Over 50% of the world’s populations now live in urban areas, in mass, we have moved away from the countryside, and away from nature. Adam Batchelor's work is a modern interpretation of naturalist painting and looks at the relationship we now have with nature and the imbalance that we have incurred between the natural world and ourselves. Through drawing, Batchelor wishes to look at how we portray and understand ecology and the animal kingdom.

Biography

Adam Batchelor graduated with a BA Hons in Illustration from Norwich University of the Arts in 2009, where he developed a bold graphic self initiated approach involving sculpture and model making. Galleries, clients, & publications include XL records, Lazarides, Lawrence King, The Wellcome Trust, Fool Magazine, Suhrkamp, Sneaker News, Another Escape, Malibu Magazine, 1XRUN, Kogan Gallery, KultSG, Christian Aid & Adbusters.

Biography

Dean Brierley is an occasional artist and full-time director of Manchester-based art label Caustic Coastal. He studied Painting at Camberwell College of Art between 2011-2014

Carole Cluer’s work explores whether it is possible to create memories through the act of drawing. Carefully drawn from her imagination, various ephemera give weight to the unreal through trompe l’oeil style effects. Carole constructs an alternative future or past within various objects such as a hat, a coat or a wallet, each meticulously recreated by hand in pencil.

Biography

Carole Cluer completed her Masters at Sheffield Hallam University in 2014. She was included in Everyday Illusions at PAPER.

Annabel Dover was recently undertook a residency at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Her work was included in the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2010. She recently exhibited in Catalyst at the IWMN, Salford.

Simon Leahy-Clark's practice stems from an investigation into the potential of everyday ephemeral materials and possibilities within drawing, painting and image making. His current work is focused on newspapers, exploring the inherent qualities of this everyday material/object and exploiting the form and information within, while also bringing to the fore the tactile nature of the paper itself. The collage works use remnants from previous work – cut out pictures are re-assembled anew, becoming a collection of imagery as well as a single image. The ‘master’ images depict abandoned spaces or objects, or are otherwise inbetween or transitory areas. The work fluctuates between its constituent parts and the overall picture. The experience of looking remains in constant flux.

Biography

Simon Leahy-Clark (b. 1973, Cardiff) studied Fine Art at Middlesex University (1996-1999). Selected exhibitions include ArtWorks Open, Barbican Art Trust (2014, 2013, 2011, 2010); The Distance Between, Bond House Gallery, London; NeoArt Prize, Bolton (2013); Photo/Print Open, Charlie Dutton Gallery (2013); Creekside Open (2013, 2007); Collectible, ZAP, London (2012); Jerwood Drawing Prize (2011, 2008); RA Summer Exhibition (2014, 2011); Crash, Charlie Dutton Gallery (2010); Core Open, London (2010); So What's Different Today, Globe Gallery, Newcastle (2010); The National Open Art Competition, Chichester (2009); 40 Artist 40 Drawing, The Drawing Gallery, Shropshire (2009); Re:Drawing, Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown (2008); 13th Yoshihara Memorial Exhibition, Osaka Contemporary Arts Centre, winner Gutai Group Prize (2005), Aftershock, 1a Space, Hong Kong (2004); Faith, Transition Gallery, London (2004); Oriel Mostyn 12, Llandudno (2002). Solo exhibitions include Library, Westminster Reference Library (2012); From the Lagado Academy, CAS Gallery, Osaka, (2005), supported by the British Council. He lives and works in London.

Ellie MacGarry makes drawings, paintings and painted objects which are awkward or clunky; unusual spatial configurations are set up through the use of surface effects and jarring colour relationships.

Biography

Ellie MacGarry was born in Cambridge, UK in 1991. She studied Fine Art at the University of Leeds, graduating in 2014. She now lives and works in Leeds, UK.

Leanne Richardson's work focuses on appropriation and reproduction to create an illusion of questioning the use of materials, to show how advertising plays with senses in seducing the viewer. By creating one off reproductions to include animals, creates absurdity and uses their vulnerability to entice the viewer. Collage shows this use of reprodcution in magazines and the animalistic society we live in of discarding everything we no longer desire. By using paper in the same way as paint, Richardson creates an illusion of what materials are being used, manipulating judgements like advertising has the ability to do.

