Amy Majed
Amy Majed’s work “Marine Skies” is an installation, surrounding themes of light and shadows, her work toys with the experience between the viewer and their surroundings. The enclosed and dark space bordering the installation supports the blue light, this produces a stronger and more concentrated pigmentation, giving the installation an unusual atmosphere. The room is filled with a blue film that funnelled through holes in a sheet of paper, this blocks some light but also directs other.
The light creates shadows upon the paper and the surrounding walls, the shadow is from the paper itself and the viewers presence within the space. The shadows highlight the whole meaning of the work as it emphasises the presence of the viewer further, leading the viewer to forget their normal surroundings and walk into another world. A world called “Marine Skies”.
Ashlee Hallas
Ashlee Hallas - Statement
I work predominantly in mixed media while experimenting with collage and painting. I create textured surfaces that make links and connections to various themes and contexts. Method and meaning are often interconnected.
My approaches often consist of the deconstruction and reassembling of work using a collage method. In particular juxtaposing multilayer used papers with a colour palette infused by my chosen location used as a way to examine, reinterpret, and reimagine.
I tend to be drawn to techniques that allow for an aspect of ‘chance’ as the multi-layered papers and paints evolve. I make frequent visits to a specific location as its important for me to remain visual as this underpins and informs my practice. My investigation and journey as I progress and make is as much part of the work as the end result.
Whilst starting points in my work may vary, a recurring interest in texture and imagery are always at the forefront of my practice.
Bethany Wilson
Bethany Wilson Artist Statement for Winter Show website –
Beth Wilson is a multimedia artist whose practice focuses mainly on painting and drawing but recently has expanded to include the use of ink and bleach. Often her work has an organic appearance that stems from the way the pieces are put together and grow. For instance, the work seen here in the York St John Winter Show consists of many 4x4 inch squares attached together with tape. Inside each square is an ink and bleach composition, the significance of which can be found in the way that the materials react to each other resulting in an almost cellular and microscopic formation. To then house these small squares within brown tape produces questions of isolation which are extremely relevant to recent circumstances.
Ellie Greensmith
Ellie Greensmith
‘Round and Round and Round My Head’
Ellie Greensmith is a 22 year old Artist currently studying in York. Her work focuses primarily on themes surrounding mental health.
Her method of working includes the use of repetitive sequences. Her large scale works consist of tiny marks, dots or words that begin central and contained. These marks then gradually spiral out towards the edges of the (6ftx6ft) page. This work is representative of anxieties, intrusive thoughts and other emotions that coincide with mental health challenges that can often begin as nothing or something small. These feelings then increase in size to be something much bigger, overwhelming and completely unavoidable, much like the presence of a piece this large in scale.
She hopes her works of this nature can initiate a crucial conversation about the reality of mental illness and question why people are so uncomfortable when confronted by it.
Winter Show Statement
Emma Henderson is a queer visual artist who mainly uses photographic practice to produce gender-bent and LGBTQ+ inspired art. In their current work, Emma has intertwined this intimate photography with linework drawing to distort the mind away from gender and reconnect with the body in a way that forces the audience away from the binary. Emma uses the line work layering over images to pull the focus away from the body as an object, and to create a focus around the curvatures of the images. These images are intending to be displayed simply, hanged suspended from the ceiling against a white wall, allowing the edges to curl which highlights the raw and intimate keys to the images. The key with Emma’s work is simplicity, and where COVID-19 may have stopped the use of models and photographing others intimately, Emma is able to capture their own body in a way that compels the viewer.
Instagram: @emmalouiseweddings
Emma Henderson
George Strachan
George Strachan Artist’s Statement:
​
‘Frottage’
​
George Strachan’s drawing-based practice is rooted in experimentation, process and enquiry. His work is an outcome of exploration into the possibilities and fluidity of the medium of drawing, partially in response to a number of what might be regarded ‘conventions’ or characteristics of drawing, such as those outlined by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida. Strachan’s enquiries into drawing are facilitated here via an adoption of the process of frottage, the making of rubbings from a textured surface. This in itself, challenging historical associations between drawing and reliance on technical skill and, simultaneously, offering an alternative platform from which to consider aspects of line and gesture in drawing.
