SolasArts Creatives

Peggy Atherton
Peggy’s practice interrogates ways social practices are entangled with nature’s cycles of life and decay. Resurrecting road kill animals has been a central part of her work, responding to them through different materials and colours, developing their forms through performative gestures, rituals, speculative and mysterious narratives. Peggy has referred to her sculptural casts of dead animals as ‘Sleeping Beauties’ indicating the strange poetic of the work and her fascination with cultural imaginaries of mortality.

Her sustained involvement with the processes of sculpture generates a diverse mix of sculptural responses ranging through traditional casting and playful bricolage. Found objects and entropic materials are frequently embedded in individual works and uncanny installation scenarios. Peggy uses strategies of surprise through juxtaposition and dislocation to explore complex emotional and cultural responses to mortality – imaginative longing, hope and humour. A recent work brings together some found rabbits and a discarded Nike rucksack which have been cast together in a range of colours and materials. These poetic and uncanny objects bring vitality to dead matter; they are haunted with memories from an unknown past and bristle with potential for new story-telling/ Stories which become ever more intense and resonant in emerging contexts of cultural anxiety, environmental change and catastrophe.

For the launch of SolasArts, November 2021, Peggy will be collaborating with artist Andy Hughes to present an installation of sculpture, photography and film in the historic Porthmeor studios St Ives. These studios were once used by modern British artists such as Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon who used strategies of abstraction to represent their complex experiences of the Cornish environment. Peggy and Andy have been working in the wooded environment of Frenchman’s Creek on the Helford River responding to this haunting environment of mud, ruin and regrowth. There is a programme of talks, a workshop and related 'pilgrimage' tour associated with this project (See Events/News).

Sax Impey
Sax Impey is a British artist. He currently lives and works in St Ives, Cornwall, England, occupying a Porthmeor studio and continuing in the tradition of Patrick Heron, Ben Nicholson, and other recognized artists.

Since 2005 he has produced work derived almost exclusively from experiences at sea. A qualified RYA Yachtmaster, he has sailed many thousands of nautical miles across the ocean. Whilst maintaining a solo studio practice he has also engaged in numerous collaborative projects, including film, theatre, performance and installation works. He was elected an RWA Academician in 2012.

His paintings are in numerous collections including The Arts Council, Warwick University, the Connaught Hotel alongside many other private collections worldwide

https://www.saximpey.com

Oliver Raymond -Barker
Oliver Raymond Barker works with the mechanics and alchemy of photography to make images, objects and structures that expand upon what photography is and can be. Working predominantly with alternative analogue techniques he uses photography as a tool to uncover imagined narratives & unseen processes, framed by his interest in culture, ecology and spirituality.

He was recently selected to participate in the Peer Forum programme at The Photographers Gallery, London and has delivered talks and workshops for a range of institutions such as UNSEEN (Amsterdam), Cove Park (Scotland), YATOO (South Korea) & London College of Communication (University of the Arts London).

‘This is photography deliberately against the grain of conventional practice. It is a kind of image making that paradoxically deals as much with the invisible as the visible.’

Martin Barnes / Senior Curator of Photographs, Victoria & Albert Museum

https://oliverraymondbarker.co.uk

Sola Olulode
Sola Olulode’s dreamy queer visions explore embodiments of British Black Womxn and Non-Binary Folx. Working with various mediums of natural dyeing, batik, wax, ink, pastel, oil bar, and impasto she develops textural canvases that explore the fluidities of identities.

Her utopian scenes celebrate relationships that transcend crude notions of queer sexuality, her figures exemplify the warm embrace of queer love, a temporal space to bathe in memories of intimacies abundant with scenes of profoundly deep tender connections. Envisaging a world reflective of the celebration of her own identities

Recent residencies and solo shows include: von Goetz, Moving in the Bluish Light (2018); Lewisham Art House, Hold My Hand (2019); V.O Curations, Where the Ocean Meets the Beach (2020); and featured in the V&A’s In the Palm of Your Hands (2020).

http://solaolulode.co.uk

Vasiliki Antonopoulou
FKA Billy Klotsa – b.1990 Athens Greece, lives and works in London, UK. Billy uses both 'he' and 'she' pronouns in an effort to render them meaningless.

Born in Greece and raised in Saudi Arabia, two locations which re-emerge in his practice, he combines text, performance and moving image, to explore notions of displacement and otherness. These manifest in metaphors that create multiple layers delving into the emotional relationships that exist in particular spaces and architecture.

