Profiles

Andy Holden

Andy Holden’s work takes a multitude of forms – large installations or sculptures, long-form videos, animation and music – that often oscillate between personal narratives and historical research. He often appears in his work, as an animated version of himself, as a teenage actor, or in the role of narrator. 

Recent projects have included a collaboration with his father around a natural history of birds’ nests and a social history of egg collecting (Natural Selection, Artangel, touring 2017-2019); an illustrated lecture showing that the world has become a cartoon, told though a history of animation (Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape, 2011-19), and a history of his own failed teenage art movement, which advocated a coupling of irony and sincerity (Towards a Unified Theory of MI!MS, Zabludowicz Collection, 2013).  

Older works include a vast knitted replica of a piece of rock he stole from the Great Pyramid of Giza as a child and later returned (Art Now, Tate Britain, 2010), and a library and sculptural space for performances and readings relating to a theory of ‘Thingly Time’, dedicated to his late collaborator Dan Cox (Kettles Yard Cambridge and Cubitt, London 2012). 

He also performs and releases music with the band The Grubby Mitts, which was the subject of a recent film, Oh! My Friends, made for the exhibition about the history of Charles Schulz and Peanuts at Somerset House in 2018, and he curated the first festival of artists’ music at Wysing Art Centre in 2010. 

Holden lives and works in Bedford, where he is currently running a project space, Ex-Baldessarre, from his studio, showing a mixture of outsider art, curated projects, experimental music and collaborative installations. He teaches Critical Art Practice at the Royal College of Art in London.

 

Mira Calix

Mira Calix is an award-winning artist and composer based in the United Kingdom. Music and sound, which she considers a sculptural material, are at the centre of her practice. Her work explores the manipulation of the material into visible, physical forms through multi-disciplinary installations, sculpture, video and performance works. Calix’s practice is deliberately disjunctive, allowing research, site and subject to influence a fluid choice of materials and mediums.

Calix has been commissioned by, exhibited and performed works in, many leading cultural institutions in Britain, including the Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Galleries, the first Coventry Biennial, the Barbican, Manchester International Festival and the London Olympics, and internationally, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, UK in China 2015 cultural exchange programme, Carriageworks in Sydney, MONA in Hobart, Performa in New York, Art Basel, and the Lincoln Center, New York. 

As a musician Mira Calix has released several albums with Warp records and as a live performer and DJ she has supported and toured with Radiohead, Boards of Canada, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Autechre and other artists. She has performed at Sonar, Glastonbury, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Coachella and Latitude.

 

Teresa Gleadowe

Teresa Gleadowe is a curator, writer and editor with extensive experience in the contemporary visual arts in the UK and internationally. She initiated The Falmouth Convention held at University College Falmouth in 2010 and The Penzance Convention held at Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange in 2012 and has developed the ongoing series of Cornwall Workshops held at Kestle Barton on the Lizard peninsula. In 2012 she founded CAST (the Cornubian Arts & Science Trust) based in Helston. She was the Director of Groundwork, a three-year project developed in partnership with Tate St Ives, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange and Kestle Barton, which culminated in a programme of international contemporary art in Cornwall in 2018.

In 1992 Teresa developed the first UK-based MA in curating at the Royal College of Art and directed the programme until the summer of 2006, when she left the college to work freelance. She was Research Consultant and Series Editor for the Exhibition Histories series published by Afterall and has taught on curatorial programmes internationally. She was a Trustee of Nottingham Contemporary from 2006 to 2015, latterly as Chair, is a member of the Advisory Board of Peer, a Trustee of Kneehigh Theatre and of the Kestle Barton Trust and an Advisor to the Freelands Foundation.

c-a-s-t.org.uk

 

Participants

Fourteen participants were selected from the open submission: Finlay Abbott Ellwood, Simon Bayliss, Olivia Brelsford-Massey, Flo Brooks, Jane Darke, Leila Galloway, Georgia Gendall, Mollie Goldstrom, Andy Harper, Emily Hawes, Rachael Jones, Alice Mahoney, Lizzie Ridout and Christopher Taylor.

 

Finlay Abbott Ellwood

Finlay Abbott Ellwood was born in Penwith and studied in London at the Slade, specialising in painting. In 2018 he walked along the coast between these two places, connecting them physically, but also psychologically getting a better understanding of the space in between. These two areas are harbours where at various times he has docked. Cross-country durational walking allows one to view the landscape as a portal, a telescope, an indexed conglomeration of experience which can then manifest itself onto a singular surface like a painting. He likes to think of time and experience as a bowl and the act of painting as trying to replicate the memories and images that fill it.

Using found materials like clay and rainwater he hopes to paint a picture of the landscape with the landscape, getting closer to emulating the feelings felt when outdoors. To further this he paints on objects where the function or use value relates directly to imagery depicted on it; these combined elements provide the spark to an otherwise “life lacking” image. This sensation he likes to call winde [sic].

