KINdoms – artist statements and bios
Nicholas Cheeseman
‘Hanging by a thread’
Branch, thread, concrete
240 x 100 x 50 cm
Biographical statement
Nicholas graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) in 2014. He lives and works in London combining teaching with his work as a multimedia Artist. He has exhibited in the UK and Internationally. In November 2017 he was awarded the EWAAC (East West Art Award Competition) Grand Prize and will be Resident Artist in Kyoto and Tokyo in 2019.
Artist Statement
The sculpture combines a 9ft embroidery made from white thread and a found branch that has been stripped of its bark. The embroidery depicts the map of the first public park in Munich (The English Garden) that stretches from the heart of the city, following the line of the river Isar, to the northeast city limits and the countryside.
The materiality of the wood and thread are an intrinsic part of the sculpture. The texture and strength of the thread are in contrast to the smooth rigid surface of the bare wood. The complimentary opposite nature of these elements allude to the relationship that is being explored between nature and the urban environment.
Lisa Porch
‘Stonecrop and Slate’
Slate, wool, cotton, lace.
Biographical statement
Lisa is a practising textile artist and academic. She has a passion for underpinning creative practice with theory and promoting conceptual craft. As a practising maker she belongs to the exhibiting group Fibre Art Wales. She runs textile and stitch workshops, gives artist talks, undertakes artist in residence opportunities and exhibits in group and solo shows.
Artist Statement
‘Stonecrop and Slate’ was inspired by observations of stonecrop growing vivaciously over sunken slate and stone gravestones; a shared materiality and a metaphor for life and death coexisting as part of a whole. Multiples of wrapped yarn stems are hand embroidered with French knots and laid on slate. This piece is part of a research interest in how conserved and archived textile artefacts in museum spaces can be used as metaphors for absence and curated decay in conceptual textiles.
Annelies Egli & Joanne Espiner
String Theory
Plastic, wool, metal
Biographical statements
Annelies Egli
Annelies Egli was born and educated in Switzerland. After completing Foundation studies in Art & Design in Zurich she completed a BA Fine Arts Degree in Bristol (1989) and MA Fine Art at Cardiff Institute of Higher Education (1993). She enjoys working with groups in a range of settings from community education to health and social contexts. Egli takes a particular interest in the role of play in creative development and overall wellbeing.
Joanna Espiner
Joanna Espiner has a BA Hons Ceramics from Bath Academy of Art and lives in Bristol. Alongside exhibiting her own work, Espiner’s practice includes working in community settings. She has diplomas from UWE in facilitating and evaluating the arts in health and social care and has worked as an arts consultant, commissioning artworks for healthcare contexts. She has a long-standing interest in the therapeutic benefits of making and working with the hands.
Annelies Egli
Artist Statements
Materially, my work often emerges through close contact and connection with gathered, found or redundant material, natural or synthetic. My interventions with the material result in textiles in the widest sense. Having gathered plastic string from the beaches of Western Ireland I found myself working in lines: processes of wrapping, twisting and knotting resulting in the material components for ‘String Theory’. I asked Joanna to collaborate with me to actualise a piece in space as we had enjoyed previous playful events involving body and movement. This is the second outing of ‘String Theory’ subtitled ‘Contraction’.
Joanna Espiner
In 2017, I began a collaborative exploration with Annelies on how the plastic strings she had collected from seashores might be integrated or woven into ceramic forms. A series of pieces developed from these explorations, which merged clay and strings, this then prompted collaborative improvisations with the string on its own. In my initial playing with the strings, I began to discover its tactile, textural, malleable qualities. Then as we merged our differing material approaches, working together in dialogue with the string, we found ways of sculpting form and three dimensional drawings with the strings in free space.
Bridget Kennedy
Wylfa Weave
Recycled copper wire & sea thrift, on a wooden loom, with mineralised rock
36x34cm (approx.)
Biographical statement
Bridget Kennedy lives in the midst of a post-industrial landscape in a remote North Pennine village. Here the consideration of timescales, so evident in the shaping of the land through decades of human endeavour, has permeated her practice. Taking part in Power in The Land, a project based around closure of Wylfa nuclear power station on Anglesey in 2012, has meant that her research has focussed on the industrial heritage of nuclear landscapes in England and Wales.
Artist Statement
With its noble and optimistic visions for the future, the nuclear power industry appears not to have met all these idealistic ambitions. Uncertainty about power plant safety and nuclear waste disposal has influenced public confidence and given rise to the consideration of a future beyond the human. When considering these issues copper has become a symbolic material for me. Whilst evoking a past tradition of hand-making, the act of weaving with this material also hints at a time, far into the future, when natural fibres may no longer be available, energy sources are depleted and human resourcefulness turns to recycling a now-redundant power distribution network.
