New Artist Network Members 2018

After December's round of applications, we're thrilled to introduce 5 new AN members. Some of you will have met them at Social Monday two weeks ago, but here is a small introduction to each of them and their practice:

Helen Acklam
I make and paint in order to give shape to my thoughts and experiences and to find out about myself as an artist. The starting point is often a snapshot or fragment of life, and an interest in exploring the tensions and tipping points between opposing positions - such as inclusion/exclusion, chaos/order, past/present.

Rebecca Child
After two years of a Foundation Diploma, I found my way to printmaking, and this is now my primary technique for making work. I find that the act of making prints is both intellectually and artistically challenging, and it engages me in a way no other medium does. I love the making aspects of collagraph and woodcut blocks, and the often unexpected results arising from multi-block printmaking. I like to work in themes, and recently have been making prints based on our local church, Cadeleigh, its extraordinary 17th century monument, and the landscape around it.

Jenny Graham
My practice is very varied and ranges from painting and printmaking through to assemblages and video. All my work, however, focuses on environment, memory and history. Recently I have been working on found postcards to create large multi-image work which transforms the original images into something closer to my experience of a time or place. Many hark back to the era of Victorian Romanticism and exploration. The series of circular etchings I am producing at the moment recall historical microscopic slides of plant life, again using the past to evoke a sense of nostalgia in the viewer while relying on contemporary (photo-Etching) techniques to help create the work.

Jenny Morse
I was born and brought up in London but have lived most of my life in the West Country, including Cornwall, which continues to provide a rich seam of source material. I work mostly with printmaking methods, though in a painterly way, mostly producing mono prints or small, variable editions. My work is driven by every day observations of the natural world, and by a love of colour, mark-making and experimentation.

Mark Stopforth
My work over the past twenty years has been devoted to those landscapes that are associated with the untamed and wild landscapes that can be found in the Moors, Fens, Fells and Estuaries of Britain. I have carried those impressions of the sublime in the landscape that were left on me as a child growing up in the Fens of East Anglia, impressions that are still relevant to my work today. Recently it has been the vast immersive spaces of Yorkshire moor, Somerset fen and Severn river estuary that have consumed my imagination and which I wish to evoke through charcoal, pencil and oil.