Using a sculptural language, her work queers the process of image editing by challenging the binary format of rough versus sleek moving image. Her outcomes are visual poems that occupy a space in between where displaced images reflect the notions she works with.

Recent exhibitions include: Mimosa House, London, 2019, The Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2018, Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens, 2018, Artnight London, 2018, NARS Foundation, New York, 2015 and the MIX New York Queer Experimental Film Festival in 2013. Her work has been featured in Frieze Review, and the Queer Direct Publication, amongst others.

https://www.vasilikiantonopoulou.com

William Arnold
William Arnold is an experimental, conceptual and documentary photographer, interested in the layers of human and natural history that comprise the making of the landscape, and the role played by the photograph in documenting time and change—the subjective and objective politics of places and their histories.

His first monograph Suburban Herbarium was published by Uniformbooks (2020) with his work showcased in various publications and periodicals including: The Guardian, New Scientist, De Standaard, Source and Resurgence & Ecologist Magazine.

Recent publication include:
Suburban Herbarium (2020) Uniformbooks - with foreword by Mark Cocker and essay by Professor Val Williams. The Last Hundred (2019) Guillemot Press. New Scientist, Issue 3306, October 31st 2020 Suburban Herbarium (Print & online), Resurgance & Ecologist Magazine, Tin Can-Firmament & Quarantine Herbarium (October 2020), Suburban Herbarium centre-fold feature De Standaard, Belgium, June 17th, 2020, Suburban Herbarium centre-fold feature The Guardian, June 2nd 2020, Caught By The River - review by Rob St. John, May 2020
He lives and works in west Cornwall, UK.

https://williamarnold.net

Peter Kennard
Peter Kennard was born in London in 1949 and lives and works in Hackney, East London. He studied at the slade and at the Royal College of Art.

Peter's work has been at the cutting edge of political art since 1968. His photomontages, installations and paintings are known globally, gaining exposure in galleries, on the streets, in newspapers, posters and books. He is professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art, London.

‘Peter Kennard’s work is a harrowing x-ray of the shadow side of the world that perfectly captures the brutal asymmetries of our age: heavy weaponry trained on broken people, all-seeing technologies and disappearing identities, perpetually exhaling Industry and an asphyxiating planet.’
Naomi Klein

Peter's most recent exhibition: Richard Saltoun Gallery, London: On Hannah Arendt: Eight Proposals for Exhibition, 2021.

https://www.peterkennard.com

Dominca Williamson
Dominica is a freelance artist called Ecogeographer, working in the field of multidisciplinary design and sustainability in Cornwall UK

She is most inspired when working outside, and when looking at how communities view landscape and cope with change. For instance, she has co-created visual research methods for the project Coral Communities and Ruritage. She is currently co-developing a Cornish (U.K.) pilgrimage project near her home. In the past, she has used Green Map Icons to co-create heritage walking maps. This time she is interested in working with Green Map's Recovery Icons and the post Brexit farmland of the U.K.

Dominica works with like-minded people in co- and community design, she has collaborated with individuals and organisations in a variety of areas – from photographers, editors and programmers to PhD landscape management students and professional archeologists. In 2015, she worked with a geographer on a Leverhulme-funded artist-in-residency project at the University of Plymouth.

Currently she is working on a cultural regeneration pan-European project with geographers, heritage specialists and psychologists called Ruritage.

Dominica was the design director for the 2004 Green Map Atlas. After this experience her final masters project was completed and published in 2009 in Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, London: Routledge, which cites Green Map System as a key influence in the research.

https://www.ecogeographer.com

Peggy Atherton
Peggy’s work explores cultural imaginaries of nature, its cycles of life and death. Through sustained engagement with sculptural practices, casting from found matter and playful bricolage, she creates poetic, objects and uncanny scenarios. Her works are like fragments from dreams, memories, stories of the past - discarded, found and re-presented for stories to be told. Each work is resonant with many sensations - at once melancholy beautiful, funny and forlorn. Peggy uses both road kill animals and entropic, abandoned matter as a starting point , responding imaginatively through different colours and materials, producing different gestures and rituals to enshrine, re-contextualise and re-present them. The works re-vitalize ‘dead’ matter with imaginative potential, creating objects for reverie and speculative story-telling.

She represented Friends of the Earth, Commissioned Art Work for Marble Hill House, London and represented London in ‘What’s new from London’ in Belgium. Elliot Literary Festival.

Peggy is Senior Tutor Fine Art Mixed Media BA and MA University of Westminster. She is a visiting lecturer for Fine Art BA at Bath University and MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. She has contributed to Education programmes through practical workshops at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and led programmes of studio visits for postgraduates at Christie's Education London.

