July 2009.

Dave Morgan-Davies Biography

Dave Morgan-Davies is a Bristol based photographic artist and digital media practitioner.

An MA in Interactive Media provided Dave with the opportunity to combine and expand upon his lifelong passion for photography with skills drawn from working as a sound engineer in London in the 1980’s and a software designer in Bristol in the 1990’s. This. and a subsequent Fellowship specialising in mobile technology, allowed Dave to develop an interest, and to work with, locative interactive technologies - something he continues to do today.

Thomas Needham Biography

Mahali O’Hare

Each work emerges from photography, more often the dog-eared photograph and the mundane moment than the glamorous. Paintings are small. They are of a size that makes every minute detail of vital importance, from the depth of the stretcher to the edge and fold of the canvas. At present I am interested in both the investing of the mundane with the iconic as well as the paring down of the iconic.

“O’Hare’s paintings have a dual quality of transparency, a plain visibility of method and medium, as well as that more transient property of phantoms and photography’ (Extract from essay by Marcia Farquhar).

Biography

Chris Poolman

Having failed dismally at trying to make it as a stand up comedian, becoming an artist seemed the next best thing.

Biography

Chris Poolman was born in Oxford in 1980. He is an artist based in Birmingham, UK. Presently he is researching stupidity and the role of the fool in contemporary art through an AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) funded art practice PhD at Birmingham City University. His most recent exhibition was Zoo Art Fair 2008 (with Eastside Projects). He is currently undertaking the largest challenge of his career to date (and what is expected to be a lifetime’s work): trying to recruit artists for a national artists football league. If anyone can tell him where they are all hiding he would be very grateful. 

www.chrispoolman.co.uk 

Sarah Pucill

Blind Light is filmed in the artists London loft. The presence of camera, studio and artist/performer are registered through image and sound - the loss of the former filling out of the presence of the latter. In this way the physicality of the object, space and subject as well as their interiority is fleshed out, mapping out a space that is at once material and physical. Controlling the light she allows into the frame, the artist lifts the blinds or pulls them shut, applies or removes lens filters, opens wide the aperture or closes it. Each performance or action threatens the image as it shifts in and out of ‘proper’ exposure until it disappears completely. Focusing either on the window or the sky, the artist narrates her camera operation whilst also describing what she sees, intermixing receptive and projective vision. ‘I can’t look’, she says, ‘the clouds are coming in’, ‘there’s been no rain for weeks’, ‘the eye burns, swells, loses focus and disappears in a stream’. Between aperture, eyeball, sun and moon, source and projection swap place. The film journeys from the grounded reality of the here and now audibly represented through footsteps, birds and traffic, to a physical space expressed through voice and abstraction. Blind Light explores the fold between the materiality of film, the psyche and the body.

Biography

Sarah Pucill lives and works in London and is Senior Lecturer at University of Westminster since 2000. Her work is distributed through Lux, The British Film Institute (BFI), British Council, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Canyon Cinema, the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) and Light Cone Paris.

Andrew Putland

My paintings balance between figuration and abstraction. I work primarily in oil paints, combining elements of my own drawings with photographs, newspaper clippings and junk shop curio. The initial mark making is spontaneous and fashioned with a certain urgency that invites ideas to hover and morph the canvas. This immediate style and openness, if painting, allows the possibility for accidents to occur. My paintings can be anything from brutal to messy and dark, yet paradoxically they are almost invariably loaded with an undercurrent of black humour.

Biography

Andrew Putland was born in 1970 in Eastbourne, East Sussex. Since graduating from the Norwich school of Art in 1998 (M.A in Fine Art), Putland has been living and working in East London where he has his studio at Maryland Studios in Hackney.

Andrew Putland has been regularly evolved in exhibiting his work since his move from Norwich and has exhibited in galleries and venues across London and the UK. These include:  ‘Art Explosion’ at the Aartvark Gallery Leeds, and ‘Was Jesus a Homosexual’ at the Decima Gallery London, a group show which included such international artists as Gilbert and George. In 2002 he was short listed for the British Schools in Rome Painting Scholarship. His most recent exhibitions include the Hackney Festival in East London.  Future shows include ‘The Damned and the Saved’, a group exhibition at Gallery studio 1.1 and the Standpoint Gallery London.