 

Simon Bayliss

Simon Bayliss is an artist, music producer and active member of Extinction Rebellion, based in St Ives, Cornwall. He works mainly in slipware ceramics, video, poetry, watercolour painting and performance. Bayliss also makes and performs dance music in collaboration with Susie Green, as Splash Addict. Born in Wolverhampton, he was raised in Andros, Bahamas, then Devon, UK.

 

Olivia Brelsford-Massey

Olivia Brelsford-Massey is an artist and life-form based in Cornwall, UK.

She explores intersections between art/making and science, technology, research, magic, humour, activism. She’s particularly interested in how we can re-contextualise these and other themes in order to understand them differently, through small subversions, collaging and re-jiggling.

She works with a lot of different mediums and materials like film, clay, fabric, food and cooking, performance, sounds, words, found or made objects, drawings and paintings to make research-based and material-led investigations into her ideas. She hopes to explore and create places for new ways of thinking and understanding to emerge.

Having recently finished studying Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art, she’s currently working on small personal projects and collaborative projects with friends.

 

Flo Brooks

Flo Brooks is an artist based between Brighton and the South-West. Predominantly a painter working in acrylic on wood, Brooks also draws upon a broader practice informed by the application and production of drawing, collage, publication and social practice, to interrogate relationships between gender, community, architecture and labour. 

Flo Brooks graduated with a BFA Fine Art from Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford in 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include: Scrubbers, Project Native Informant, London, 2018; What Comes To Matter, a Plymouth Platform award for Plymouth Art Weekender, Plymouth, 2018; Is Now a Good Time? Cubitt Gallery, London, 2017. Group exhibitions include Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, London, 2019, and Survey, Jerwood Space, London, which travelled to G39, Cardiff, Bluecoat, Liverpool and Baltic, Gateshead, 2018- 2019. 

He is currently working on a Clapham Public Realm Commission with Studio Voltaire, London, developing a mural informed by LGBTQ+ and feminist narratives connected with Clapham Common. 

 

Jane Darke

Jane Darke is a documentary director, painter and writer. She made a film, The Wrecking Season, 2005, with playwright Nick Darke about their collection of Atlantic debris found on the beaches of north Cornwall, and the connections made through them with the eastern seaboard of the Americas, as well as with Cornish fishermen and wreckers. It was the first broadcast film to mention plastic pollution of the seas. The Art of Catching Lobsters, about grief, was made after Nick Darke died in 2009. Her most recent film, made in 2017, was about the poet Charles Causley. All were broadcast on BBC FOUR. Her book Held by the Sea was published by Souvenir Press in 2010, about the healing power of landscape. Jane has also made several radio programmes for BBC Radio 4. 

Jane trained as a textile artist, producing hand-painted lengths of cloth at Middlesex Poly, BA hons, then started painting while doing her MA at the Royal College of Art. She continued to paint, worked as a gardener and had two children with playwright Nick Darke. For two years (1984-6)the family lived off-grid. In 1990 they moved back to Cornwall, where Nick was born, and began to scavenge anew.

Jane curates the St Eval Archive, a collection of recorded memory and digitised photographs, in Tregona Chapel, and has recently started compiling a herbarium of the parish of St Eval, gathered by herself and partner Andrew Tebbs. They hold teas and workshops for the community in the chapel. 

She is currently working on a new film about Nick Darke’s influence on the creative lives of others. She’s also working on a book, written in non-academic language, about our planet: natural history, general science, history and religion and how we got to where we are now, a view of the world from sea level in Britain. 

 

Leila Galloway

Leila Galloway is an artist and educator based in Penryn. She describes herself as a maker of things, using sculpture within the bounds of installation. Her practice is concerned with different states of flux – translations of various physical states and the way things appear to flow in an unending series of fleeting moments of suspension.

Leila studied BA Fine Art at Manchester Poly, has a Higher Diploma in Fine Art from the Slade School of Art and a Higher Diploma in Aesthetics and Art Theory from Kingston University. Over the last 33 years she has taught Fine Art in various HE institutions in the UK and has exhibited at numerous independent spaces and museums nationally and internationally.

 

Georgia Gendall

Georgia Gendall is an artist and gardener living and working in Falmouth, Cornwall. Her multidisciplinary practice is often satirical, sometimes immersive and frequently inconclusive. Using sculpture, performance, sound and video, Gendall examines the interconnected relationships between our sense of self and our experienced environment within the prevailing social, political and economic landscape. Her practice often creates problems of its own in order to create poetic and futile solutions to those problems.

Alongside her practice she runs the online cross-disciplinary collaborative platform ‘Forced Collaboration’ and is in the band Shagrat. She has a BA in fine art from Central St Martins and is a studio holder at CAST.

 

Mollie Goldstrom

Within Mollie Goldstrom’s recent art practice seaweed functions as a site of convergence between interlocking narratives and histories, encompassing many centuries and coastal environments. Working in multiple modes, she explores seaweed as a vehicle for curiosity, optimism, and transcendence as well as a reflection of human and environmental exploitation and devastation. Amidst anxieties of forces outside individual control or comprehension and a rising climate of societal and ecological collapse, narrative drawing, writing and cookery are her means of creating order, wonder and understanding.