Recent exhibitions : ‘Europe After the Rain, Newlyn Art Gallery Penzance 2020, Hestercombe House Somerset. 2018, TinType Gallery London 2017.

Ben Cook
Based near Penzance in west Cornwall, Ben Cook makes artworks inspired by the landscape- as seen through the eyes of a surfer.
Taking the ‘Surfer’s Gaze’ as inspiration, he works across many art forms, using found and reclaimed materials, reflecting the environmental concerns of the modern day surfer.
His engagement with the concept of the ‘Surfer's Gaze’ reaffirms Lacan's dual definition of the act of gazing.
At times his work is non-judgemental, concentrating (gazing) on the aesthetics of design and textures of materials related to surfboards, and the beauty of natural phenomena encountered by surfers on a daily basis. However, when Cook concentrates on what the surfer becomes aware of when they are themselves viewed, the politics, social realities and environmental concerns of surfing emerge.
Cook uses the prominence of surfing and surf culture in the south west, to address issues of both local and universal concern pertaining to the landscape, the visual culture and the inhabitants of contemporary Cornwall.

https://bencooksurfart.co.uk/

Sam Bleakley
Sam is a British surfer, travel writer, filmmaker, presenter and longboard contest commentator. He has published five books on surfing and contributed to several multiauthor volumes on the topic. Sam's work often focuses on emerging surf communities and cultural tourism projects in areas that are post-conflict or post-environmental disaster. With an intent to celebrate responsible tourism and surfing’s potential to inspire positive change in both local and global contexts.

Bleakley has produced, presented, directed, co-edited and written numerous surf travel films including the Brilliant Corners surf travel series on emerging surf cultures. He has appeared in action sport DVDs, documentaries and television programmes about surfing and travel.

https://sambleakley.co.uk/

Amada Williamson
Dr. Amanda Williamson is a Visiting Honorary Professor at ‘The Centre for Dance Research (C-dare)’ and currently supervises PhD students at Birmingham City University and the University of Gloucestshire. She directs the two year professional training programme in 'Bio-Somatic Dance Movement Naturotherapy’ in association with ‘The International Somatic Movement Education & Therapy Association’ (ISMETA New York).

She is principal editor and author in, “Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives” and the international peer review research journal, “Dance, Movement and Spiritualities” (with Intellect Publishers UK/USA).

https://www.movingsoma.co.uk

Dr Mandy Bloomfield
Is an academic, a researcher, a writer, an educator and occasional dabbler in creative collaborations. Her professional role is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Plymouth, where she leads the MA Environmental Humanities programme.

Her research expertise revolves around experimental poetics. She is the author of the academic monograph entitled Archaeopoetics: Word, Image History (University of Alabama Press 2016).

Her current research explores how modern and contemporary poetry engages the dilemmas of our present moment of ecological emergency. She has published several academic articles and book chapters related to this interest. Since she began working at Plymouth in 2014 she developed a fascination - perhaps even an obsession - with all things sea-related.

Mandy is increasingly drawn to thinking about cultural imaginaries of the ocean and asking how poetries of the sea might help us better understand our shifting relationships with the watery world in our current era of environmental change.

Jacqueline Nowakowski FSA
Is a professional archaeologist and researcher for over 40 years with extensive field experience in the UK and abroad (Poland, Germany and Italy). Nationally recognised prehistorian and educator. Currently working freelance following a long successful professional career as Principal Archaeologist, Cornwall Archaeological Unit, Cornwall Council.

She has lectured in UK and abroad and have published widely. Appearances on national television (Down to Earth and Digging for Britain) and interviews on local, national radio and BBC world service, YouTube and podcasts. She develops creative multi-stranded archaeological and heritage projects and works with heritage charities, groups and other creatives with an emphasis on wider engagement about archaeology, landscape and environment, and advocate for community participation in research and outreach.

Clifton Evers
Clifton Evers is a lecturer in media and cultural studies at Newcastle University, He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney. he research sport, lesiure, masculinity, and pollution. His work includes employing wearable technologies as a research method to conduct ‘wet ethnography’ e.g. in the sea. Clifton also uses experimental creative methods to conduct and share research. Clifton’s research has been published in journals such as Leisure Sciences, Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Sport in Society, Social & Cultural Geography, and Cultural Studies Review.

