artist: David Ian Bickley

Title

Cities

Description

A recent abstract work. This and others in the series were inspired by reading “The Alfred Wallis Factor” and general research into the St. Ives arts colony and the birth of abstraction in the area known as West Penwith (a place where a lot of my own work has been conceived and created).

The creative / technical process to make these works was extremely arcane & complex and each new incarnation of this style is part of journey of discovery / rediscovery to help build a new calligraphy of process.

Using an image of soft round hills, abstract geometrics are introduced to warp and hide the origin — yet beyond the machinations of the city lies the essential material of landscape. Still there, underpinning our modern games.

artist: Stuart Jones

We are increasingly disconnected from our environment due to technological advancement and in a consistent conflict with the natural world due to the way we live. I approach my work with these ideas and thoughts with the hope that they gain traction in the spaces in the work. The human presence is missing from my paintings enabling the viewer to become the missing human presence within the work, the spaces becoming portals that the viewer has to negotiate into another world, space or time.

Title

Urban 2

Description

A painting depicting how we live in and view our environment. Layers of linear elements, architectural shapes and atmospheric space have been built up to create a reality that is full of ambiguity and mood.

artist: Roni Ben Porat

Title

“Folly” – Installation view

Description

“Folly”, installation, 2019

Folly: A building that mimics the remains of ancient construction from the past. I created a sculptural installation that deals with the relationship between architectural objects and their cultural meaning. The disconnected space brings us back to meeting points that were once central and vibrant and offers an abstract interpretation of the changes those points have undergone following the technological age.

artist: Neville Eldred Smith

Title

AD 79 Herculaneum no 22

Description

Through boundaries, layers and interconnected spatial links, the intention is to create the space that is not ‘seen’, using the deconstructed drawing and mixed media process.

artist: Maryanne Royle

Title

Fabric In, Fabric Of

Description

Fabric In, Fabric Of, 50 x 70cm, analogue prints on pearl paper, 2020

This work is an exploration in to the virtual world of pixels – the medium from which we commonly get our information and, as a result, spend a lot of time engrossed in.
When seen up close, pixel images appear fragmented or disjointed, abstract and meaningless. But when far away the eye creates something that makes sense as a whole, a trick of the mind experienced every day. The fabric in the image is apparent when far away from the work and the fabric of the image is apparent when close.
These analogue photographic prints have been created by using a smartphone screen in a darkroom. I have repeatedly passed the image through digital and analogue states enlarging the pixels and creating abstraction, demonstrating both the practical nature of the technology and the way it can be used to transfer information multiple times.

artist: Richard James Benbow

Title

Covid Hotel

Description

Acrylic on cradled wood panel
50 x 60 x 3 cm
2020
In response to a dream in which I was walking. 

My practice begins by the simple act of walking. I stake out my territory. A lyrical loiterer I am. Inspiration springs from the absorption of the landscape through the senses – touch, seeing, hearing, and feeling in a spiritual sense: for our connection to the land is deeper than purely physical, the memories we gather vibrate and reverberate within our hearts and minds. The tool of abstraction enables me to configure my message. I am interested in psychogeography and the world around me which I interpret through thought, philosophy, and as an idea. Paradoxically, the world appears in a ‘concrete’ existence; however, I don’t attempt to represent external reality but seek to portray the world through shapes, colours, and textures. Rural/ suburban/urban districts, the edge lands, where the city meets the countryside are my subjects. 

artist: Alessia Camoirano Bruges

Title

I contain multitudes

Description

I contain multitudes is a symbolic colour piece created to represent the complexity of humans. An individual we are all made up of many layers, facets and personalities. This painting aims to capture the same in its colours and cells, which when viewed closely resemble the layered patterns of our own beings. “I contain multitudes” portrays the journey of each individual and the many possibilities. Each person contains experiences, knowledge, emotions and potential which influence our decisions and actions. Every person is unique – it is important to understand what makes us as individuals different and embrace our differences.

