MEET THE ARTISTS

Jessica Akerman

Ceramics, popping colour and playful forms collide in Jessica Akerman’s sculptures; an assemblage of fragmented bodies and design trends.

Jessica Akerman works with pattern, colour and diverse materials to explore social histories and place. Working across sculpture, installation and performance, her work is often site-responsive and shaped by architecture, places and their inhabitants. 

She often explores aspects of working lives, particularly those of women. Her practice visualises different modes of communication, and how social structures are expressed, for example through folk song, domestic design, costume and tools.

Jessica is based in Bristol.

 http://jessicaakerman.com/

Instagram: @jessica.akerman

Rose Court Bendall

Rose Court Bendall makes bold, physical works that sit between sculpture and installation. Her constructions operate at scale, often engaging key themes of gravity and balance while toying with tensions between minimalism and surrealism. The placement of the work in unpredictable and surprising environments is a key part of the process, encouraging curiosity through mystery and humour.
Having graduated in Fine Art from Bristol UWE in 2020, Rose now lives and works in Stroud.

https://www.rosecourtbendall.com/

Jeremy Brookes

Jeremy Brookes is a Cotswold born artist and sculptor. His practice is firmly rooted within his local landscape with found materials featuring regularly as both an inspiration and a resource.

The work he makes revolves around the concept that what we find of interest in our environment is a reflection of ourselves.

Jeremy uses the act of walking both as a means of navigating through his environment and as a creative space in which to observe and reflect upon his interactions with the inner and outer landscapes he encounters.

Jeremy's use of found materials is a starting point for his exploration that embraces the mutability of line and form. His practice is drawing based but expands ideas surrounding traditional notions of drawing on a surface into three dimensions. To draw is to make an indexical trace, to create a line or a form that the viewer is able to observe and interpret. The abstract nature of Jeremy’s work is underpinned by a thoughtful exploration of the ideas surrounding self and his relationship with his environment.

Instagram @jeremybrookesartist

Paul Grellier

Which came first: the human …. or the tool ... ? Paul Grellier’s fascination with, and use of traditional tools began in childhood and have lately informed the focus of much of his work . A familiar object such as a pick axe, relatively little changed in design over millennia, incongruously sculpted in polished stone, takes on a serene and iconic form, embodying the extraordinary range and scale of humanity’s endeavour. This tool alone symbolises so much of how we have interacted with this planet.
Beauty and brutality are merged in ancient earth matter with a tangible fragility and questionable purpose.

Paul lives and works in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Mair Hughes

Mair Hughes' irreverent and polymorphous constructions reincarnate artefacts and ideas from the past under new guises and with altered intentions. Her practice is rooted in sculpture and installation, toying with processes of translation and reconstruction. Hughes’ works employ a spectrum of making methods from crafted textiles and hand-built ceramics to staged photographic images and altered manufactured objects. Her eclectic approach to production reflects the strange and sometimes perverse hierarchies of value and matter that we grapple with in a material world, but also articulates the desire that an extravagant amount of care be taken over these interactions. Mair Hughes is based at Stroud Valley Artspace since 2017.

http://www.mairhughes.com/

Alice Sheppard Fidler

Sheppard Fidler works across installation, sculpture and performance often operating outside the gallery context. Her conceptual art practice utilises and transforms found and recycled materials and spaces to navigate often fragile and imperceptible boundaries between place, human experience and states of being. In response to the excess produced in the physical world, the transience of the work is key, whether it is an object that can be packed away or a performance which cannot be repeated. The body, present or absent is often used as a key tool with which to work with the interactions between space, scale and object. This performative approach, which sets up temporary ‘stagings’, invites the audience to interact and integrate with the work as a shared, cooperative experience.
Born, 1966, she lives and works near Stroud, Gloucestershire, having lived in London till 2016.

www.alicesheppardfidler.com

Rebecca Wyn Kelly

Rebecca Wyn Kelly lives and works on the West coast of Wales. Her kindship and deep-rooted connection to the land give her work a strong sense of identity. Visualising the personal and political challenges that face isolated communities is central to her practice. The philosophical threat of people and place unravelling is ever-present in the work she creates. Her idiosyncratic relationship with materials and place is enchanting. She contains the magical quality of found objects or materials by honouring their history and reimagining their future in the form of sculpture and installation.
https://www.rebeccawynkelly.com/

Artist in Residence June 11th - 14th

Gugan Gill

Gugan Gill is a young artist born in the West Midlands and now based in Birmingham.

Her work can be considered as a visual and poetic investigation that explores themes of home, identity and time and place through the lens of feminism. Using print, illustration, digital film and Super 8, Gugan’s approach to making revolves around documenting and reflecting on the wonders of everyday, capturing a sense of domestic feminism and the life story.  

Instagram: @gugan.gill