Part of Community Art School and Yeovil Community Art School Graduation Exhibition.
6 April – 14 May, Yeovil Art Space.
A new exhibition at Yeovil Art Space showcasing nine members of the Yeovil Creatives and their experiences with the first Yeovil Community Art School programme.
The artist associates and Yeovil Creative members in the school are Miranda Pender, Dawn Handy, Celia Brokenshire, Natasha Rand, Izzie Robbins, Sarah Moore, Rhiannon Cross, Jess Egan and Stéphanie Max.
Between October last year to March 2022, this cohort of 9 artists attended a full day of teaching each month, giving them opportunities to learn new skills, collaborate, explore ideas around their practice and curatorial study, and ultimately discover sustainable ways to thrive as professional artists, in a regional and rural setting. The show displays results from the practical sessions from the school, cyanotypes, placards, camera-less films and more. The artists were also invited to share a personal response, a piece of art they have made interpreting their experiences with the school, making for an exciting and dynamic exhibition.
Detail of images clockwise from top left: Stéphanie Max, Izzie Jobbins, Sarah Moore, Miranda Pender, Dawn Handy, Jess Egan, Natasha Rand, Carolyne Leaflet (Community Art School producer), and Celia Brokenshire.
The beauty and diversity of the Southwest provides me with a rich variety of sources to stimulate creative responses. I am particularly drawn remarkable Jurassic coastline. I have always been drawn to the sea and take great enjoyment in being close to the water in all weathers.
“Fresh”, mixed materials, 30 x 15 cm
In the summer months I enjoy the invigorating shock of being immersed into waves to the feel of salt spray stinging my face in winter, rejuvenating the physical, the mind and soul. I aim to capture elements of these experiences in my pieces, using a variety of mediums to create 3D properties, generating a sense of movement and energy to each coastal inspired work.
“Summer sunset”, mixed materials, 100x 80cm
A local nature reserve is a place I spend much time walking and observing seasonal changes to the flora, fauna, wildlife, and changing light on the wetlands. Through exploring texture, mark making and colour, I hope to reflect a time, a place, emotion, or sensation to each work.
I am presently working on a large scale textural piece, which I hope to display at the Cove Gallery in Weymouth, where I have been fortunate enough to have sold work for a couple of years.
“My creative practice varies hugely in form, ranging from commercial illustration to site specific design and ceramics. I studied Illustration at Falmouth University graduating in 2017.
Since then I have freelanced in illustration and design work along side roles as school Creative Technician’s and a Window Display Designer. I moved back to Somerset last year after spending 5 years living on the south coast of Cornwall. I take a lot of inspiration from the coast and the outdoors. I am also one third of SPUD collaborative, a trio in a long distance illustrationship making zines and other printed goods.
Pictured ahead: Yeovil Art Space Wellbeing Activity Booklet, 2022 – Digital illustration and design
Pictured: Pacific Coast Trail, Pencil and Digital map and spot illustrations for ‘Rolling Home Magazine’ & SPUD zine.
In September last year I created a mural with Yeovil Art Space for the CAHM’s assessment room at Yeovil District Hospital. We worked with a small group of young people to come up with ideas for the design that would create acalming presence for a range of ages. The pastel shapes where cut out by the workshop participants and layered my illustrations over the top. I’ve worked on a few other projects with YAS including the Front Yard Fest and most recently the new Wellbeing Activity Booklet.
Pictured: Yeovil Hospital CAHM’s Mural, 2021 – Collage and digital illustration.
Show Off Ceramics, 2021 – Collage and coloured pencil
Window display in Yeovil Art Space
Since visiting the Met Museum in New York on a University trip I have been drawn to decorative ceramics and now whenever I go to London museums I love to sit and draw them. I like the objects themselves but also how they often tell stories with decoration especially the Greek vases. This is an idea I have been exploring through drawing, collage and more recently ceramics. Through my work as an Art Technician I have overseen setting up a new ceramics studio, knowing very little about the process I’ve had to learn along the way and this has really fed into my own work. Cornish Myths have inspired my most recent work illustrating onto tiles and wonky vases (both thrown and hand-built) using sgraffito to carve into contrasting slips.
Pictured: Cornish Myth tiles in process, Terracotta and slip.
A collaboration between artists Clarissa Ready &Stéphanie Max, expressing their influences, process, finding bridges and creating new collaborative artworks around the theme of nature.
Clarissa Ready and Stéphanie Max have a shared interest in materials and techniques.
They have a lot in common and both articulate their research within mixed media,including printmaking, painting, drawing, collage, embroidery and textiles.
They appreciate experimentation and discovery, letting the materials speak to them and the shapes and forms evolve.
During the year 2021, the two artists met 4 to 5 times to enjoy creating together, exploring new ways to work and know more about each other. They set up small art challenges to play whilst leaving room to surprises and experimentation. They started sharing stories and drawings using dice.
