Meet the Grads
Circus Artspace are delighted to introduce our first cohort of 30 Graduate Associates. We will be meeting monthly from March - October 2021 and look forward to sharing more of their work as the programme unfolds.
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Follow our dedicated Instagram account, where each week a different Associate will be sharing their work:
Louise Allan graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Moray School of Art in 2018 and is currently based in Plockton. Her painting is informed by her surroundings. It is with this sense of place, this experience of living with the landforms that compel her to convey her feelings towards these phenomena through the medium of paint. The wild rugged landscape of hills and moorland, wide-open seas, lochs and dramatic weather patterns produces ever changing light which provides dramatic mood between luminosity and obscuration.
Her work is increasingly of an abstract nature, painting intuitively from memory. Her methods of working provide a language expressing and emphasizing her feelings, focusing on sensation of place.
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Find out more: www.louise-allan.co.uk
Instagram @louisallan16
Untitled 1 - mixed media on paper 2020
Pauline Atkinson graduated in 2020 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Textiles from Moray School of Art. Her current practice began in a garden and ended in a garden; that of her own physical everyday garden, and the time-altered memories of a childhood garden. She is interested in the circularity of time; and how our lives are interwoven both with each other, and those of the natural world.
She is drawn to work with old fabrics and analogue photographs which both have the ability to capture traces of life; the essence of that which they encounter. Both materials, being subject as we are to the passing of time; to fading, aging and eventual decay, show qualities of both resilience and fragility through their survival. The tactile nature of these materials inspires a feeling of tenderness which compliments the slow meditative nature of hand stitching and embroidery.
By deconstructing, and then bringing together old fabrics, photographs, and other repurposed materials: she attempts to create a dialogue between my hands and the materials, and between the work and the viewer.
Instagram @pollyatkinsonart
2016 Part of college installation 'Memories'. Analogue photographs on old family dining chair upholstered with repurposed curtain material
Becs Boyd lives on the Black Isle and graduated in 2020 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Moray School of Art as part of the delayed ‘Covid’ cohort. Within her work, ceramics, painting, installation and sound draw connections between everyday ritual and myriad non-human timeframes and ecologies.
Her multidisciplinary practice harnesses unpredictability, material process, tipping points and changes of state to probe relationships between materiality, creative uncertainty or ‘the wild’, and temporal experience. With physical touch both a precious and a dangerous thing, she is interested in how we navigate vulnerability and lack of control in a world characterised by many kinds of separation. She feels a need to probe her own identity at the edges of uncertainty and loves the creative energy of vulnerability and what remains unknown, unexpected and unresolved.
She won the New Highland Contemporary 4 award and has exhibited work in galleries and online, including a solo show on Art North’s Projectroom 2020. She was recently shortlisted for VAS and Hospitalfield Residency programmes. She enjoys collaborative creative engagement, with significant projects including Journeys In the North 2018 and Northern Exchange Iceland 2016.
Find out more: www.becsboyd.co.uk
Instagram @becs_boyd
notional space vi (2021)
mixed media on paper
Since graduating from DJCAD with a BDesHons in Illustration, Jaqueline Briggs has been working from her studio in the Highlands in Wasps Creative Academy Inverness. Growing up in the Scottish Highlands with a Papua New Guinean mother and Scottish father, she has always looked to environment, culture and people as sources of inspiration. She uses art as a means to explore and learn about the world and the elements of her contrasting heritage. In her work, she uses bold colours and line and enjoys the crossover of disciplines within fine art and design.
From March 2020 – October 2020, she coordinated ‘The Sea Inside’ Cromarty Community Art Project with ‘Nature Scot’, researching local knowledge, stories and folklore surrounding the area. Artwork created by the community and the three artists involved was exhibited in The Cromarty Courthouse Museum representing this research and local’s personal connection with the coast.
Since graduating she has exhibited work in Gallery 48’s ‘One’s To Watch’ Exhibition (Dundee 2016) and the ‘New Blood’ Exhibition (London 2016). She has taken part in The Scottish Black Lives Matter Mural Trail, with an installation Mural in Eden Court, Inverness (July-August 2020) and Oor Wullie’s Big Bucket Trail in Inverness (June-August 2019).
