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Katie Orton is an artist interested in the concept of the microcosm. What can a seemingly insignificant product or action tell us about societal forces and methods of control? What is it that makes us who we are? That is the question at the heart of Orton's work. She seems to have a fascination with the props of identity; a ring on a finger,...
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Concepts I make prints and paintings responding to the local landscape. In a mostly arable landscape I necessarily engage with current farming techniques as well as the natural changes that occur. The work is intended to be a document as well as an expression. Colour has become increasingly important to me as an expression of mood and...
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“The poet scans the landscape with his hermeneutic gaze, but it remains trackless, refuses to emerge into meaningfulness as a landscape of signs”. J.M.Coetzee – “Disgrace” – 1999 My aim is to search for portent and potential narrative in the overlooked and seemingly insignificant aspects of the everyday. We are all surrounded by the...
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David Sherry (b. 1974, Northern Ireland) studied at the University of Ulster at Belfast (1994-1997) and Glasgow School of Art (MFA, 1998-2000). Solo exhibitions include Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2006), M and M Gallery, Antwerp (2005) and Jack Hanley, San Francisco (2005). Select group exhibitions include G.A.K. Bremen (2010), The Ikon Gallery...
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My pictures derive from a delight in the world around. A play on the mundane and everyday reality we slip through on our way to somewhere else. They are about collective moments, some tragic, some euphoric, when the sharing of an experience gives significance to something unnoticed. These quiet revelations bind, nurture and reassure us in a world...
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Lisa O'Brien's performance and installation work stems from her interest in sound. In the 80's she studied Expressive Arts at Brighton Polytechnic which included components in music composition, performance and sculpture. She developed an interest in working with instruments and vocals and much of her subsequent composition and performance...
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My practice is a pictorialist one, involving mainly photography, painting and drawing, underpinned by the legacies and practices of conceptualism. In this way, I aim to work in and around issues of picturing, photography and realism as a set of problematics. Commentators have remarked upon my works' Romanticism but also its schizophrenic...
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Blue has been given access to the National Library of Wales' (NLW) varied collections which consist of many of the Nation's treasures, including a broad range of materials such as manuscripts, maps, photographs, paintings and archives - not to mention the films, sound tapes and off-air recordings that are also housed there. The project was...
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'At the centre of Sarah Staton’s work is a dialogue between design, architecture, modernism, interior, exterior; the space between the work and the ground or support structures that exhibit the objects, and a little bit of life and fun without any cause for concern or angst-ridden guilt.' (Stephen Snoddy, 2012)Sarah Staton studied at...
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I met with Lucienne Cole on the 2nd May 2007 in a dark studio room in the heart of Birmingham, her current home. Lucienne and I shared a number of interests, the power of pop, the relationship between pop music and art, off-site interventions and art in social spaces. We had a lot to share, here are the highlights...This interview is available...
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Louise Hopkins practices a strategic sort of iconoclasm. Starting with pre-printed found surfaces, Hopkins remakes visual imagery through overpainting or repainting, erasing, scratching off or tearing the surface. The form of mark-making for each work is a specific response to the source material. Although she is perhaps most well known for...
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Open Frequency ProfileFeargal O'Malley, Northern Ireland Manager for Visual Artists Ireland, profiles the work of Mark McGreevy.Mark McGreevy’s densely packed compositions appear continually to shift focus between overlapping visual planes, as if caught between two worlds, a pictorial equivalent of today’s...
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Over the last few years Tim Bailey has created a diverse and convincing body of work, and most recently he has concentrated on producing a parallel practice based on performance and painting. Creating a fictional scenario, where cracked actors play out surreal and multiple roles in an uncanny way, one could say that his work deals with various...
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When viewing Lloyd Durling's intricate art works I think about whether life is the result of things simply happening, or where simple things happen. By this I mean the way the world is a complex relationship between relatively simple actions that by a chain of associations develop into incredibly complex organisms and systems of existence. ...
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Andrew Bracey's practice hovers on the fringes of painting as it crosses over and expands into installation, sculpture, drawing and animation. He often uses existing sites and the readymade as alternatives to the traditional canvas support for painting, creating tensions between the hand-made and the man-made. Bracey graduated with an MA in fine...
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Sally Sheinman is interested in human nature and the way people react to and interact with visual art. Her projects in recent years have invited the public to take part in her work, largely relying on their interaction to make the project complete.Trained as a painter, there is always a painting element to every idea she embarks on, though...