Goldstrom studied printmaking at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the University of Iowa. She has been a fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska; C-Scape Dune Shack in Provincetown, Massachusetts; and the Scuola Internazionale de Grafica, Venice, and was a 2015 recipient of the John Anson Kittredge Fund. In 2018, she participated in the BiodiverSEEDy project; her drawings Folding lattice for agriculture in dry areas were commissioned for permanent storage at the site of the Nordic Gene Bank’s original seed vault in Svalbard, Norway. Originally from the north east of the US, she now lives and works in west Cornwall.

 

Andy Harper

Andy Harper grew up in Torquay and went to a Polytechinic in Brighton followed by a couple of MAs in London. He currently lives in St just, has a studio in St Ives and teaches part-time on a broad-based fine art course.

Harper co-founded Not Cut studios in London (1996-2010) and was a member of the Organising Committee for Braziers International Artist Workshop (2004-2008).

Processes of production have always served as a gateway to Re: Advice please explore key concerns such as pattern recognition, procedural memory, visual thinking, sensory processing, neuro-aesthetics and haptic perception.

Recent one-person exhibitions include Soft Errors and Plastic Fox at Patrick Heide Gallery and Sol at Danese Corey Gallery.

 

Emily Hawes

Emily Hawes is a visual artist based in Bournemouth, working across sculpture, video and participatory practice. With poetic tendencies and a non-linear approach, she proposes new relations to the body and the landscape, which are informed by post-human feminist thinking and ethics of care.

She often works in collaboration with other artists, researchers and interdisciplinary practitioners – most recently working with dance artist Marta Ammendola to develop new choreographic work responding to ecologies within the Essex estuaries, as part of a new commission for The Old Waterworks in Southend, funded by Arts Council England and The Artists Information Company. She is a member of GU Women, a female-focused support network for artists in Birmingham.

Hawes studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, MFA (2014) and the University of Brighton, BA (2012).

 

Rachael Jones

Rachael Jones is a filmmaker and postgraduate researcher based in Cornwall. Her work employs experimental and arts-based techniques to disrupt traditional methods of documenting and recording. She combines a range of archival sources, blending old photographs with newly created visuals and incorporating both analogue and digital formats to create a playful tension in her films.

Rachael’s current practice involves using experimental filmmaking strategies for participatory arts-based projects that engage with looking at the Cornish landscape. She is currently the recipient of a PhD practice-based research studentship in digital media at the 3D3 Centre for Doctoral Training and teaches experimental film at Falmouth University.

 

Alice Mahoney

Alice Mahoney is an artist and musician based in Redruth, Cornwall. Working predominantly in installation, her work incorporates film, sound, sculpture, painting and print. Her practice takes references from decorative and architectural forms, science fiction and domestic interiors to create staged environments and narratives, exploring our social and political engagement with our surroundings and objects. 

Part of Alice’s practice includes curating and running a membership and residency programme at CMR Project Space in Redruth. Recent funded events that she has led have included a series of artists talks, screenings and workshops based around sound, photography, film and publishing as artistic practice.
She is the founder and co-organiser of Inland Art Festival 2014 and 2016.

Alice has just completed a year-long funded mentoring programme with artist and mentor Sarah Tripp from Glasgow School of Art and curator Andrew Hunt.

 

Lizzie Ridout

Lizzie Ridout trained in visual communication at Falmouth College of Art and The Royal College of Art. She focuses on research as an artistic practice, with provenance – of material, language, process – underpinning her outcomes. She often works with paper and archives.

Lizzie was Pearson Creative Research Fellow at the British Library, London in 2007. She was awarded an Artist’s Book Residency Grant at Women’s Studio Workshop in New York in 2011 and was Artist-in-Residence at Fiskars, Finland in 2012. Recent collaborations include Various Writings (an exploration of past/present/future acts of writing through practice-based and theoretical experiments) and Tanks & Tablecloths at Plymouth Arts Centre (an exhibition bringing together naval artefacts with new responsive artworks).

Lizzie divides her time between being a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Falmouth University and continuing her own studio practice.

 

Christopher Taylor

Christopher Taylor is an artist and educator based between Somerset, London and Central Portugal. His work uses text, narration, sound and storytelling to take us elsewhere – to an actual place and time or an imagined other. His varied practice includes installations of soundscapes with open narratives, organic materials that change, seasonal fruit, films, walking tours, podcasts, and booklets.

Works seek to pick out and bind disparate ideas together to represent the interconnections between all things, our passage along this continuum, the creation of history and the making of place. Images, sound and objects change at different paces, representing the cyclical, momentary and vast amounts of time in which we inhabit. Collectively his works aim to take the viewer on a journey, share knowledge, pose questions and explore landscapes.

Chris received his MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 2018 and his BA in Fine Art from Falmouth College of Art in 2007.