Member Artists

Dorothy Courtis is a Suffolk-based author of historical novels, writing as Dorothy Stewart.

Ruth Wharrier is a freelance botanical and natural history artist and illustrator. She works as a tutor for Suffolk Wildlife Trust, is an advisor for the Arts Council Arts Award scheme and runs regular workshops for adults.

Botanical Artist and Illustrator

Harpsichord Decoration

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I am a writer, textile artist/bookbinder with a keen interest in fables, folktales, myths, and exploring ancient places.

I’m an enthusiastic walker also, and my writing is inspired by the many journeys I’ve made; from visiting mysterious places and ancient churches to observations within the woods, of wildlife, and of walking in nature.

My textile/bookbinding work is an extension of this. I mostly work in silk, with each piece being hand-dyed, painted and embellished.

www.aelfwynnbooks.com

Mark has painted for over forty years with work appearing on television seven times.

He was awarded First Prize by Bill Oddie on the program Moving Art, host George Melly, and interview by Sister Wendy Beckett. Mark has shown in New York, Interart Gallery, Jarvis Centre, Williamsburg Historical Center, and France, Norway, and Holland.

In London he won the Lucy Morrison Memorial Prize at the Royal Overseas League and exhibited in House of Commons, Royal Academy, Mall Galleries, Tripp Gallery, Logos Gallery, as well as Fruit Market Gallery Scotland; The Minories, Chappel Galleries, Norwich Castle, and Ferini Art Gallery.

Mark grew up in East Anglia and studied at art schools in Great Yarmouth and Manchester. He is now based in the Suffolk market town of Bungay. A figurative style based on sound drawing and heightened colour was prevalent in the early large scale works. A move to a series of figures in fields of colour and stronger definition was the direct influence of experiments with sculpture. Latterly, paintings have become much smaller and introspective. Delicate drawings and designs for commissioned sculpture have also attracted admiration.

Work has been shown on Anglia Television and has appeared in arts reviews in the Guardian, and regularly in the Eastern Daily Press. Mark has exhibited in London, Norway, France, Austria, USA and South Africa and work is held in private collections throughout the world.

Website

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.