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Suffolk artist and print maker Mickey Gibbons, has spent most of his career in London working as an award-winning creative director within the publishing industry. Mickey studied Illustration at Portsmouth and went on to work for English Heritage as a small finds illustrator before moving to London to become a freelance magazine designer. His innovative design work has included sports, music and lifestyle titles that he has taken from conceptual ideas to the news stands.

After rediscovering his love of drawing, Mickey began using a cheap pack of felt pens to quickly and expressively record the infinite complexities of East Anglia’s beauty. Mickey’s art is made ‘en plien’ at a wide range of locations including rural landscapes and industrial heartlands. 

Mickey also uses the photopolymer plate process to produce limited edition prints of the drawings. He has also recently self-published a curation of the felt pen drawings in a book called ‘Sheet137 – Lowestoft’.

The focus of Mickey’s work is on the physical act of drawing and the fragile opportunity of getting just one chance to capture a fleeting scene. His obsessive love of the vast Suffolk skies and moving seas allows him to exploit the inherent range of a felt pens tones and mark-making which references both the Impressionists and Japanese calligraphers before him. There is a desire within his work to bring a sense of contemporary modernity to landscape art that embraces both its abstraction and serenity.

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I work in mixed media with a focus on natural objects and landscape. I enjoy the hidden corners, hedgerows and unfamiliar views. Currently I am making a series of intricate paintings inspired by a collection of sea shells. I am studying for a BA in painting with the OCA.

“When the lights go out And the darkness surrounds you Open your eyes

to the Wonderment” 

Bill Jackson is a multi award winning photographer, filmmaker and sound artist. The concept of time is crucial to his ideas, exchanging the classic definition of photography as a series of instant glimpses of the world in which we live, to a personal definition of ‘space-time’. 

A conceptualist arts education in the early 70’s at Coventry School Of Art continues to inform my thinking and work practice. Drawing or mark making in its widest interpretation is integral to his work. The mark, either as an engineering drawing or a mathematical notation, is the beginning of the journey to new ideas.  

As a young art student, he was  influenced by Pollock’s approach to random mark making and the artist’s’ intervention in that process.  He creates stages for these interventions  to unfold; with the knowledge of these stages in daylight, the ‘performance’ is transformed by night. 

As a nocturnal photographer and filmmaker, he works with specially constructed drawing tools in the darkness of night to engage with natural elements including the sea and the wind to map out spaces and environments, tapping into the natural energies to trace and draw, and document unique, live, site specific performances. The reality of the captured image is fundamental to all his work, particularly with long exposure photography. 

In 1986 he transitioned from photography and ventured into cyberspace, initially experimenting with early digital formats, combining them with analogue photography. Through this period major electronic mapping works included ‘Iconoclast’ and ‘The Journey of The Skin Man’. These were later used to illustrate the current concerns about photography at a symposium at The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in 1991. 

My work is about is about the textures and mood of the landscape around me – focusing sometimes on the details of vegetation and sometimes on evoking a sense of the season, of space, light and weather.

I draw and use digital photography, almost always in combination with experimental textile and mixed media approaches.

I work in series – responding to particular places, often the beautiful Waveney Valley landscape local to me, and exploring the possibilities of new techniques.

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I try to communicate a sense of atmosphere by capturing the motion of the sea, the tranquility of the land, and the texture of the rocks.

I let my work develop and take over from my initial direct reaction.

The elements of the environment are not only beautiful, calm but vast, complex and dangerous. This relationship between fear and tranquility are emotions I can identify with.

Engaging with nature has helped me to overcome my recent surgery to remove a brain tumour. I admire and appreciate more so now the beauty found in an individual leaf or a spectacular view.

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A mixed media and natural resources artist creating a selection of contact botanical prints and paintings using the plants gathered from around Suffolk.

The art work is a calm and gentle visual experience that allows the natural marks and colours from nature to connect you to the natural world.

Finding sanctuary in nature and seeking deeper connections with the landscape, I have immersed myself in researching and discovering the potential of natural colours and prints from my environment. Following a path that led to completing an MA at NUA I have continued to work exploring my locality through mindful practice.

Each print or painting is a result of a unique process, from gathering materials on long walks, to preparing the fabrics, dye baths and paints. Embracing the serendipity of creating this way allows for the materials to become their own part of the collaboration. I am able to guide the process but ultimately the outcomes are unknown until they are revealed. Each leaf, fabric or colour used has a journey attached to it, to create with these natural resources adds a deeper connection to the art.

Making my own paint brushes and paints, or using some recycled fabrics, feels different to painting with shop bought brushes and canvases. Seeking the beauty in natural resources and awakening ancient practices in our contemporary world is the way I feel drawn to express my art and my love for nature.

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I am a Suffolk based artist working in architectural stained glass: light and colour are my medium.

Most of my work is commission based for secular and non-secular buildings. In some commissions, in agreement with the client, I enjoy taking an experimental approach to painting on glass, allowing for an element of surprise and discovery.

I also offer stained glass courses at my studio – Myglassroom in Mellis. There is a personal element running through my work, that is not commission based, in which themes of environment are explored and completed pieces can be displayed in numerous ways and places.

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