The title is inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem; Song Of Myself 51 which goes

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The artwork is 40cm diameter, iridescent acrylics and double coated with resin.

artist: Thyme James

Title

Nates

Description

Screen print, 20cm x 20cm 150gsm cream surrey papervariable edition of 22.
Using line, solid vibrant colours and painterly marks these prints make up a larger body of work and formal exploration of the female form. By taking inspiration from life drawings, Victorian erotica and her own nude selfies, James’s work upholds a feminist critique, addressing how women are presented through art, the male gaze and self-representation.

artist: Ryan Saunders

Title

Form 5, 2020

Description

With the exploration of forms that I have found within my domestic boundary, I have organically destroyed and reconstructed its shape and the space that it situates with little to no reference. Through paint, I have reduced and revealed its most basic structure, creating a different image every painting. These should not be taken as a direct representation of the original point of reference; view them instead as a visual digestion of compositions and rigid forms.

artist: Chloe Goodwin

Title

cut-off 1

Description

Through the exploration of single use materials, I have revalued elements that would usually be discarded, including paper cutoffs, staples and canvas threads. Instead of serving a practical purpose, which they did during their original context in a previous artwork, I have collected these otherwise useless materials and have framed them to now have an aesthetic value.

artist: Kaoru Shibuta

Title

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Description

The world connected by sound and music links us.
Kaoru Shibuta translate musical notes into images and contemporary installations. In addition, through local culture and energy of atmosphere, he create a poetic symphony composed of images, colours and harmony, which is a perfect fusion between nature, music and art.
“If Mozart is the one who composes music to link the terrestrial world to the celestial world, I am the one who undertakes him to propagate it with my painting. If Beethoven composed to surpass philosophy,then I undertake to give them a shape with my paintings. J・S・Bach is the old testament Bible of the classical music.”

Audio/Video

https://youtu.be/Hg85asCWWrc

artist: Clare Smith

Title

Holding back the gloom #3, 2020

Description

Mixed media collage/drawing (ink, watercolour, marker pens) 30.5x45cm

We live in a collaged world…and we collage our identity, try to make sense of all the different parts and try to make a whole that means something,. Over a lifetime we collect bits and pieces that fit or don’t …

These collages bring together various materials, much of it recuperated from discarded pieces of work, ghost prints, and tracings, cut up or torn and re-ordered. The fragments are parts of a disjunctive narrative, playfully brought together to create a whole.
For me collage is a way of being completely in the present and being spontaneous. As a way of working it is fluid and mutable and is like painting with paper.

By bringing together the different pieces, it is as if I am connecting disparate parts of the self and re-ordering chaos. At the same time the process involves the physical application of ink, pens, paper and handling of the material – a way of connecting mind, brain and body.

artist: Sonia Ben Achoura

Title

Light in the Darkest Hour

Description

Light in the Darkest Hour
2020
Mixed Media on canvas with deep edges
H87 x W92 x D4 cm

Sand timers whisper in my ear
Tales of lockdown
The slow passing of time
A mist envelops the world
So dense,
Only blinding radiance could dispel
The sorrows and darkness.
God rays through dark clouds
Split open the heavens,
Catalysing new paths
And envisioning a new world,
Flooded by wisdom and beauty.

Artist: Aurelie Crisetig

Title (dis)locations

Description

‘‘(dis)locations’ depicts the alteration of landscapes through digital topography. Every pattern of land represents a variation of time and space in both digital and physical world. These patchworks of sceneries taken from Google Earth express how diverse a location on our planet can appear through a digital apparatus. These transfigurations were digitally seized by a dispositive used to capture
landscapes, but also physically transformed by the global warming produced by human beings. Both changes depict the unpredictable development of landscape during our tumultuous time.

artist: Katie Watson

Constructed on bare birch plywood, the paintings celebrate the inherent qualities of this traditional construction material upon which I explore diagrammatic form and mechanical language. My process involves the accumulation of diagrammatic information found in instructional flat-pack furniture booklets, vehicular maintenance manuals, and model construction kits. I then reinterpret fragments of this information through painting, multi-dimensional assemblages and dysfunctional objects.

Title

Forecaster

Description

‘Forecaster’ (2020), oil on birch plywood (45 x 31.5 x 1.2cm). From the series ‘Methods of Construction’.

artist: Linda Chapman

Title

Outside In II

Description

I often work with windows, using the reflections and the light passing through the glass. This one gave me the story I wanted that was going on inside and on the street outside in a very pleasing selection of colours.