Find out more: www.jacquelinebriggsillustration.com
Instagram @jacquelinebriggsart
Sophie Brown graduated from Gray’s School of Art with a BA in Painting in 2020 and is currently based in Dingwall. She was our last intern and as part of her internship created a video essay called ‘The Wicked Witch – Depiction and Deception’ as well as exhibiting in our SUPERMARKET show. Sophies practice is primarily focused on the exploration into repugnant and polarising people in society. Over the past year, she has focused on the formation of Toxic Masculinity in Western society, studying figures who have gained large scale media attention following the #MeToo Movement.
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Using everyday items such as nylon tights, her thoughts move away from literal depiction and towards working within the remit of the Abject – disembodying human features as an exploration into the visually uncomfortable.
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Instagram @by.sophiebrown
I am the Father of Four Daughters, 2020, 109cm x 60cm, Stitched and Stuffed Nylon, Clay and Resin on Steel Wire
Lorna Campbell graduated from Moray School of Art with a BA in Fine Art in 2018 and is currently based in Inverness. She is one of the founders of Circus Artspace and has continued to be a key member in facilitating the work we do. Her practice has evolved from gallery-based interactive installation to socially engaged practice in the community, drawing on a career in participatory rural community development.
Lornas work is process-led, with a recurrent theme of transition and change. She explores tension and balance and shifts in our relationship with others and with our environment. She believes that we all have an innate creativity, expression of which is fundamental to our wellbeing. This has led to her interest in art as social practice, actively engaging others in the creative process. Her work in participatory settings focuses on relationship-building within a supportive space where creativity can flourish, and conversation and collaboration in the making process are encouraged. Creative process, particularly dialogue and interaction between participants, is of equal importance to her as a final artistic ‘output’.
Her influences are diverse, including William Kentridge and Artur Żmijewski, Erwin Wurm and Pina Bausch, all of whom explore social constructs, often emotional or challenging, in unexpected, eccentric or humorous ways which stimulate the viewer to reassess their own point of reference and assumptions.
Peace Flags: interpretation of Tibetan Prayer Flags developing a theme of Peace, Calm and Mindfulness. July 2019
Creating Concertina Books using local maps and favourite places. May 2018
Liz Crichton graduated in 2020 from UHI Shetland with an MA in Art and Social Practice. Her work explores our hopes, fears, choices, chances and sense of identity. Inspiration comes from her surroundings, and the people she encounters. Giving tangible form to an idea, is an outworking of her spiritual development, coming to a deeper understanding of herself and seeking to draw closer to the source of her existence.
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Working with a variety of media and in participation with the public, her work often contrasts the power of the natural elements with the fragility and temporary nature of life and the futility of human endeavours and seeks to inspire others to step out beyond what they know for certain. She is excited by opportunities to bring people together, to build relationships and explore together, in ways that create liminal spaces where for a short time perhaps the unimaginable becomes possible.
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Find out more: www.revelationarts.org.uk
Clinging on... 2019 found objects and wire
Madeleine Daly graduated from Moray School of Art in 2019 with a BA in Fine Art and is currently based in Elgin. She works within an extended painting practice, following an intuitive path open to repetition and redirection. Her work involves an intentional reworking, creating found space and serendipitous connections where previous layers are revealed. She sees the physical act of making and learning through repetition as an essential process.
Madeleines work contains emotional fragments of information imprinted within memory, that help to develop an understanding of place in the world in a way that cannot be put into words. Memories are continually filtered through replay and self-editing; the details can become abstract but the sense of recognition remains. The work walks along an invisible line between representation and abstraction, a balancing act of memory and imagination which creates an intersection between one thing and another.
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Instragrm @mad.daly_
Tape works - collage acrylic on masking tape
Leah Davis graduated from UHI Inverness in Contemporary Art and Contextualized Practice in 2020. She explores and responds to internal and external influences, psychoanalytical theories and socio-cultural factors through a female gaze. Visual metaphors permit her subconscious and conscious thought pathway to be acknowledged and in turn, understood. She intends for the work to help eradicate the taboo of opening a dialogue on life and personal experiences, allowing us the freedom to be transparent without the fear of judgement.
Like many others, Leah has been on a continuous journey to determine her identity and where I fit in the world, which has given her an immense interest in the human psyche and human behaviours. Her practice is primarily autobiographical and confessional. Through the use of paint and sometimes collage, she explores life; sexuality, relationships, dreams and intuition, music, nostalgia, Pop Culture, social structure and taboos, film and books.