Grace Derry
Title: House Home
Grace Derry, strives to document, explore, and articulate the world around her. Through a multi-disciplined installation practice, she examines how she inhabits spaces questioning the relationship with the space and how it can be a reflection of herself and her experiences. Recent focus has led to a material-based enquiry of the home. She analyses the contrasting experiences of living within the family home, and her university house. Contemplating how memories can be held within a space, how we mould and create reflections of ourselves within new spaces, reflecting on her own evolving thoughts on what is home. Documenting textures and shapes that are key memories but may otherwise go unnoticed by others. Abstracting and layering the forms and formulating these motifs with traditional aspects of the home associated with memories such as bannisters and photo frames, in doing so creating a personal representation of the home for the viewer to explore and experience.
Hope Mitchell-Graham
.jpg)
Hope Mitchell-Graham Winter Show Artist Statement
Hope Mitchell-Graham is a third year Fine Art student at York St. John, whose work focuses on feminist themes such as gender stereotypes and the division of labour in the home. This piece is made up of tea towels, dish cloths, sponges and other assorted household cleaning cloths, painstakingly hand-stitched together, with batting and a backing fabric to make up a quilt. Drawing together two undervalued forms of women’s work, domestic crafts and housework, this piece forms a commentary on the value of women’s time and art made within the home. Prior to being stitched together, pieces of the quilt have been stained with purple ink and alcohol. This means that these abstract forms made of ink have been split up among the squares and placed separately in the quilt, adding visual interest and a feeling of incompleteness.
James Ashby
Artist Statement
James Ashby is an artist based in Lincolnshire. Primarily an oil painter, but often using multiple mediums, he focuses on the exploration of philosophical thinking, consumeristic culture and contemporary politics. Most of his current oeuvre is underpinned by the idea of the sublime in philosophical thinking, exploring the ideas presented by the philosophical enquiries into the sublime to capture the essence of a sublime experience. His paintings of the ocean are a prominent example of this, conveying the overwhelming force of the natural world.
​
These pieces are no different, seeking to explore this idea of the sublime at play in the mathematical and dynamical sense, whether in depictions of abstract interstellar landscapes or the drama of an abyss concealing a ferocious sea. Inspired by the works of Werner Herzog, within his paintings he attempts to conceal the narratives of the culmination of the powers of nature, much like Herzog’s works on the same subject.
Jess Hargreaves
‘Dirty Laundry’
My practice is a heavily illustrative and mixed media exploration into the everyday. Taking words from songs, adverts, conversations, literature, etc. Reassessing where meaning lies in these moments in our everyday lives, how we process this and if it has significance to ourselves or not. A perspective of irreverence from the mundane and mental obstacles we face, trying to transform and produce an emotive response that could also be considered taboo and comical. Impulsive drawings are what motivate my work incorporating very physical mark making. Turning drawing into a daily routine, taking these motifs then turning them into large scale paintings on fabric to deconstruct our formal thoughts of painting and drawing, creating a juxtaposition of provocative subject matters included in the work with the childlike and rawness of the actual method of my practice.
Winter Show
Body of Work Title
“Evolution”
​
Born in agricultural North Yorkshire, John now lives among the former rurally located industrial coal fields in County Durham. Here he is guided by an uncomplicated serious sense of fun. He identifies and gathers natural and disregarded engineered objects discovered when exploring the numerous nearby abandoned collieries and disused quarries.
​
Driven by his passion to create awareness of the neglectful interferences that mankind has imposed on their natural surroundings, his 'Evolution' collection of work, uses the collaboration of his signature materials, of found and salvaged stone, wood and metal. This body of sculptures, demonstrates combinations of these manufactured, disturbances and nature. When collectively presented, they compliment each others qualities successfully, as thought provoking and enlightening creations of visual art.
