May newsletter
Welcome to my newsletter, keeping you up-to-date with the latest from my studio. I had a wonderful time in April enjoying the Fragile With Attitude exhibition in the Great Oak Hall at Westonbirt. This exhibition was part of the ‘Re-Storying Landscape for Social Inclusion’ collaboration – a project led by Dr Sarah Bell at the University of Exeter in collaboration with Art Shape, Zoe Partington, Natural Inclusion and Westonbirt Arboretum. Having started work on this exhibition in the autumn last year, it was wonderful to see my work in situ alongside the artworks created by the other wonderful artists who were involved. If you were not able to make it to the exhibition, I have now added all the artworks, along with audio descriptions about them, to my website. These pieces are all also now for sale. You can also watch a video about the exhibition, created by Fastershire.
At the same time, I was quite sad to have reached the end of this project, as it was such a great experience to be a part of it. I have often felt like an imposter, as many of us do, whatever our field. But being a visually-impaired visual artist has felt contradictory and something I should hide. However, while working with other artists who face disabling barriers, I didn’t feel like the odd one out, having to explain access needs. This made me feel at ease, and freed me to concentrate on art from the start. Then throughout the project I came to further embrace my identity as a visually-impaired artist, and I believe that this has enabled me to create more authentic work. I am now building on this to create art that more closely reflects how I experience the natural world.
For the rest of this month, I am planning to spend some time with my sketchbook, rather than working on any large scale paintings at the moment. I am experimenting and thinking about different ways of portraying nature as I see it.
On 7 May, I was delighted to attend the launch party for the Landscape curated exhibition at Sixteen Gallery in Cheltenham. I have a painting, Breathe: Sunset, included in this exhibition. It was fantastic to attend an in-person event, and to meet several of the other 50 artists whose work had been selected to appear in this show. So much of my work is inspired by nature and the landscape, and it is always inspiring to see how other artists interpret landscape in their own ways through a range of media.
Looking forward to June, I will be taking part in Art in the Park in Cheltenham. I will be there during the second week, from June 26th to July 2nd. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for good weather!