Find out more: www.leahdavis.co.uk
Instagram @iamthesurrealleah
Fool? Oil on canvas- 2021
Mat Dugard graduated from Perth UHI with a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art and Contextualised Practice in 2018. At its core, his practice is about making sense of images and exploring meaning through context. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach to art making, he attempts to combine diverse source material and abstract it through a process-based practice.
We live in a fast-paced world and painting and, to Mat, is a way of slowing things down. To him it is important to take something out of the breakneck, saturated flow of today’s culture in the hope of preserving it. Creating a chance to digest it, before moving on.
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Find out more: www.matdugard.com
Instagram @dugard.art
"Dugard is Dead", Degree Show installation at Perth Museum and Art Gallery. Mix media on Canvas', wood assemblage and wood frame. Variable sizes, 2018
Suzie Eggins graduated with a BA (Fine Art) from Moray School of Art in 2018. Since graduating, she has developed new ideas at Hospitalfield Graduate Residency, exhibited in RSA New Contemporaries and was commissioned to make new work last year for the Travelling Gallery. The foundation of her visual art practice is drawing, and this extends into printmaking and sculpture. She responds to her immediate environment, previously engaging with the built environment and more recently drawing attention to the natural world. Visually, she likes the meeting place between the organic and the constructed, a strange intersection of worlds.
Related to this, she works between analogue and digital processes. Her images are hand drawn before being translated into the technical mediums of digital imaging, printing and laser cutting. Her material choices represent this underlying contrast and relationship. She works with natural materials such as wood, paper and pencil and combine it with emulsion and sheet acrylic.
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Find out more: www.suzieeggins.com
Instagram @suzie_eggins_
'River Clyde' Risograph print and coloured pencil on recycled Context paper. Travelling Gallery 'Shapes of Water' 2020.
'Garden XIV' Lasercut and etched birch ply and emulsion on cradled birch board. 'Garden' series, 2020.
Hester Grant studied BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Moray School of Art and graduated in 2018. She was our intern at the start of 2020 and during her internship she curated an online zine exhibition called “Inversesh”. Inspired by the zines the other artists in the exhibition submitted, she has begun incorporating poetry and words into her practice. She has taken inspiration from the 70s art collective COUM Transmissions which later went on to form the industrial band Throbbing Gristle and has been experimenting with sound using effects peddles and a Korg synthesiser.
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Hesters artistic practice explores the concept of “obscenity” through examining how mainstream pornography, illegal drugs and “lad culture” affects society. In doing so, she created a shirt using her partner as a pin-up as a way of objectifying him that echoed how women are typically objectified. Previously, she designed a shirt using the images of porn stars’ collapsed anuses resembling “rosebuds” as the pattern. She created this piece to examine how placing a shocking image in an everyday context affects its meaning to the viewer. She decided to wear the shirt in drag as the porn producer Max Hardcore to examine the idea of what happens when the objectified (a woman) takes on the role of the objectifier. She is inspired by artists such as Isa Genzken, Aurel Schmidt and Ryan Trecartin and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky as these artists use a crude aesthetic to put across their work.
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Instagram @lidl.kim
YouTube Love Stories, Zine, 2020,
Deborah Ilett studied at UHI and graduated with a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art and Contextualised Practice in 2019. Her art practice focuses on the effects of time, a sense of belonging, place, memory and our interrelationship with nature. It uses scientific discovery and exploratory methods of research as a means of inspiration, reflecting her long-held profound interest in art and science as she strives to identify and develop the connections between these two disciplines. From research she expands on her discoveries, using each layer of information to inform her practice so that the subsequent artwork evokes and elicits further outcomes for the observer. It seeks to link the past and present, to re-awaken the childhood sense of curiosity.
Science informs her practice and provides inspiration for her creative work. It enables the consideration of ground-breaking concepts that can be used in creating and developing her practice. Combining art with scientific elements creates a melting pot of infinite possibilities for research and development of ideas, through to the methods of production. Science and technology have much to offer, but they are tools, the means of discovery, understanding and progression, whereas art provides us with the means to visualise the potentiality of what we have learnt.