John Cutting
Laura Campbell
Laura Campbell is a Third Year Fine Art student studying at York St John University. Her practice surrounds themes of anxiety and suffocation through the frank and confrontational imagery of medical ailments, in combination with intimate and intrusive documentary style photography. Focusing on communicating the lack of control over her body, Campbell explores direct, autobiographical themes through the obsessive nature, making vast quantities of works. The practice is primarily process driven, with the use of performative and experimental media to develop resolved and composed artworks. Documentary photography, lino printing, and the digital manipulation of imagery provides as a base to work into pieces through further media explorations. Heavy combinations of drawing and sewing enable for the distortion of previously layered imagery, allowing for inks and gold leaf to embellish the artworks, creating a sense of comedic irony throughout the practice. Performative processes are also imperative, creating outcomes in the form of stop motion animations, video and sound, and performance documentation photography.
Laura.campbell.art
Lucy Nettleton
Untitled, Blob, 2020
Lucy Nettleton is an artist who primarily works within a sculptural/installation medium but also uses some aspects of drawing and collage within her practice. Mainly she has found herself working with industrial materials such as plaster and wire. Her piece Untitled, Blob, 2020 is a large, black, sculptural blob with a textured surface. The textured surface is coarse and chunky, made from a paper mulching method. Lucy uses experimentation with materials in order to create textures that force the viewer want to interact with the work. The sculpture should be displayed in a way that makes it an obstacle for the audience to manoeuvre themselves around. Making sculptural obstacles is a theme within her practice, with Lucy compelling the audience to engage with her work by using it to block pathways or corridors. The use of sculptural obstacles is a way of representing the difficulties she has struggled with being a sculptor during the pandemic.
Instagram : @lucysartworld_
Mia Ferullo
Mia Ferullo’s Website statement:
‘Blueprints’
Mia Ferullo creates work surrounding the female figure, specifically looking at her own body. Using a combination of painting, cyanotypes and performance, Mia’s self-portraiture aims to challenge the way in which the female nude is typically sexualized. The colour palette of blues is used to make this separation that steers the work away from stereotypical feminine connotations. Mia actively focuses on the performance aspect as she intends to demonstrate the making process of the work, coinciding with the final result. ‘Blueprints’ consists of a large white sheet that has blue, painterly body prints dyeing the cotton. Handsewn onto the sheet are figurative A5 cyanotypes. The sheet has then been layered with a video projection that demonstrates the process of making the body prints. The video collage is spliced up to avoid voyeurism and includes short shots of blue paint and parts of body.
Sophie Martin
Sophie Martin’s practice focuses around an autobiographical exploration of self, aiming to unveil an inner world typically unseen or unheard in day-to-day life. Through a merging of both painting and photography using a series of double exposures, contradictions between the physical and the cognitive - presence and absence - may be visualised. There is a particular emphasis on conveying emotion without words which is achieved through water-based imagery and the adoption of a muted colour palette. This becomes layered with incomplete figurative paintings which are printed onto tissue paper, and sewn into long sculptural pieces. These hang down and waver in the passing of the piece. The materiality of the tissue paper offers a vulnerability and a sense of humanness; it possesses a delicate, fragile and skin-like quality which both in scale and an overloading of imagery, washes away remnants of the figure.
@sophie_martinart
Stephanie Williams
Steph Williams is an artist with a ‘Butterfly Mind’ that translates identifiably directly into her mixed media art works, creatively embracing any number of mediums including collage, ink, paint, illustration and installation. Her individualism is engaging as her interests in past and present social issues such as injustice, inequality, ‘being human’, mental health and disability, are threads of creative narratives that run through her art works.
More specifically, her latest work addresses her experience of life in Covid19 lock-down, her personal struggle with the turmoil of her heightened anxieties that sometimes overwhelm and even disrupt her art works; illustrated through the juxtaposition between detailed, minimal and unfinished works, that clash by way of documenting her personal journey. This chaotic, unsettling journey with some remissions into calm, is illustrated through her limited choice of palate and text, surrounding a more detailed self-portrait, representing the ‘achievable.’