Jenny Core’s work is an investigation into the potential and diversity of drawing as a medium and not ‘just a process’. Her works are time led and explore performative processes. The object is captured on paper. It dissolves, explodes and ceases to exist in its current form. What remains is a mark of an object that once existed, a moment captured in time. These created forms have then been manipulated and appropriated to create playful narratives.

Biography

Lives and works in Berlin. Core studied Fine Art at The University of Huddersfield (2009). Core curated The Drawing Project at Castlefield Gallery in 2014. Other exhibitions include: Some Misunderstanding, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester. (2013) Self Portrait Exhibition, Brooklyn Art Library, New York. (2012); 60 Drawings Exhibition, Bankley Studios & Gallery, Manchester (2012); Drawing Connections. Siena Art Institute. Italy. (2011); Twitter Art Exhibition, Exhale Unlimited (E.U.) Gallery, Los Angeles (2012). Awards include: Special Recognition Award, Abstract Competition, Light Space & Time Gallery, USA. (2013); Shortlisted for the Neo: Artprize 2013, Bolton. (2013).

Susannah Douglas is concerned with the representation of the human figure through the conventions of portraiture. She plunders images from a range of sources; art historical examples, via photocopies; anonymous photographs uploaded to the Internet and glossy magazine spreads. These fragments are spliced together, the poses, gestures, attire and composition are examined, repeated, reconstructed and reflect back upon themselves.

Biography

Susannah Douglas lives and works in London. She graduated from Wimbledon College of Art with an MA in Fine Art in 2010. Her work has recently been exhibited at Bermondsey Project, London and in Bristol as part of Incub8; Motorcade Flashparade's series of solo exhibitions by selected emerging artists. In 2013 she was selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize, The Griffin Art Prize, and Art Laguna. In 2014 she will have a solo show at the Globe Gallery in Newcastle and a two-person show at PAPER.

Phil Hopkins’ drawings have a devotional quality. Drawing on the humble, mundane materials and images that dominate our everyday experience, they worry away at them until their physicality and their meaning is transformed. The kitsch poetry of paint-colour names on DIY store colour charts carry the pathos of suburban aspiration, and catalogues of furniture or consumer goods reveal the ways in which we strive to assert our individuality within the limitations of commodified options. These are carefully chosen surfaces on which to draw, and their sheen of advertised sophistication is erased when Hopkins works with these materials. The erasure takes place not decisively, not cleanly, but partially, hesitantly, by means of a roughly scumbled layer of paint reminiscent of the white-smeared surface of windows behind which redecoration work is taking place. The schematic image of the house, and the narrow line of the garden path, ubiquitous in Hopkins' work over many years, remind us simultaneously of a place of refuge and a place of confinement. They signify both the private home of the 'nuclear family' and the social space of the housing estate, embodying both the separateness of the individual and the uniformity of the mass. (Derek Horton, 2014)

Biography

Born in Bristol England, Phill Hopkins studied at Goldsmiths College in London. He lives and works in Leeds. Known as a sculptor, his recent work has centred predominately around drawing. He was recently included in Becky Beasley’s ‘I Fall to Pieces’ (named after his piece) at Leeds City Art Gallery; Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War - Imperial War Museum North, Salford and Parallel Lines & Model Gallery, Leeds. He is represented in various public collections, including, Imperial War Museum, London; Stadt Dortmund, Germany; Hungarian Museum of Photography and Leeds City Art Gallery.

Architectural spaces, computer games and photographic realism all play a part in James Moore’s work. The highly detailed paintings are heavily informed by the aesthetics of games, comics, sci-fi novels and, sometimes, by real places.

These paintings all picture something expansive, something concrete, conjured up from fictional environments, sketches and photographs. Motives differ from one painting to the next. One work may depict a virtual space, from an imagined world, while another might show a city park or a building from the real world. The painted scenes are never unbelievable spaces – they always stay close to the real, on the border of fiction.

Biography

James Moore is an artist and curator based in Cardiff. He studied a Fine Art degree at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Masters in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design in London. He was recently shortlisted for the Welsh Artist of the Year competition, and also exhibited two paintings in the National Eisteddfod in Wales.
James exhibits regularly in group exhibitions and within his own curatorial projects. Over the past few months his work has been included in ‘Digital Romantics’ at Dean Clough Gallery in Halifax and in ‘Virtually Real’, in the Stanley and Aubrey Burton Gallery in Leeds and Blyth Gallery in London.

Graham Watson’s practice is a continuation of the Surrealist practice which aims to resolve the contradictory conditions of dream and reality. Using image appropriation and traditional cut and paste techniques to create collages primarily concerned with the evocation of the magical, a childhood sense of wonder, and possibility and consequently nostalgia, it’s power both equally ecstatic and melancholic. Watson embraces free association in his practice and avoids narrative an underlying impetus often pervades the work.

Biography

Graham Watson (born 1974) lives and works in the Lake District. Graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in 1996. Played nationally and internationally as former drummer in art band ‘Black Basque’. Recent exhibitions include: ‘1964’ P.S. Mirabel Manchester 2014, ‘End of the Line’ Paper Gallery Manchester 2013, ‘Yellow’ Rheged Gallery Penrith 2013, C-Arts Open Studio Cumbria 2013. Residency and exhibition at Rogue Studios Project Space Manchester 2011.

Hannah Wooll's work has always been concerned with imagery that is slightly off kilter, exaggerated or fabricated. The portraits of women who at first glance are beautiful and uncomplicated then reveal themselves to be anything but, subverted from the magazine pages and old master paintings from which their heritage derives; laying sloth like in dead winter trees which belong in Technicolor film sets, or starkly lit in deliberately contrived and manufactured environments which are oddly dreamlike. More recently paintings have been inspired by uncanny museum painted dioramas, figures strategically lit by phosphorescent fish tanks, and reflections in glazed paintings; portraits within portraits, gaze upon gaze. The paint itself is as powerful an enticement as the carefully chosen imagery; a slippery, fallible, distortive tool, rendering limbs and features clumsy and unreal, existing to be just a painted mark, which in itself lends a surreal layer of reference.

Biography

Hannah Wooll (b. 1977 King’s Lynn, Norfolk, UK) studied at Norwich School Of Art (1995-96), Manchester Metropolitan University (1997-2000) and The Royal Academy Schools (2000-03) where she received the May Cristea Award for Fine Art for her final show. Shows include: Solo Show Natural Habitat, Twelve Gallery, London, (2010); Solo show, Contemplating Life and Stuff, Comme Ca, Manchester (2007). Selected group exhibitions include: Portfolio North West, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, (2013); Polemically Small, Torrance Art Museum, California, (2011); Beyond Fontanna, Studio 1:1 Gallery, London, (2010,) Jerwood Drawing Prize (2009) and (2010), Jerwood Space, London and tours; The Future Can Wait, Truman Brewery, London, (2007); New London Kicks, Wooster Projects New York, (2005). Wooll currently lives and works in the North West of England.