Instagram @deborah_ilett
'Cat in a Box', mixed media (plaster, golden thread and a small glass bottle, contained within a box), 2020. © Deborah Ilett
Jack Kay is a political protest artist based in Inverness and graduated from UHI with a BA (Hons) in Contemporary and Contextualised Practice in 2018. His work focuses on social-political topics, explicitly illustrating the conversations, impact and aftermath of such on modern human society.
Most of his artwork is primarily sculptural and installation-based, using alternate materials such as animal skins and acid to produce macabre but prominent abstract structures, expressing simple forms in the body but highlighting the ugliness within the human condition.
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During the Covid-19 lockdown, his work predominantly revolved around the tumultuous reappearance and upsurge of the ‘Black Lives Matter Movement’ in America and its relevance in the UK, concentrating on specific events and visualising them in an ongoing series of digital collages. Such events include the police brutality displayed throughout the United States, and the neglected case of Breonna Taylor by both the involved Police Dept. and ‘Black Lives Matter.’ He has also created work which illuminated the endorsement of conspiracy and far-right groups by now ex-President Trump during his troubled re-election campaign.
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Instagram @theblackeningdog
Catch of the Day with Fishmonger's Display. Sculpture, 2020,
Becki Kirkwood graduated from Inverness UHI in 2020 with a BA in Contemporary Art and Contextualised Practice. Stemming from an interest in the individual and collective experience, her work focuses on the psychological and social influences that affect our everyday life. These influences guide her to create work surrounding topics such as mental health and identity, which is explored from a personal viewpoint through the form of self-portraiture.
It is through this practice that she works with photography, collage and drawing techniques, which is often combined to create mixed media artworks using both analogue and digital techniques.
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Find out more: www.beckikirkwood.com
Instagram @beckikirkwoodart
stitched-image: Untitled, 2020
Evija Laivina graduated from UHI with a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Arts and Contextualised Practice in 2019. Her work explores identity, body and beauty. Through photography using portraiture and lately self-portraiture approach she aims to understand and communicate issues that are important in this current time. She often uses her own experience and memories and ties them with other people, opinions and stories. She enjoys collaborating with scientists in the medical and anthropology fields. It feeds her work with new ideas and create new connections. She is interested in trends on social media, medical news and updates, related to cosmetic surgeries and some specific topics like Breast Implant Illness issues and other problems related to extreme and excessive beauty treatments and manipulations.
Working with various mediums, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and video, Evija has flexibility and freedom to explore new ways of communication and connecting with different audiences. Photography is her preferred medium, staging a completely new world; pretending to be someone else.
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Find out more: www.evijalaivina.com
Instagram @evija_laivina_
The Castle, 'The Hoarder' project, 2020
'Mirror' , photo series 'Barbara' 2021, self portrait
Claire MacDonald graduated from UHI with a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art and Contextualised Practice in 2019. Central to her practice is the use of art and space to encourage a sense of wellbeing for all. The work is socially engaged and multidisciplinary and often takes the form of installation involving light. This is realised through a diversity of scale and media. Printmaking and scale models are recurring features within small scale studio practice which informs and compliments larger scale public pieces. Community voice and ownership are the backbone for the majority of works, which celebrate the uniqueness of place are site specific and collaborative in their nature. The aim is to invite the audience to connect with the universality of being human, by putting a focus on the interconnectedness of the minute and the vast drawing parallels with the local and global, individual and collective.
Nature is the key inspiration alongside the theories of Joseph Beuys’s Social Sculpture, Deleuze and Guattarri’s Syntax of Space and Aaron Antonovsky’s Salutogenic model for health based on a Sense of Coherence. Her work explores art as a vehicle for social change by considering art practice as a tool for alternative ways of thinking.
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Find out more: www.clairemacdonaldartist.com
Instagram @crowlemac
From the Calder to the Spey, Cardboard,Scale Model. 2019. Kingussie's
Lar MacGregor graduated from UHI Inverness with a BA(Hons) in Contemporary Art & Contextualised Practice in 2018 and lives in the Scottish Highlands, 15 miles north west of Inverness. The pace there is unhurried and there is a strong sense of history and heritage in every village and moorland glen; a landscape of close-shaven heathers and trees shaped by wind and time.
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In an age of noise, distraction and technology, she is ever curious about those moments of clarity, when all the stresses and strains of our daily lives simply ebb away and we are left with silence amidst the chaos.