Milly Rowland
Physalia Unraveled
Cotton, metal thread
Biographical statement
Milly Rowland has an MA in Fine Art from Birmingham School of Art and continues to practise from rural Somerset
Artist statement
Embroidery is very much akin to swimming through the dark fabric, finding pathways where tendrils can form and grow and allowing shapes to develop to alter the shape of the fabric rather than stretching it. Th exposed threads reflect the disordered nature of growth and fragility of creatures such as the man-of-war which have in recent times washed onto the shores of the UK in vast numbers. The Portuguese man-of-war, is in fact a collection of organisms or colonial organism. I make work inspired by an idea of overlaid ecology and the fragility of incredibly complex ecosystems like coral reefs, mixed with creatures I imagine, inspired by the writings of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad.
Sabine Kussmaul
Biographical statement
Sabine trained as a fashion designer at Hochschule Pforzheim, Germany and Pratt Institute, New York. After working as a freelance designer for sportswear, she moved into teaching Drawing and working as an Illustrator. From 1991 to 2008, Sabine worked as a teacher for Art & Design courses in Further Education. Since 2008 she has developed her visual arts practice and is currently finishing studies for an MA Fine Art at the University of Chester. Sabine is planning to continue her practical work and research at doctorate level.
Artist statement
In my current practice, I explore the relationships between self, body and environment using drawing and installation and working between indoor studio spaces and on outdoor locations. Through my work, I question how we can be, as bodies and selves, in different environments, and how the web of relationships in which we engage are affected when embodied drawing practices become part of it. Line as the essence of drawing, is essential to my practice, representing the journeying of pencil on paper and correlating to a person’s movement between spaces and places, creating resonance between surfaces, living beings, materials and environments.
Amanda Lwin
The Cartographer Tries to Map her Way to Deptford
Biographical statement
Amanda Lwin is a British artist of Burmese descent, whose work charts the interfaces between landscapes, cities, buildings and people. Lwin grew up in London and studied Architecture (Cambridge) and MArch Urban Design (UCL). Since shifting towards contemporary art she has exhibited extensively with commercial galleries and public programmes, including Sculpture in the City 2018. Her latest curatorial project invites painters and writers to re-interpret British domestic interiors.
Artist statement
Intricate Polynesian fishing nets, whose lines and knots were also woven maps of wind and sea currents, are an inspiration for this handwoven textile.
Produced specifically to fill the space above a cafe courtyard during the Deptford X Festival, ’The Cartographer Tries to Map her Way to Deptford’belongs to the artist’s ‘Capricious Cartography’series. The handwoven net charts electric power cables under the streets of this neighbourhood. The work’s title is drawn from poet Kei Miller’s 2014 collection, in which a Cartographer and a Rastafarian dispute the properties and capabilities of mapmaking in asserting control over territory.
Juliet Duckworth
Unfolding Landscape
Biographical Statement
Juliet Duckworth has been working as a painter for many years. She is inspired by the natural environment and in particular the transience of nature and how time and erosion alter it irrevocably.Duckworth is currently researching for her BA Fine Arts at Bath Spa University.
Artist statement
My work is about the transience of nature and how time and erosion alter it irrevocably. I have created artworks that have evolved over the weeks to demonstrate this interest. By burying and weathering materials and leaving them for lengths of time I explored how these materials become stained and decayed and how creases and folds naturally occur. As there is no control over the results of the ageing process there is an element of chance in the outcomes and consequently the process becomes the subject.
Nikki Allford
Biographical Statement
Nikki Allford is a maker and Installation artist based in Bristol.
Artist statement
My work investigates the way repetitive actions can result in the formation of a peice. Structures are built from the accumulation of lines and tape. The resultant pieces can be read as abstract or as hinting at other qualities – the work shapeshifts – reminiscent of the innards of the body, skins slices of bone, webs, pelts, pools of blood or water, or flowers. Tape rolls are left in place. This simple gesture contextualises the forms so the materiality of the piece and the very products that it is made from are clearly referenced. This act anchors the piece to both method and maker.
Patricia Brien
Biographical Statement
Patricia Brien is a UK-based curator and academic. She is currently researching towards her PhD in the Environmental Humanities and Textiles at Bath Spa University.
Artist statement
My research seeks to reveal relational textile narratives with the often invisible more-than-human through various media. I am interested in notions of vibrant matter, materiality and the dynamism of the nonhuman world; the water that energises a mill; the wind tangling thread; or the gossamer spider web – a woven living spectre in a disused industrial space.
Alison Harper
Biographical Statement
Alison Harper holds a PhD in practice-led research at Bath Spa, Bath School of Art and Design. Harper’s work is materially led and has an eco awareness in examining new forms of ‘new materialism’, relating to disposability, the development of a ‘deep materialism’, the micro-political and the under examined relationships with the material world.
Artist Statement
My work is about altering our relationship with matter; by reinventing these materials commonly seen as ‘waste’ I am questioning how we exist in the world, reassessing stasis and inertia and our impact on the biodiversity of the planet and also on ourselves.