18th July to 5th August 2008

‘Exhibition Showcasing Students from Weston University Campus Studying For a Foundation Degree in Applied Art and Design’

curated by Lloyd Gill

ELISHA MAY WILLS + BENJAMIN HART + CHRISTINE HARVEY + STEVEN EDWARDS + LIZ PRICE + NICKY MARSHALL + CLAIRE HOLLOWAY + DANIEL JAMES TIVENAN + PAMELA BAHR +
RICHARD PHILIPS + ANIKA SMITH + PAULINE FOORD + JANE PHILLIPS + ALI CLAYTON + AMY HIGGINS

This exhibition at the Lloyd Gill Gallery is titled ‘Exhibition Showcasing Students from Weston University Campus Studying for a Foundation Degree in Applied Art and Design’. As part of the exhibition of 14 students, the gallery is introducing the Art Prize of ‘Contemporary Art Practitioner at The Lloyd Gill Gallery’ and cash prize of £50 for one student. This is to provide encouragement for the student selected and to help raise an awareness of Contemporary Art in Weston - super - Mare. The award will be handed by the Town Mayor at 7:30 pm on 18th July. This exhibition showcases a wide range of works from painting, sculpture, photography and video. The exhibition features works distinguished by the artist’s feelings, expression, and cultures.

Claire Holloway: This work involves mainly three techniques which is Photography, digitally manipulating pictures on Photoshop, and then painting these onto canvas.
Mostly she paints figurative portraits and mainly in a black and white style with
different tones of grays, she thinks that these colors work really well with this
style of painting, she uses acrylic on canvas for the materials and techniques
used for this. She likes her artwork to be aesthetic and harmonious and also like
the abstract relationships with the form and color, she could say that she likes her
work to be pleasing to the eye, likes the look of it and understand color
relationships that invoke feelings.

Clare Holloway

Elisha May Wills: All types of flowers represent all sorts of things in many cultures, the flowers she is most interested in is the Sakura (Cherry Blossom) form Japan and the Rose from England. I studied the effects that the Sakura has on Japan and has done for many centuries and why the Rose is our unofficial flower.
She wanted to recreate the history that these flowers have in a contemporary style, using Japanese and English themed effects, mainly looking into the 18th Century which she finds of great interest in both these cultures. Within her work she also wanted to represent the chaos and busy lives humans now have unlike what it might have been all those years ago. The dense stitch and bead areas represent all kinds of people from all cultures.

Elisha May Wills

Liz Price: Looking at her artwork will, she hopes, causes you to stop in your busy life, for a moment, to consider the details that are around us, and the fast pace with which they are changing. You will perhaps see small areas of drawing or photographs, snapshots of moments that can never be repeated, swallowed up by vast areas of nothingness.
She enjoys mixed media and finds that employing many layers through collage also reflects the many layers within our lives. It is not simple or straightforward and sometimes you need to take a step backwards to see what is really important, or interesting, in the bigger picture.

Liz Price

Amy Higgins: Her Art practice focuses on a combination of traditional painting and mixed media work. This can be developed into installation and time based media. It’s context is largely inspired by her country of origin ‘Malta’. The cross-cultural approach from living in the UK and her life experiences traveling in different countries in Europe and Asia, inspire her decisions towards the process and concept of her work.
She continuously question’s her art practice and search for importance and significance within her knowledge. To expand and improve the way it can be applied to and mirror the human condition.

Amy Higgins

Anika Smith:The concerns and conflicts linked to motherhood are the ideas that underpin my painting entitled ‘Overprotect’ and related emotions such as love and fear are themes investigated within this work. Anika’s intention with this painting was to produce a piece of artwork that questions the issues that surround the protection and overprotection of children.

These questions, together with influences from other artists such as Mary Kelly, Chuck Close and Barbara Kruger resulted in this large-scale work.

Anika Smith

 

Ben Hart: His work explores the role that individuality plays in society, and he has focused on the existential issue of my own self as a site that has been formed by influences of others. Through his work, he has become acutely aware of the regulation of the Individuals’ behavior and how that behavior is motivated through conformity and/or self-determination. Despite this awareness, there is also an acknowledgment in my work of the ‘somewhat tragic’ in our humanity. This has been achieved visually by the moralization of nameless faces in my paintings.