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As an artist that walks, she has come to realize that walking is simply a mechanism that used to connect to the magic that happens whilst walking. The people she walks with bring their own stories, life experiences and ideas with them, and walking together creates something meaningful for all involved.
Walking is about seeing, smelling, hearing, touching and if you get the right season, tasting. Like us, pathways get worn, become familiar or change over time but they give small insights into the history and cultural use of space as well as the complexities of the lived experience within a space.
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Find out more: www.larmacgregor.com
Instagram @larmacgregor
Leaf Litter, Lar MacGregor
Authorised Access, Lar MacGregor
Kelly Marwick graduated from Orkney College UHI with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 2019. As her creative practice has evolved, she has developed an interest in how we cope with vastness of space, specifically through existentialism and the human psyche. She has previously made work that focused on the realm of cyberspace and the concept of infinity within the digital world - the cyber-geographical spaces between computer networks are infinite and complex, similar to the complexity and curiousness of the human psyche. Emotional triggers caused by the cybernetic sublime can vary from fear and emptiness, to curiosity and euphoria.
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After graduating and given the restrictions with COVID-19, Kelly decided to look around the landscape in Orkney and apply her ideas around vastness of space to the island itself, and how it’s bounded by the seas. She always felt this freedom of having the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean surrounding, a boundary that is huge and infinite, allowing to see through the landscape in all directions towards the horizon until it becomes faint and abstracted. Using this idea, she has recently developed a number of pieces using a variety of media from drawing to digital photography and film photography. A selection of these works recently exhibited in the Moti Collective exhibition Bounded Islands.
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Find out more: www.yllek-art.tumblr.com
Instagram @yllek_art
Wideford Looking South, coloured pencil on card, 2020
Untitled I, matchbox pinhole camera, 2019
Rachel McClure graduated from Moray School of Art with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Textiles in 2020. She was awarded the Grampian Hospital Arts Trust (GHAT) exhibition prize and was selected for RSA New Contemporaries exhibition, Edinburgh (postponed until 2022)
Her work explores psychogeography, mapping and considers the unseen, unnoticed aspects of our environment and examines our place in this. Initially through the practice of Urban Walking in Elgin but has broadened this investigation through cold water swimming during the lockdown.
Following a challenging year with serious family illness and the pandemic, Rachel interrogates how interaction with the environment impacts on our wellbeing, physical and mental health. Through the medium of cold-water swimming, she explores the connection with nature and the elemental sensation of being immersed in cold water.
Her current practice includes photography, sound recordings, printmaking and cast making. She aims to capture instances of the multisensory embodied experience of being in the sea and in nature to explore and map our external and internal journeys.
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Find out more: www.racheljmcclure.com
Instagram @racheljmcclure_art
#Wavey Wavey : Plaster : 2021
Robert McCormack graduated with a BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking from Glasgow School of Art in 2020. Since the pandemic he has been living in his parents house making plaster casts in the garage. After scraping some money together from his one and only sale from his degree show, he has started studying an alt/MA at the New Art school through a series of distance tutorials. With support, Robert has embarked on a series of Bambi drawings pasted on wooden panels. Bambi syndrome (BS) it is some kind of misguided faith in cute and innocent things, a rejection of the worlds dangerous reality. He has been in Inverness for eight months working in a high school in an additional support needs department.
Whilst working full time, he has been co-organising a graduate project with Glasgow Open House Festival. He is working towards two solo exhibitions in Edinburgh and in Glasgow as well as waiting for the green light to embark on a three month residency to Florence funded by the RSA.
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Find out more: www.robertmccormack.co.uk
Instagram @robertmccormack_
'Bambi and the Band' Charcoal drawing pasted on wooden panel 2021 41x49
Isabel McLeish graduated from Grays School of Art with a BA (Hons) Contemporary Art Practice in 2019. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and creative practitioner based in the Western Highlands of Scotland.
Isabel explores the entanglements of people, objects and place and the elemental and multiplicitous nature of being. Her practice is informed by personal experiences of immersion in landscapes, the history and language of the Highlands and Islands and the rhythms and cycles intrinsic to the planet. Through making and a process-led practice, she hopes to highlight the interrelationships between people and the land and encourage reflection on our bodily and sensorial connection to the living, animate earth. Isabel aims to foster a reciprocal relationship and informed dialogue with nature and work towards symbiotic, sustainable and collaborative futures.