Clarissa is a textiles and mixed media artist and explores ideas in a great diversity of materials. She has a background in print, embroidery and knitwear, influenced in part by watching her mother and grandmother knit and sew as a child. Clarissa studied at Glasgow School of Art after which she freelanced as a designer selling work in America and Europe alongside teaching.
Stéphanie is a french mix media artist and uses paper as principal support. Her childhood was cradled by strong popular imagerie “Les images d’épinales” from the East of France. The little french girl visited a local printmaker and illustrator with her grandmother, writer. This meeting with Jean Morette was more than fascinating and shaped her dedication for art, the printing press and more specifically her attachment to pictures and narrations. Paper is a love story, including her attachment to books, old yellowing pictures and texts.
Exhibition at Yeovil Art Space
October 2021
During one month show in Yeovil Art Space, the artists shared a selection of personal artworks as well as pieces that “four hands have made together” and works in progress. It was an evolving ‘lab’ of experimentation. The artists proposed several workshops to share their experiences and techniques.
8 yeovil Creatives members have been part of the art festival in September (18 Sept- 3 Oct 2021), with Lucy Hawkins, Natasha Rand & Jill Preston.
Five of them were welcomed at Yeovil Art Space to set up temporary studio space as part of the Somerset Art Works Open Studios event. Grażyna Wikierska, Clarissa Ready, Stéphanie Max, Dawn Handy and Jess Egan have been showncasing an exciting range of work in printmaking, drawing, painting, mosaic and sculpture and proposed workshops to the community.
Grazyna is a mix media artist working in Yeovil, she like choosing all kinds of media to tell us a story. Recent works refer to spirituality, shamanism, self-discovery, fragility of everyday life and vulnerability.
“When you are young you learn your body, sometimes working against your will. Which can be the best thing ever happened to you. Like a blessing. Subtle Body “is a “quasi material”aspect of the human body, being neither solely physical nor solely spiritual, according to various esoteric and mystical teachings. This contrasts with the Mind–body dualism .The Subtle Body is what connects our physical body to the Causal Body (AKA Universe, Spirit, God)”. It was an awakening moment for me and I started observing experiences in the human – woman body. Observing form from formlessness level.
Line work in this painting represents a link to spirituality, meditative state, surrender, calm state. The field surrounding the body is the opposite – maybe – It is like chaos – vibrations – the universe of emotions without any form yet – formlessness. Cosmic consciousness in which we should identify ourselves. Mystical quantum build from energy.
Grazyna takes part of Somerset Open Studios event, 18 Sept-3rd Oct 2021 with 4 others artists and Yeovil Creatives members, in Yeovil Art Space. The artist organises with the artist Clarissa Ready a Textile workshop Saturday 2 October, 10.30- 1 pm, Yeovil Art Space. More info here.
Jess is a visual artist working in the South West, her work is primarily centred around landscape, works both figuratively and in an abstract style painting.
Landscape, coastline, and the skies above are fundamental features in my work, they are where I find space to think and ever since I was small, I have been compelled to try and capture what I see around me; just recently I was prompted to remember drawing mountains in Spain on a childhood family holiday, trying to perfect an art and capture something of what it was like to be there in that magnificent landscape. I am enthralled by openness, large scale vistas, and my human sized place within that. Working with acrylics, inks, watercolour etc, I like to explore intuitively through my materials. The processes of painting and drawing are vital, the physicality of mark making, and so my work is often abstract as it takes the original focus into an emotional experience.
St Ives – Ink and Watercolour on paper – approx 10×7”
I am beginning to understand that I am interested in ‘experience’ and how I translate that in my work. I think this partly stems back to a time when I lost confidence in my painting and drawing and took up a compulsion for taking photographs, obsessively recording places but not drawing them. Now photos sometimes inform my work alongside my sketches but are mainly a way for me to have moments of creativity at a click of a button, an achievement, a capture, a new possession. Then I can develop my ideas with drawing/markmaking later as a slower more considered approach. I used these ideas on a large scale in my work for ‘Somerset Reacquainted’ exploring the lockdown experience, taking daily photographs and exploring my feelings about time and its influence on us, part of the experience of life.
After spending many years apart from my practice I have realised how important making art is to maintaining my peace of mind and how key it is to my identity. I am keen to promote the message of art for all and creativity for health.
My earliest memories of drawing and developing a passion for art, stem from my childhood and teen years in South Africa. I found inspiration and felt inspired everywhere I went. Memories of standing, aged 2, in front of profuse blooms of bougainvillea, bursting with Cape chameleons delight my imagination to this day.
I am about to embark on a Fine Art degree, focusing on sculpture and printmaking, followed by a Masters in Art Therapy. After completing a Foundation in Graphic Art in 1994 and subsequently a Journalism Diploma, I set out to discover the world as a backpacker. 18 months later, I unintentionally fell in love and Britain has been my home ever since.
I’m a self-taught mosaic artist, with a formal background in drawing, printmaking and graphic art with a primary focus on linocuts, woodcuts, etchings and mixed media.
Whilst my degree is still on the horizon, I’ve picked up a handful of diplomas along the way as a healthcare and youth worker – the wonderful people I’ve worked with over the years have all inspired me to become an art therapist.