I am always interested in what can be achieved naturally, therefore I use natural light at its most playful and colourful and natural shadows and reflections, together emphasizing so much that usually can barely be seen. I try to show what amazing art surrounds us on the streets and just how exciting our urban environment can be if you look at it in different ways . I don’t use filters, manipulation, layers or any other tricks, I work with the refraction that occurs naturally

artist: Philip Westcott

Title

Recycled

Description

What I found interesting was that after working on landscapes, my mark making on the abstracts were more free flowing with swirls and curls. I wondered if these more spontaneous paintings were influenced by the natural shapes of landscapes, revealing an unknown response to nature.
It seemed as these works evolved that my cityscape work was having an impact on my mark making just as effectively as my landscapes, with the work becoming more linear and geometric in shape.
I wondered if my abstracts were revealing an inner consciousness about the subject matter. It is something that I hope to explore in the future.

artist: Cat Hamilton

Title

Self Portrait – Hide & Seek

Description

This image was inspired by the song Hide And Seek by Howard Jones. I incorporated it as a self portrait as the song really touched me in lots of ways. I wanted to show the separation I can feel from life and others, while I know in some way that we are all connected. It is hard to remember that sometimes… I wanted to express the sense of uncertainty I felt during the first lockdown and daring to believe that everything will work out for the better, depicted by the blank white spaces open to the possibilities of a new future yet to be written.

There is a line in the song Hide & Seek that I resonate with :

Then as part of the game
She completely forgot where she’d hidden herself
And she spent the rest of her time
Trying to find the parts

I feel that this image is representative of me trying to find the parts of myself that are hidden…

artist: Nicola Turner

Title

The Contemplations, 2020

Description

The Contemplations, 2020. Mixed media including horsehair, coir and steel. 190cm x 132cm x 65cm. George Bataille writes of the cultural shame of filth, sexual function and death and how our “horror of nature” is linked to the fantasy of independence. I am interested in the dissolution of these boundaries and looking at the in-betweeness of things, exploring how humans are ecosystems that exchange and overlap with other ecosystems, not bounded by skin or death. My work and methodology have both been looking at challenging individuality and creating awareness of the wider interconnected energies of which we are a part.

Artist

Charles Binns

Title

Fossil No. 2

Description

The artwork was inspired by a conversation I had with a geologist on the Isle of Arran during which we discussed how man’s pollution of the oceans would leave a layer of rock in the geological record that was encrusted with fossilised plastic waste. I therefore made casts of plastic jetsam I collected from beaches and rearranged these to create a fossil like object, imagining how the Anthropocene Age will be viewed from the record it leaves behind. What does our fossilised legacy say about humanity and the we have treated our planet.

artist: Miguel Sopena

Title

The Dénia series: Moon

Description

The Dénia series: Moon (oil paint, impasto medium and marble dust on canvas, 120×90 cm). The large-format paintings in my Dénia series are based on the sights, textures and sensory input of the town in Eastern Spain where I spent many Summer months with my family as a child and adolescent. The series is based entirely on physical and emotional memory rather than on any actual imagery or physical mementos, and draws on the persistent and deeply emotional quality of early impressions. Technically, the initial ideas for the series developed into an abstract, strongly geometric language executed with heavy oil impasto mixed with marble dust and worked thoroughly with a palette knife to create rough, unique textures. Layers of washes are also part of the vocabulary of the series. Scale plays a major part in the impact of these pieces.

artist: Katharine Paisley

Title

The Moments We’re Missing

Description

Recently, I’ve been moving away from making work based on the evidence behind the Anthropocene.

My current work is exploring youth, coming of age and the messy escapism that comes with it. I’m comparing our reaction to the Anthropocene (destruction of the world’s natural systems) to our reaction to growing up into adulthood. Just as with the Anthropocene, when we come to terms with the reality of growing up it all just seems too much and rather than facing it head on, we spiral and seek out other problems. We choose escapism over solutions. I think this is a feeling that will resonate with all generations.

