Photo Credits: Igor Emmerich and OpenArtFolke
Fri 13 Sep – Sun 29 Sep 2024
Launch Event:
Fri 13 Sep, 17:00-19:00
Exhibition Continues:
Fri/Sat/Sun 12:00-16:00
Last Fridays Late Night Opening:
Fri 27 Sep, 17:00-19:00
The artists in this group exhibition responded to our call out for pieces about the lived experience of the artist. With a focus on mental health, women’s health or diet culture. The pieces on display are across many forms and media type and may be work in progress or finished pieces. This group exhibition is part of Open Art Folke 24 and Sick Of It.
ARTISTS:
Anastasia Marshall
Anastasia is a Folkestone born writer and director with film & TV projects in
development. As a producer in the commercials and branded space, she has
created content for the likes of Vogue, IKEA, Canva and many others.
Anita McKenzie
Anitaji loves issue-based projects, portraiture and documentary photography. Anitaji is a mixed bag of professional skills and experiences, with decades spent working in the field of cultural arts and heritage. She is a photographer, picture editor and researcher, a deltiologist, Interfaith Minister, training facilitator, and neurodivergent mother and grandmother to wonderful neurodivergent young people.
Heidi Yssennagger-Moxey
I am a contemporary artist and Art textiles teacher living in Sandgate. The origins of my work lie within my own personal history of illness, hospitalisation, surgery and bodily related issues. I have often explored these issues in relation to my own body image in reflection and how other’s react to ideas around altered body image. Predominantly concerned with the representation of the female body, and the portrayal of the female Nude as perfectly contained, neatly packaged, with no excretions, my work purposefully sets out to challenge, confront and contradict these historical representations. Starting out as an oil painter, I found that more and more I felt compelled to use textile sculpture as my medium…these sculptures have been my therapy – inspired by the words of Louise Bourgeois “…the magic power of the needle – The needle is used to repair the damage. It is a claim to forgiveness”. By sewing together surplus, deconstructed Stoma bags with surgical suture materials, I am healing my own wounds, forgiving my bodies failings and freeing myself of my bodily torment. It is my abreaction.
Henrica Langh
Henrica Langh is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher inspired by the magic of the ordinary and our delicate existence in this world. Her practice is highly process-led and serendipitous. She works across different subject areas and mediums, such as textiles, photography, poetry, and installation art. Rather than being solidified in finished outcomes, her practice forms an ongoing dialogue between ideas, feelings, and material experiments that grow and interweave like a garden. Her research interests lie in material culture and emotion, artistic practice as a form of knowledge making, feminist approaches to body and identity, and the intersection between phenomenology and practice-led research. She holds an MA in Applied Imagination from Central Saint Martins and a PhD in practice-led research from the University for the Creative Arts.
Ivanya Daly
Ivanya Daly is a mixed media artist, raised all her life in Folkestone. Her current work is informed by her experiences as a neurodivergent mother and carer for various family members, throughout her life. As an abuse survivor, Ivanya is curious about power balance versus control, our personal liberty within society and it’s systems, within relationships and within ourselves.
Janis Volckman
East Kent based potter using solar power experimenting with textures and colour.
Jayne Simmonds
Having had a successful design career it is now time to create work that comes from me. As an artist I am working out what I want to say and how to say it, but as I gain confidence I’m learning that I work instinctively. Colour has a huge resonance and work within a limited palette that is quiet and soothing. It allows me to be kind to myself as I draw a line under my old self and learn to grow into my new self. The human figure fascinates, with its twists and tensions, and innate beauty; wanting to capture this quickly and tenderly.
Jayne Wright
Jayne Wright is a ceramic artist and musician from Yorkshire, now living in Margate. Working in stoneware and porcelain, she explores all forms of ceramics often combining throwing, hand building and mould making. Her ideas are generated by her interests, passions and obsessions. Her projects are often ambitious, encompass various themes and create a bigger picture. In 2022 she created the Mermaid Army, a collection of ceramic sculptures of open water swimmers. Jayne made her popular linocut hand made tiles using her sketches of the swimmers. Tile designs now include where people swim and iconic peculiar landmarks. Jayne is the founder of JAW Ceramics CIC. At the heart of her work is a sense of fun, joy and celebration.
joypolloi
Having dabbled in 2D collage for many a long year Joy is increasingly drawn to making 3D works out of rubbish she finds on the mean streets of Folkestone. A bit of a magpie/a fruitcake who likes hoarding mad sh*t, she likes bright colours and shiny things, especially when they’re free and stuck in a hedge. Whilst she struggles to recall basic nouns in an everyday situation Joy’s mind can somehow collect and store fun bits of information which eventually get squashed with other ideas in her head. Her work is a result of the effort to translate these mashed up ideas onto a board using a UHU stick and a lot of muttered swearwords.
Laura Brown & PCOS Body Map Workshop Participants
With a background in feminist global health research and expertise in creative participatory methods, I am an advocate for arts and crafts for health. My eclectic art practice includes crocheting, acrylic painting, and air dry clay, often featuring cats. I’m also a mental health mentor and study skills tutor and am training to become an Art Life Coach. I co-facilitate the EVERYBODY Community Life Drawing Circle. I volunteer with the Folkestone Art Society, and run mindful arts sessions at schools and universities. My goal is to leverage my research skills and art practice to promote health and wellbeing in the community.
Lauren Willis
Having been to art school, finished art school, worked in galleries, then stopped working in galleries – a move to Folkestone in 2019 saw Lauren start to be creative again. Working mostly with small scale collage, her artwork is often simple and playful whilst poking around at things that often consume too much space in her brain – mental health worries, the patriarchy and some good ole existential dread thrown in for good measure.
Lili Spain
Lili Spain is a Folkestone-based artist. Starting from a sculptural sensibility, her artwork encompasses a diverse range of media, with a current focus on performance and textile art.
Madi Strong
My central focus in work and life is embodied practice it is equally true for my artistic and clinical practice. I am often attracted by movement seeing it as a as key vector of perception. These pieces are part of an ongoing series exploring my experience of woman, myth disability, collision, impact and ownership.
Robyn Neild
Robyn Neild’s bronzes depict both fluidity of movement and delicacy of form in this traditionally masculine heavy, static material. Since re-locating to the Kent coast and learning the techniques of bronze casting, Neild began experimenting, in her coastal studio to push the limits of the ‘lost wax’ technique to create highly textured yet deceptively delicate sensual pieces. Natural materials, the human form, and the folklore of botanicals are combined to create a plea of protection or change.
Sarah Lloyd
Artist, Designer, Researcher, Human and Director of Fourth Wall Folkestone CIC.
Sue Bridge
Sue Bridge studied Visual Communication in Birmingham and became a designer, animator and illustrator in London, spanning 30 years at the BBC. A yearning for authentic self expression and more meaningful work brought her to painting. She undertook further study in fine art attending Slade Summer School in 2014, and Fine Art Professional Development at Tonbridge Art School before finally moving to Folkestone in 2016, to become part of thriving art community in the Creative Quarter. She won the Cass Art Prize for most innovative use of colour in 2023. She has been selected several times for Mall Galleries. Gagosian Associate Director Péjú Oshin personally selected her for her section at Discerning Eye 2023. Her animations have been shown at The Turner Contemporary and The Photographers Gallery, London.