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Isabel is currently a postgraduate student at the Centre for Rural Creativity at the University of the Highlands and Islands. Isabel wishes to continue to develop her artistic practice in a rural context exploring performative, walking and collaborative processes as a means of making.
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Find out more: www.isabelmcleish.com
Instagram @isabelmcleishart
Truncated, stoneware, 2019
Miami Mohsin was born in Kirkuk, Iraq in 1961. She moved to Perth in Scotland in 2004 along with her two young children due to the conflict in Iraq. She graduated in 2019 from UHI Perth College with a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art and Contextual Practice. inspiration for artwork comes from her motherland, Iraq, and the culture and heritage of Mesopotamia, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian.
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Miami’s work ranges from sculptures to paintings, yet her practice is not defined by these alone, as she embraces experimentation with a vast array of materials, to more personal pieces. Her ideology on creating sculptures is very simple: anything can be used as a medium and materials to create a sculpture.
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The process of experimenting with a varied and unusual combination of materials - such as clay, Papier mâché, cement, plaster. - bring so many stimuli for art. If art evokes mystery and intrigue, then she feels her work is complete, always looking for a hidden message of the sculpture. Exploring the idea of a story by scanning and analyzing, size, form, style, and texture of the sculpture - is what stops the individual to think and interact with the art. The more mysterious a piece, the greater the interest it can create. Searching for meaning, information and context can stimulate imagination and fascination.
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Find out more: www.miamimohsinfineart.com
Instagram @miamimohsinfineart
Rosie Newman graduated from UHI Shetland with an MA in Art and Social Practice in 2020. She is a painter, multidisciplinary artist, an environmentalist, a socially engaged artist and an educator. She works with a variety of materials, technology and people in creative ways. Her recent work has become more focused on connecting people, phenomenologically, psychologically, and aesthetically to local natural areas, in ways that promote well-being and sustainability.
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Encounters and processes are important factors and many of her works include performance and actions outside the gallery. Some recent installations have included audios of forest birds made with human voices, marine recordings with hydrophones and a stargazing event using an abandoned boat.
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Rosie was awarded the UHI Research and Scholarship Scheme 2018, which enabled her to study art and local culture in rural North Macedonia. This inspired an investigation into how new technologies could be used as creative tools to promote sustainability, enhance wellbeing and bring people closer to nature. A Virtual Reality installation was designed to counterintuitively create a computer-generated art installation that reflected the historic local ecology of the UHI campus. Field studies and creative workshops were set up that generated materials for the VR installation that reflected the participants responses to the natural world using acoustics and watercolour painting.
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Find out more: www.rosienewman.com
Human Forest, Moss, handmade nests, chairs, clay, audios of human voices imitating bird song, 2020
Hand Made nest, Human Forest, Found natural objects and wire, 2020
Holly Osborne graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking in 2018. She reflects on stereotypes, ideals, and mundanity, using drawing and painting as a vehicle. She is a collector of images, gathering material from a range of different sources - stock photos, screenshots, vintage knitting patterns, adverts, social media, etc. Her artistic practice draws from contemporary sources, finding images mostly from online. She engages with our relationship to image in the PostInternet condition, working from photos taken from television, her phone or even directly from the moving image onscreen as life drawing. Staged, awkward figures come into play, questioning our aspirations. Engaging with a disquieting humour, she aims to unsettle and seduce with these darkly comical characters. Crude yet witty depictions that grasp the fallacy of image and our perception of others.
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She is a drawer and painter primarily, often working with basic materials like cheap felt pens and pencils then translating these seemingly unsophisticated figures into oil paintings. Although fascinated by flat image, she maintains a strong observational drawing practice, drawing objects and capturing family members around the home.
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Find out more: www.holly-osborne.com
Instagram @hollyceosborne
By the Pool, Oil on Canvas, 80x60cm, 2020
Gerald, Oil and Charcoal, on Canvas, 20x30cm, 2020
Fiona Percy graduated from Moray School of Art in 2018 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Textiles. In childhood as a policeman’s daughter, she carried a sheen of outsider through multiple moves. Her sense of place, home and safety was imbued into the objects that migrated with us and this continues to impact on my art practice.
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There is an intersectional theme of queerness, queer identity and the ‘queering of place’ which runs through the work. The use of copper within these artworks is further symbolic of protection and conductivity.