I find comparisons with my lines of thought and Plato’s allegory of the cave. In the allegory prisoners are shacked facing the back wall of a cave. Behind them is a road that people travel on. The prisoners experience these people as Shadows. When the prisoners are released from their chains they run out of the cave into the light and experience the people and objects as the truly are. The prisoners cannot cope with reality and so run back to the cave and the shadows on the wall. In the allegory the shadows represent a false reality, an illusion of the truth.

I think this is an incredibly relevant time to be exploring this line of thought. A pandemic, a symptom of the Anthropocene, has come along and rather than creating a dystopia, it’s revealed that we’ve been living in one all along. I read an article the other day that said ‘Women under 25 finances hit worst by virus’ and another that claimed that the under 25 population are most likely to be working in unstable public sector and therefore be vulnerable to redundancies. Finding the right path for your future is hard enough, let alone doing it during a pandemic, with little to no savings, in unstable employment, with a government that will throw you under the bus, facing a financial depression and thinking about how you’re going to be paying COVID off through your taxes till you die.

artist: Laurene Bois-Mariage

Title

Control Over The Cloud

Description

Control Over The Cloud is a deceptive interactive installation.
It depicts a storm cloud made out of hundreds of small images of a power button, crossed by what seemingly is a thunderbolt on one end and a growth curve on the other.

The installation is of an illustrative nature, pointing intricate relations between climate, power and economy.

While awareness is raising about how capitalism relates to global warming, geoengineering tends to emerge as a solution against climate change.
On the same note, popular discontent is raging. With an increasing sense of impotence and fear of irrelevance, number of us feel the urge to gain better understanding and greater command of environmental issues.

Control Over The Cloud looks upon the promises and mirages of interactive technologies, and asks itself how to distinguish tools of empowerment from those of control.

artist: Alana Lindsay

The destructive creating is about mark making and mark making is about immortality, fear, life purpose, and death. I feel that these reasons are why my works hold a subtle grotesqueness and why I feel drawn to a particular colour palette or even why I can not settle on one aesthetic or one form of medium. I see all my works to be a document of performance, a mark left behind, but if the marks I have made are a document of a performance, then when did the art happen?

Title

I FEEL SICK

Description

16 x 16 inch
Oil painting on canvas

artist: Joas Nebe

Title

A Clockwork Toy

Description

Reality is gone. Only shivers of reality survive. Worst then modern times, e.g. collages of DADA artists. Shivers are so many times broken that they cannot be put together again in order to re-construct reality or an adequate image of reality.

That means, reality is lost, out of reach forever. Mental landscapes and theoretical assumption, ideologies take over uncontrolled forever.

film link:

http://www.jsnebe.de
https://youtu.be/Zg8_vIKur98
https://www.theworldtakesabreath.com/nebe-clockworktoy

artist: Lynne Chapman

Title

Air Drawing

Description

Air Drawing is created from waste packaging, carrier bags and embroidery thread, bound around a found-wire core. It is part of a series which explores 3-dimensional drawing and the ways in which our relationship to the space captured within the piece changes as we move around it. It measures 115cm x 88cm x 40cm.

artist: Seve Favre

Title

Disciplined Nebula

Description

2020, mixed media on canvas, 100 cm diameter
This painting is part of my series of artworks which speaks of the theme of destructured landscapes, landscapes marked by the hand of humanity. The square, a geometrical form, is for me the sign of the human. It is a counterpoint to the organic forms created by nature. My works are interactive, the spectator can interact directly with the artwork, modifying it in order to make it reflect on its action on its environment and the respect it owes it.

artist: Elija Grybyte

Title

Please Operate my broken Hip

Description

‘Please Operate my broken Hip’ is one of the paintings I made during Covid pandemic, it references my work as a carer during this time. Combination of exhaustion and witnessing illness.
At the beginning of the pandemic I almost completely stopped painting, because I work as a carer. It was the first time when care work was not only a side hustle for my art practice anymore. I felt like a carer first and only then a painter.
I have seen the everyday of residents in a Dementia specialist care home during Covid, where one is stuck inside for an unknown amount of time, with so little support. Loved ones are not allowed to visit even when one is dying.
Carers are given no time nor mental space to grief, even when so many deaths surround them.
The figure in the painting is put against hard edged shapes, everything is distorted and confusing. It references the alien reality of life during the pandemic, full of pain, illness and twisted reality.

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