SolasArts Artists

Dominca Williamson
Dominica is an interdisciplinary artist called Ecogeographer, who works in the field of sustainable design. New materialism is a strong aspect of her eco-phenomenological approach. She largely works with co-production methods to empower people and uses abstract mapping methods to communicate ideas.

She co-created work in the West Indian Ocean with Plymouth Marine Laboratory and partners using walking, model making and ethnographic fieldwork in order to centre on people, resilience and coral reefs. Currently she is co-producing work on a cultural regeneration pan-European project with geographers, heritage specialists and psychologists called Ruritage.

At home in Cornwall, she was recently awarded an Agritech grant to co-develop an arts-sci prototype, which will monitor how people value farmscape. She was awarded a Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence Grant with Dr. John Martin of the University of Plymouth in 2015.

Her final Masters project (in Digital Futures) was completed and published in 2009 in Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, London: Routledge, which cites NGO Green Map System as a key influence in the research.

Underpinning her training is a First Class Honours degree from Goldsmiths College; it was the first course in the U.K. to lead on sustainable design. Woven within her design skills, are equally grounded fine art practices.

https://www.ecogeographer.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 and 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

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 current exhibition is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London,
23 Jul - 19 Jan 2025

https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/peter-kennard-archive-of-dissent/

https://www.peterkennard.com

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

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

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

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/