The current focus of my art practice is primarily on mosaic art and sculpture using recycled materials, mixed media paintings and sculptures, as well as printmaking.
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Using recycled materials in my work has always been a passion – growing up in South Africa with limited resources, as art materials were expensive and imported – I learned to adapt, adjust and incorporate recycled materials into my work. The use of recycled materials is endemic in South Africa, leading to wondrous creations by extremely talented artisans, artists and crafts folk.
Necessity quite literally smashes preconceived notions of materials
Having been adopted, my art practice definitely currently centres around ‘identity’. It reflects my journey after undertaking DNA tests and a lot of research to discover the very mixed heritage of my biological ancestry. The outcome is reflected in my work, which reflects my processing of the documented stories, histories, ancestral art and cultures of my ancestors, whose origins span the globe.
I’m a member of the Yeovil Creatives and South-West Mosaic Artists. My work is available in multiple locations, including the Yeovil Art Space, where I also run art workshops.” (more info about workshop soon).
Dawn Handy is going to take part in Somerset Open Studio 18 Sep-2 Oct 2021 with 4 other Yeovil Creatives’ members at Yeovil Art Space.
‘Contemplation of the ancestral‘ copyright 2021 Dawn Handy for the South West Mosaic Artists’ ‘Picking up the Pieces’ exhibition at the Sou’ Sou’ West gallery, Symondsbury.
‘Headdress of my foremothers‘ copyright Dawn Handy 2021. 30cm contemporary mosaic. Sou’ Sou’ West gallery, Symondsbury with the South West Mosaic Artists.
‘Flowering Hope‘ copyright 2021 Dawn Handy for the South West Mosaic Artists’ ‘Picking up the Pieces’ exhibition at the Sou’ Sou’ West gallery, Symondsbury.
‘Hold on to your dreams‘ copyright 2021 Dawn Handy for the South West Mosaic Artists’ ‘Picking up the Pieces’ exhibition at the Sou’ Sou’ West gallery, Symondsbury.
“The Woods‘ copyright 2021 Dawn Handy for the South West Mosaic Artists’ ‘Picking up the Pieces’ exhibition at the Sou’ Sou’ West gallery, Symondsbury.
‘Rising Phoenix‘ copyright 2021 Dawn Handy for the Together We Are Stronger community project, in conjunction with the Yeovil Creatives, led by Natasha Rand.
‘We honour you’ copyright Dawn Handy 2021. 30cm contemporary mosaic skull. Tesserae handcut from vitreous tiles, vintage and modern china and crockery, displayed alongside beads and found objects. Showing in the Picking up the pieces 2021 exhibition, st the Sou’ Sou’ West gallery, Symondsbury.
We are so glad to have a wonderfull window display to go along with our plant pot project for raising money for our Yeovil Creatives art group!
Our member Rachel put together the lovely pots hand decorated by our members and her green and poetic paper elements to create a stunning scene.
“I’m an illustrator and designer based in Yeovil, Somerset. This window display was originally commissioned by Weston Artspace on the theme ‘Ray of Light’ to coincide with the high streets reopening back in March. I tried to focus on a positive aspect from the COVID pandemic that I hope people will continue to value.
During this time most people have been able to slow down, take time outside in their local surroundings and appreciate how good being in nature makes them feel. Carbon emissions have dropped as well as noise pollution, which in turn has given wildlife an opportunity to thrive. More wildflower have bloomed in verges making them welcome habitats for bees and insects. The greens cape backdrop felt like the perfect fit to help display and promote Yeovil Creative’s Plant Pot Project and upcoming Front Yard Fest.“
Rachel is a creative designer with a degree in illustration from Falmouth University. The artit’s work spans editorial and information illustration to window displays and site specific design work. Rachel does a lot of drawing mixed with collage, painting and digital work.
Members decorated clay plant pots to raise money for their activities and projects. Each pot is unique, handmade and brightened with painting, collage or mosaic.
They are lovely characters in our wildlife window created by the artist and illustrator Rachel Akerman in Yeovil Art space. Rachel Akerman Illustration
All of this is taking part of the Front Yard Fest Yeovil, community art event to celebrate our homes, which will be 8 to 29 AUGUST 2021. For more, see Front Yard Fest Yeovil – Yeovil Art Space .
Each pot is for sale, £15, £20 and £25 for the bigger ones. Thank you for supporting us and enjoying a rare and very local plant pot!
FIND HERE ALL OUR PLANT POT COLLECTION
Small pots (hight: 10cm, diamater on top: 11cm), £15 each.
Medium pots (hight: 10cm, diamater on top: 11cm), £20 each.
Big pot(Hight:16cm, diameter on top: 17cm), £25 each.
You are very welcome to send us a picture of it on display in your house, flat, garden or whatever! Use the #plantpotyeovil in Instagram or @yeovilcreatives in Facebook, or send us an email yeovilcreatives@gmail.com.
Yeovil Creatives 