Biography

Leanne Richardson graduated in 2012 from Manchester Metropolitan University with a BA Hons in Fine Art. Leanne has been included in Making Faces, The Chapel Gallery, Ormskirk (2014); Silent Auction, Holden Gallery, Manchester (2012); Nine, Kraak Gallery, Manchester (2011). In 2013 she had a two-person exhibition with Lucy May Schofield at PAPER.

I started to make these paintings out of a kind of mourning for the person I used to be: an enthusiastic, passionate teenager who read art books and novels and poems and biographies and watched films and TV and listened to music and dreamed. They are paintings of places that were familiar to me in my childhood and adolescence, places in which I found myself alone and thoughtful. They are places in which I forgot things. ... I paint the paintings of all the times and all the thoughts I lack the language to describe. For the one single moment that I can recall, I feel a dull sadness for the thousands I have forgotten.
(George Shaw, 2002.)

Biography

George Shaw was born in Coventry in 1966. He studied at Sheffield before later doing an MA at the Royal College of Art in London. He now lives and works in Devon. He has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2011 for his retrospective The Sly and Unseen Day.

Ruby Tingle graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2011. Specializing in collage, performance and music inspired by myth and folklore, her work deals primarily with the idea of personal psychology and private symbolism, and how this can be translated via the re telling of stories, normalisation of the fantastical and exploring the notion of in-between places. Self portraiture is employed to allow for the artists, a vicarious existence- a dreamt form of landscape, animal, and transformation become possible and documented. Performance and installation are used as a platform for the three dimensional translation of these ideas, often incorporating the theme of life drawing, looking at the static or moving body as it is forced into a living portrait. Music operates in a cyclic pattern alongside these visual artworks, lyrics often referring to or influenced by occurrences from within the collage and vice versa. The musical arrangements and physical aesthetics of these works function harmoniously, both questioning and engaging with the ambiguous and extraordinary.

Eleanor Watson paints empty spaces; allowing for the room and its contents to set a scene for stories. The objects described in varying detail are given a similar weight to props on an empty stage. What is immediately familiar and recognisable is undermined by the flattened rendering of the objects and the incongruous use of colour.

The paintings retain a likeness to the printed image; particularly in the way in which negative spaces are layered in order to describe the objects. Eleanor encourages a literary feeling of description. Clues as to whose story is being told are everywhere, although most questions are left unanswered.

Biography

Eleanor Watson attained her BA in Fine Art: Painting from Wimbledon College of Art (2012) and has since had a solo show at the Foundry Gallery, Chelsea; a joint exhibition at The Mall Galleries; was included in the RA Summer Exhibition and was shortlisted for the Young Masters Prize 2014.

Dawn Woolley’s artistic practice encompasses photography, video, installation and performance. She uses photographs of objects and people to question issues of artificiality and idealisation. Her artwork forms an enquiry into the act of looking and being looked at. Referring to psychoanalysis, phenomenology and feminism, Woolley examines her own experience of becoming an object of sight and also considers the experience the viewer has when looking at her as a female, and a photographic object. Voyeurism and exhibitionism intertwine as she attempts to disrupt relationships of power in purposefully provocative scenes.

Biography

Dawn Woolley completed an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2008. She has developed a photography-based practice that encompasses digital video, installation and performance as well as photo-based installations. Dawn Woolley currently lives and works in Cardiff, UK and is a photography lecturer at Bridgend College. She is co-director of the curatorial project Another Product, which she founded with James Moore in 2003. Recent exhibitions have included; “Virtually Real” at The Blyth Gallery, London (2010), “Start Your Collection” at The London Art Fair (2009), “Fotomonth” in Krakow, Poland (2007) and solo exhibitions in Ffotogallery, Cardiff (2011) and Vilniaus Fotografijos Galerija, Lithuania (2012). Her artwork is held in a number of private collections in the UK, The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado and in the Museum of Photographic Arts in Kiyosato, Japan.