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Her work method flows along a four-word mantra; Gather, Create, Destroy, Repeat. Gathering stuff over a sustained period. This can be data or materials or research. These materials hold memories that knit together place, time, and energy. Creating an archive; recording and displaying time and place as the narrative develops. Destruction is necessary for transformation, she may deconstruct a bed, she may reduce plant matter to dye, or she may destroy an illusion of self. The destruction is often a reabsorption of elements. Repeating, returning, and re-cycling and recording through the creative process in a continuing loop.
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Find out more: www.fionapercy.co.uk
Instagram @fionapercy395
Marital Bed Stresses, Strains and Stitches1; mixed fabrics, metal and wood; 197x152x16;2019
Erin Semple graduated with an MLitt in Fine Art Practice - Photography and the Moving Image from Glasgow School of Art in 2018 and is currently living in the Highlands. She looks to her personal life and experiences to inform her work, utilising the lens to better understand herself and those around her.
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Erin’s work, although often introspective in nature, explores ideas such as the female gaze and notions of home by investigating the self in landscapes and domestic spaces. She has exhibited in Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and Hong Kong, undertaken a residency at Cove Park and co-founded Fresh Focus - a peer led critique group for graduate photographers seeking creative and constructive criticism and support.
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Find out more: www.erinsemple.co.uk
Instagram @erin.semple
untitled - photograph (120mm bw film), 2019/2020
Morag Smith graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Moray School of Art in 2018. She looks at the traces that are left in a landscape and use these as the creative inspiration within her practice. These traces include her recognition of a landscape, knowing that this island follows on from that headland; knowing the shapes to expect and what personal markers come next. Knowing some of the historical traces held within the land, be it place names such as Lady Rock or Bloody Bay, or an understanding of the people who have been lived here. It interests her to know a little of the geology and to understand why a landscape looks as it does, the softness of Lismore compared to the hardness of Morven, the vast movements of time. All of these traces give her knowledge of a landscape but to know it she needs to experience it, to move slowly within it or across it; to move it from merely a scenic view to somewhere known, to Place.
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As a contemporary abstract artist working across disciplines, she takes these inspirational traces from within a landscape and uses process, research and experimentation to slowly move it from something known to an abstract form. These forms may retain a hint of their past either through their organic shape, or the use of the vibrant and intimate colours that she notes when moving unhurriedly across the land. To move slowly and repeatedly allows her to notice and give attention to these details.
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Find out more: www.moragsmith.scot
Instagram @moragsmith_artist
The Cabrach(1)_2020_Digital Still
Whatever there is the landscape emerges if we just sit still (1), Concrete & Resin_2018
Sadie Stoddart graduated from Moray School of Art in 2019 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. Her practice uses weeds as a metaphor to explore our relationship with the constructed narrative used by the media to discuss topics of a social, political and historical nature. The similarities in the language used to describe displaced plants and displaced people allow an exploration of issues such as control and belonging, to be examined through a different lens. By mimicking the open statements, that we feel compelled to have a view on, the absurdity of the language and the often inhumanity of the narratives used comes to light. These messages of many natures are absorbed by us as a society and woven into our everyday lives. Using collective voices and disjointed phrases, Sadie aims to question the impact this rhetoric has on us and our views on these subjects.
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She has previously used low value, temporary materials, such as mono-prints on newsprint, Plaster of Paris and found objects to further question the value of both the language and the ways in which they appear in our lives. The materials and the processes used to create them have allowed her to mimic the repetitive, quick nature of the media and modern day news.
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Instagram @sadiestoddart_art
Leaves - Monoprint leaves on newsprint - 2019
Contradictions of a Dock leaf - Monoprint on newsprint on wooden board - 2019
Taylor Black is currently based in Fort William, he has a diverse practice which allows him to interpret personal moments; capturing a specific feeling or energy can take various forms from fashion design, digital graphics, photography or video.
Taylor has a strong interest in facilitating creative experiences for a broad range of communities. Previously he was employed by youth-arts organisation Room 13 international, Fort William for a 5 month internship (2018 - 2019), assisting with delivering workshops and visits for primary and high schools. Taylor lead on their Glenfest Project designing and screen-printing t-shirts and hoodies with a group of local young people, he also delivered a mark-making workshop for a group of 12 children where they created their own mark making tools from recycling and reusing 'trash'.
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Instagram @tayblk_
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