Ellie Rees

The overarching theme of my work is how the reality of the everyday and genuine human emotion differs from their romantic depictions.

Gender is a recurring concern in my work and I have recently begun to make video performance pieces that explicitly explore the female role in representations of romantic relationships. This often illustrates dichotomy and duality within women. Increasingly working in opera, my work has begun to adopt formal theatrical characteristics such as costume and set, exploring the romantic archetypes that opera relies on - particularly regarding love and gender.

Biography

Ellie Rees studied at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design and Winchester School of Art. She currently lives and works in London where she teaches at Chelsea College of Art and Design and Byam Shaw School of Art. Ellie has been a visiting lecturer at many colleges across the country including Edinburgh, Huddersfield, Aberystwyth and Brighton.

Ellie exhibits and performs internationally. Venues include: The ICA, London; Tate Modern, London; Espace Croise, Lille; The Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Caracas; Espai Ubu, Barcelona; G39, Cardiff and The Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh. Increasingly working in set design for opera, she has recently made video sets for: English National Opera, Trinity Laban and The Almeida Theatre, London. In July she was awarded a Jerwood Opera Fellowship for 2009.

Sonia Stanyard

The relationship between human consciousness and nature are the recurring themes within my paintings. The starting point is the paint itself as my work is conceived through a build-up of false starts, experimental use of paint and re-working, until I have created a friction that interests me. Not drawing directly from the physical landscape but rather working from memory and written notes, I aim to create an environment that explores feelings of melancholy and solitude. So I use landscape not in a literal way but more as a vehicle to convey ideas and emotions. My aim is to create a tension between classical compositions in art history and post-modern expressive handling of paint.

Biography

Esther Teichmann  

“..Teichmann’s utopian island-world lies somewhere between black and blue seas, between here and now and the fantasy of where one might go, or perhaps, even, where one has been. At the heart of the work is the experience of the primal loss of the mother, who necessarily turns away, as Teichmann’s mother does in some of the photographs...”

Carol Mavor, Love in Black and Blue, 2007

“..Water appears in a lot of my pictures. It stands for a desire to return to something, a uterine, primordial fantasy of return, but also a desire to be outside of yourself. Water as a containing and holding thing, like a boat floating, but also covering and cloaking. Water as a place of escape, almost of your own physicality. …”

 An Impossible Place  From an Interview with Richard West  (published in Source, July 2008)

Biography

German/American artist Esther Teichmann was born in 1980 in Karlsruhe, Germany and moved to Britain in 1998. Having received a Masters of Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in July 2005 (listed among Art Review's top 25 new artists upon graduating), she continues to live and work in London (Senior Lecturer on the Photography MA at Brighton University) whilst following her own practice (currently a research by project student at the RCA).

David Theobald

Today, location is not so much defined by geography but by our position within the complex web of processes that make up contemporary society. My work attempts to capture such a situation, caught in a perpetual state of transit where the room for manoeuvre is always limited. Working with video inevitably raises questions about mediation and the seemingly endless pursuit of much digital animation and game technology towards ever more spectacular optical effects. In contrast, my work seems more likely to generate feelings of futility or frustration that, in some cases, might give way to deeper contemplation of the systems in which we live. No bad thing.

Biography

Chris Tosic

For more information on Chris Tosic’s work, please visit: www.christosic.co.uk

Biography

Susan Truseler

Blending autobiography and fiction as I wander on foot and in thought, I construct photographs from my imagination. Collecting objects from junk shops and the family home, the studio and landscape is transformed into an imaginary world. The camera and darkroom is used like a novelist opening up generative possibilities through invention and memory. Through this continuous working progress, the sequential unfolding of time is disrupted and is at once innocent and unsettling. The passage between reality, imagination, loss and mortality are recurring themes within the work.

Biography

Stephanie Wood

Taken from a series of images, this photograph draws attention to the manner in which we purposefully or subconsciously disconnect ourselves from our surrounding environment. The subjects of these photographs do not know they are being photographed; creating an unposed and sincere image. They have let their guard down in public, resulting in the subject appearing vulnerable.

Biography

Stephanie Wood lives and works in Dorset and graduated from University College Falmouth in 2007 with a BA (Hons) in photography.