Member Artists

Spadge Hopkins SOS committee member; WBA, NCAS and EAAF member is creating on a full time basis, informed by experience gained during a creative career that involved leadership, product design, the music industry and automotive engineering. Currently he tends to work in three dimensions and in metal.

His first mainstream public exhibition was in Ipswich in 2015 but he has been practicing and studying autodidactically, producing varied work for colleagues, friends and family since the 1980s.

Spadge’s first serious works were conceptual. The Machin(sic) series are made of found mechanical components in order to explore questions of value and are an expression of Spadge’s appreciation of the form and function of mechanical components that are so often unseen when they are performing their intended task.

His copper sculptures are variously figurative and explore two of the binaries of sculpture; volume and void; whilst playing with the use of light and shadow. Movement is a conscious theme in his natural history subjects whereas other pieces often concern mystery and the evocation of history.

A public art, rock-music themed commission for the City of Cambridge in 2016 and a continuing fascination with the subject, movement and shadow has led Spadge into producing a unique series of drawings of people laser cut in metal. These are lit in various ways and often move within the piece via small electric motors. Recently he has used the laser cutting technique to produce a series of animals some of which have been larger, outdoor sculptures.

Spadge has also curated a number of exhibitions. He lives and works in a rambling array of barns and sheds in Suffolk and has strong links with London, Cambridge and the West Country.

Sculpting in copper and steel at the moment. Natural history and iconic faces. Movement is often a theme either in the form itself or via electric motors. Natural light and shadow or projection and shadow often feature. Studio/gallery visits welcome by appointment.

SpadgeHopkins.co.uk

Facebook @SpadgeArt

I am an artist, researcher and educator. Trained in dance, my practice is informed by phenomenology, the lived body. Installation and theatrical sets/settings, costume, choreography, film, and photography are the end artefacts. Throughout the making, the body is the measure. I work both solo and collaboratively.

I am a sculptor working in a wide variety of materials.

PatrickElder.com

Kaaren Whitney is a Homeopath, Poet and Guardian of a Labyrinth and Tree Circle.

She gardens as time allows and creates seasonal rituals eight times a year.

Fern Spray is a self taught glass mosaic artist who creates bold and dynamic glass mosaics suitable for interior and exterior situ. She has always felt the need to express herself creatively and is continually inspired by the natural world around her, whether its textures and shapes or colours and contrast. Her life is clearly entwined in the local Norfolk/Suffolk countryside via walking and working and this is very apparent in her work.

Her work is inspired by many other artists, in particular, Georgia O’Keefe, Klimt, Teresa Young, Vincent Van Gogh and Susan Crocenzi

https://silverloreartworks.co.uk

I am an innovative Fine Artist with experience as an Arts Educator. My work begins with my camera to record observations and capture my experiences that will later translate into a project or a piece of work that relates to a chosen landscape, cityscape and or theme that I am interested in.

Natural landscape is my ‘safe place’. A place to creatively explore my primordial self.

In my current studies as an MA fine Art Student I aim to continue researching and producing environmentally conscious works. Since recorded time the landscape has been repeatedly in flux; some of this change has been created by natural elements and others are manmade. The new scale of recent human activity and its ever expanding growth opens up more discourse surrounding the era of the Anthropocene.

Previously I made relief prints with re-used polystyrene, and I used my work in 2008 to kick start the waste debate: highlighting the inadequacies of our recycling facilities and overproduction of packaging. I have run print workshops themed around this and exhibited my own prints made using this material some of which were published in a book. (Marshal 2015).

Currently I also use intaglio and relief printing techniques such as; etching, drypoint, collagraph, linocut and screen print to realize my designs in drawings from everyday observations, reflecting mood and feeling with colour and texture.

One of the things I like about Art is that it can challenge our perceptions of something. In my more recent undertakings I have been using a more 3 dimensional approach to show my relationship to landscape and materiality. I try to find the personal meanings of objects and places and what that can convey to us over time. I like the idea that the context of an artefact or a place, can have a powerful influence on our understanding of it and the unconscious emotional responses that we are likely to have towards it.

Website: www.louisemaclaren.com

I work with sound, images and live performance responding to sites of natural, historical and political interest.

Website: www.gendoy.com

I graduated with a BA(Hons) in fine art as a mature student in 1986 and have been mostly painting ever since showing my work in many exhibitions in, Norwich, Ipswich, Sudbury taking part in the Gainsborough touring exhibition of drawings, in Bury St Edmunds, Stoke-on Trent, Halesworth,  and Aldeburgh for the last 4 years. I have also tutored art classes for over 14 years and continue this in Beccles.  For the last ten years I have added collages and sculptural assemblages to my repertoire. I am very interested in the found object and mostly work on driftwood and found and gifted wood. I use the wood to give me ideas for the piece if the wood speaks to me that way. I also use myths, legends, history and other artists as inspiration. I often make and write small books to go with bigger works which contain research information and maybe my own poems. I open my studio every year for Suffolk Open Studios event and will be open for the middle two weekends in June.

ninaartmaker.info

I am based in Norfolk,  surrounded by marshes and a river running by in the distance. Very lucky indeed. It would be difficult not to be involved with the wild world in such a place, so that’s what I seem to be working on. I work with that much maligned artistic medium – plywood. I shape it with increasingly bigger tools as the subject matter grows in size, then paint. The starting place is wildness and a need to express our connection with it, as well as to celebrate the beauty of what is here and thriving, an essential survival tool for us all in these alarming times.

At the beginning of 2019, I fell off a bus and broke my ankle, not a great idea for someone who works with power tools and big bits of timber! I used the incarceration to illustrate ‘On the Marsh’, and to study printmaking so all was not lost.

At the end of October last year, I was back in the The Aldeburgh Gallery again with my brilliant cousin, the artist Jane Rands, but only now can work start fully again, so watch this space!

www.cindyleewright.com