Ben Hart

Dan Tivenan: This project is based around a selection of different characters, some are based on real people and others are just random strange little characters that popped in his head. The point is you only get to see a glimpse of this whole character’s life, a “single shot” if you will.
Just because these characters came from inside his head doesn’t mean they are any less real than the people you pass and pay no attention to in your daily lives.

Dan Tivenan

 

Pamela Bahr: The general style of her work can be bold with very clean lines, and special attention is always paid to uniqueness and Aesthetics. She tries to be fresh and innovative in her approaches to subject and format. she works with sometimes quite normal, every day scenes of life and her challenge in this is to change the meaning of the images into something different, like a valuable personal memory or perhaps a sarcastic hint. She recently started to display my work online and she focuses now on building up her Portfolio so she get used to displaying work. She can see herself working on outside Installation projects later on in life, as one of her interests and ambitions is to attempt and create recreation zones incorporating Installation, sculpture, paintings, rocks and plants into a garden-like experience. A piece of art you can sit and walk in…

Pamela Bahr

Pauline Foord: This work is entitled ‘Holding Self’ in an attempt at exploring body language and how we unconsciously display signs of our own personal state of being. She wanted to reveal something of our own disability- how we are trapped within our bodies and environment and how much we are part of all that is around us and how much of all that is around us is part of us. It is about physical and mental health and our interaction with the world we love in.
All to express the complexities of a single, suspended moment that is repeated over a millennia of human existence.

Pauline Foord

Chris Harvey: Chris’s work involves many different ways of using paper. She makes bowls with paper pulp, in various shapes and sizes. She also makes bowls using different types of tissue paper with inclusions such as feathers often found on my walks. She can also make a ‘one-off’ special bowl which uses off cuts of wedding and bridesmaid dress materials to give you a very special ‘memory bowl’ and a unique gift.

Chris Harvey

Ali Clayton: Ali’s work draws on mental activity – memory, dreams and reflection. It explores the idea of the sea as a metaphor for the unconscious, and the contrast between the things washed up, lost or abandoned at the high tide mark ( all those things we can no longer think of as having life or meaning), and what lies beneath the surface ( the unconscious mind, unavailable to us except in dreams). Her finished work aims to give a feeling of the density and complexity of those mental processes mentioned above but also to reflect my love of the formal elements of art and design.

Ali Clayton

Nichola Marshall: Nichola’s work is influenced from the Cornish landscape. The shape, form and color have impacted his work and through researching I have become more aware of environmental issues. The Earth recycles its self, and as subject to enable her to find information to interpret the ceramics and paintings she does. In both ceramics and painting she also uses color to evoke the experience of being in a particular time and place and the wind, rain, sun and earth all provide qualities that lend themselves to work she does as an artist. These things give her a sense of power and inspiration and a way to produce, shape and form images that take one to a stillness that evoke a meditative moment which is out of the normal daily toil. Through this she strives to connect the viewer to another time an another place and to allow them the opportunity to feel and perhaps experience similar emotions.

Nichola Marshall

Steven Edwards: Steven’s photographs are designed to show that it is possible to give a personal, account of a combative situation, and to show the horrors inherent in it, without exploiting the persons concerned and without resorting to images that actually show the carnage in real time. Because these images have an aesthetic value as well as an immediate response value, he hopes to show that it is necessary to take a moral stance on the way that the world is portrayed in the media. This message will last longer in the minds of the viewer than images that show real events happening to real people.

Steven Edwards

Jane Phillips: With the recent death of her father she felt compelled to explore her feelings and reflect on the transient nature of our existence, our existence, out physical non-permanence in this world. She needed to create concrete images of her father, to capture the memory of him and hold it in some sort of permanence. To feel that there is still a connection – there by virtue of that memory.

Jane Phillips

 

Richard Philips: This work is inspired by the passing of time and by a neural programming that allows us to remake the human form by imposing our humanity on an inanimate object. To that end, the shells in the eyes of a mannequin can be seen to represent our ability to look back in time to our long distant origins and in so doing, examine our mortality and find acceptance in the inevitable.
In this work, an unspoken dialogue exists between the object and the spectator, as they position themselves; both in relation to each other and to the power that is exerted upon them by the society in which they sit.

Richard Philips

Private View: Friday 18th July 2008, 7pm to 10pm
Lee House 13 Beaconsfield Road Weston - Super - Mare Somerset BS23 1YE
Tel. +44 01934 623449 enquiries@thelloydgillgallery.com www.thelloydgillgallery.com