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My earlier works were composed of dense masses of parallel lines, drawn across a flat surface with a ruler - they were purely abstract. After some years I realised I wanted to work from reality. Now, all my source images are photographed from the natural world and then projected. Trees, plants and scrubland provide endless subject matter, although...
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Nick Fox’s paintings and objects are a combination of fine art and craft, romantic desire and explicit eroticism, decorative pattern and loaded symbolism. He employs this exploration of the symbiotic relationship between these pairings in a reflection on both the historical contexts of the art object and other artefacts, as well as in the...
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 Open Frequency ProfileSimon Morrissey, director of WORKS|PROJECTS, Bristol, profiles Bedfordshire-based artist, Andy Holden.Andy Holden’s works are material stories: objects as narratives, physical things that like to tell tales. Polymorphic in nature, Holden’s practice encompasses a diverse creative output, from monumental...
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The Lonely Piper was genesised in 1999 as the sole protagonist in the film 'I Can't Play The Bagpipes', a romantic yet humorous deconstruction of Scottish stereotype. His body of work to date has a Caledonian twist yet stems from the universal concerns of natural history, life, death, the paranormal and a love of folklore. Modestly referring to...
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Open Frequency ProfileRussell Roberts, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Photographic Research, University of Wales, discusses the recent paintings of Welsh artist Gareth Hugh Davies.       It has been said of the paintings by Gareth Hugh Davies that they represent a sense of the liminal; a...
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One can imagine that much of Tim Machin's time is spent turning the pages of the daily broadsheets, a hot mug of tea caressed in one hand, steaming a nearby window pane to create a cloud of condensation and a trickle of vapour, whilst rolling in his other a perfect sphere of blue tack. One can also imagine that making Machin's art is a...
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Conceptual and formal references to post-war American art and culture, art history and critical theory inform the work of Neil Clements, but ultimately it is the viewer’s relation to the work that completes it – the subjective encounter in a particular context.In 'Moat' (2009), a rectangular sheet of aluminium, overlaid by...
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I dislike 'arty' in art and in writing (i.e. the knowing sophistication found in a lot of celebrated stuff) – also references to huge knowledge. This doesn't leave me much: favourites are: Thomas Mann, Robert Creeley, Tal R,Canute Caliste… and South Park. I do also like: ancient wall painting and the early Renaissance; and a lot of...
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Lucy Skaer makes drawings, prints, sculptures and films that are often combined in installations. Her work forces the viewer to grapple with the experience of seeing an image or object that does not immediately reveal its form. Skaer acknowledges that the act of looking can be demanding, as she describes in her encounter with Holbein’s...
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'Coombes emphasises the entrenched political, cultural and class connotations of the traditional media that he works in. Stiff, pragmatic oil painting is harnessed to the exhausted mores of the tweeded aristocracy. The fluid eroticism of Baroque painting is applied to the svelte creases of an urban folk devil's dog-eared leather jacket'. (Neil...
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Artist statement My walks around cities take the form of a psychogeographic investigation, a process of subjectively mapping the city in it's intensive state of movement and flux. Through these drifts and the documentation of them I am seeking the point of transition from aesthetic practice to a radical critique of the city. I...
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'Gordon Brown's vast paintings combine fish and fowl, flora and fauna, in bright colours as though Hieronymus Bosch was designing sets for Balamory'. (Moira Jeffrey, The Herald, Glasgow, 2006). Inverness-based artist Gordon Robin Brown makes satirical and surreal paintings which combine a curious mix of elegance, humour and eroticism. The...
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Alex Charrington’s meticulous paintings and drawings are made using his ‘painting machines’. Process based in the truest sense, his relationship with his materials – he mixes his own pigments – and the method of their application is integral to his work and not just a means to an end.Despite their mechanical origins,...
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Giles Eldridge plucks his images from a variety of places: some refer to famous or political subjects whilst others are anonymous or taken from cultural sources such as art and architecture. Similarly, he employs different techniques to render these subjects. Each individual painting or drawing maintains its autonomy but is also part of a...
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'Dispositions (Finlandia Hall)', 2004(click to enlarge images) Jon Wood: We were talking earlier about medium and categorisation in relation to your practice...
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Frances Young, Nadia Hebson, Lucy Harrison, Michael Day, Dave Cushley,Toby Huddlestone, Bryan and Laura Davies Curated by Anthony Shapland It could have all been different. The past drives the present forward toward everything that may be. The sinking of the Mary Rose, a g-plan chair, the shipping forecast for 22 April...
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