Clifton champions making research accessible to, done with, and made useful for the wider public through civic engagement.

https://pollutedleisure.com/tag/clifton-evers/

Dr Andrew Spira
Andrew Spira is an independent art historian, writer, curator, lecturer and painter. He was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1996-2002 and a Programme Director at Christie’s Education from 2002-2016. In 2008, he published The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Lund Humphries) and, in 2020, he published two books of the relationship between personal identity and cultural conventions - The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art and Simulated Selves: the Undoing of Personal Identity in the Modern World (Bloomsbury). His interests are highly eclectic, embracing the history of science and music, as well as the visual arts.

Andrew’s current research revolves around the way knowledge and ideas are determined by cultural and linguistic conventions that have evolved over many centuries. It focuses especially on the role of diagrams, both manifest and imagined, as templates for ‘systems of understanding’, and explores the ways in which we use them to conceptualise our experience of the world and of ourselves.

https://www.andrewspira.com

Dr Richard Plant
Dr. Richard Plant is a writer and teacher; an architectural historian with research interests in Romanesque architercture and sacral topography. He studied English literature for his first degree and then spent time living in Sudan and Italy and working as a gardener before taking a master’s degree followed by a PhD in medieval architectural history at the Courtauld Institute. Since then he has taught at a variety of institutions on art and particularly architecture of most periods in the western tradition.

He was Programme Director of an M.Litt and MA in Early European Art and Deputy Director at Christie's Education London. Richard now lectures and leads tours in the UK and Europe (pandemic permitting). He is publicity officer for the British Archaeological Association, and has co-edited four volumes of their series of Romanesque conference transactions.

Dr Francis Thomas
Dr Frances Thomas is an art historian and educator with decades of experience lecturing in North America, Japan and Europe. Teaching in a variety of institutions over the years, including the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr Institute of Art in Canada, and the University of Leeds, University College London and Christie’s Education in the UK, has both broadened and deepened her enthusiasm for art and its place in society.

While she maintains a wide range of interests in historical and contemporary art and design, her Master’s and PhD theses focussed on two distinct highpoints of the Italian Renaissance exploring the multiple, intersecting stories of authorship, identity, art and politics. Committed to object and experience-based teaching; engaging with materials, techniques and processes,

She has produced a book about contemporary Canadian art’s relation to its geographic and social environments. Most recently, Frances has been exploring the physical and ephemeral nature of prints and printmaking across geographic, historic and economic boundaries, from footprints in the sand to Dürer’s rhinoceros woodcut.

Kate Gordon
Kate Gordon is the founder and CEO of London Art Studies. Having produced arts programming for CNN and Carlton, Kate launched London Art Studies in 2011 (after heading up Sotheby’s Public Programmes Department), which provides educational courses on art. In June 2018, London Art Studies launched online classes, winning the award for the world’s most popular online art courses at the Webby’s 2 years later. Educated at St Paul’s Girls' School, Amherst College USA and University of Moscow, Kate has worked in the art world for over 20 years. In 2016 she co-founded the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA); she also wrote a regular column about the art world for London’s Evening Standard newspaper from 2016-2020.

After chairing the fundraising group ‘Foreign Sisters’ in 2017 and 2018, Kate remains a Senior Arts Advisor to Cancer Research UK and is also on the board of the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital Art and Design Advisory Group. A member of the Tate Patrons Executive Committee (2014-2018), Kate is now a Trustee of The Art Academy and of Art History Link-Up, and since March 2020 serves as Chair of Serpentine Patrons.

Laurent Issaurat
Laurent ISSAURAT heads Societe Generale’ s Art Banking Services. Alongside this professional business role he is actively engaged in contemporary art initiatives and projects, sitting on the board of Fluxus Art Projects (London) and Fondation Thalie (Brussels). He has participated in various selection committees, in the context of Socgen's Contemporary Art Collection (2016), the Palais de Tokyo's Prix Découverte (2017), the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2018) and the Geneva Contemporary Art Fund’s Digital Mediation Award (2021). Laurent is a keen writer who has published numerous exhibition reviews, interviews and articles relating to contemporary art and the art market. He has also written a survey of French Contemporary Artists. Laurent lectures on art business for business conferences and university seminars (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, ESCP International School of Management, University of Paris Dauphine)

Laurent is a graduate of the Institut d'Études Politiques ('Sciences Po’) Paris and holds a Master Degree in Financial Engineering, Sorbonne University, Paris. He also trained in art history, M.Litt in Modern and Contemporary Art and Art World Practices (Glasgow University /Christie’s Education London) and Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He is a Member of PAIAM - Professional Advisors to the International Art Market - since 2019.