Description
Participating Artists Biographies with examples of their work
Caitlin Akers
Caitlin Akers is an artist working across printmaking, artist’s books, workshops and billboards. Her work is concerned with language, poetry and identity. Caitlin studied for a Masters in Book Art from Camberwell College of Arts before graduating in 2018. She has created commissioned work for Manchester International Festival and Kingsgate Project Space , London. Recent group exhibitions include B-side Art Festival, Dorset, Bristol Artists Book Event 2021 and Edition Residences at APT Gallery for The Art Licks Weekend , 2019. Alongside her artistic practice, Caitlin runs the book binding and letterpress workshops at Manchester School of Art and a wide range of traditional and contemporary print and book binding processes. She has recently relocated to Preston.
www: caitlinakers.com
Maggie Ayliffe
Maggie is an artist and educator based in the North West. Through her practice as a painter, she has sought to engage with visual languages, materials and aesthetics that are often undervalued and overlooked stemming from an interest in the decorative and stitch-based arts practices traditionally associated with women. More recent work looks to the construction of ‘natural’ spaces and the aesthetics of plants and gardens in domestic and urban environments. Maggie has recently taken up a post at Liverpool John Moores University as the Programme Leader for Fine Art. Prior to this, she worked for many years at the Wolverhampton School of Art, most recently as Head of School where she worked closely with Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the South Bank Centre to bring British Art Show 9 to the city.
Barbara Biddulph
Barbara Biddulph spent her career in the stop-frame animation business. Working on projects such as ‘Bob the Builder’, ‘Brambly Hedge’ and ‘The Clangers’. As a designer and art director, where drawing was a major part of every day concept designing new worlds and all that went in them.
“Now I draw for my own enjoyment. Urban sketching anywhere I am – here and abroad. It’s a great excuse to sit and take in your surroundings, observing and recording shapes, textures and colours.”
David Boardman
David was born in Leicester in 1973 but spent his formative years growing up in Northumberland. He developed a love of drawing and painting at a very early age, inheriting his artistic skills from his grandfather, a renowned Cheshire painter.
After finishing school he enrolled in an Art and Design foundation course at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne College, where he developed his painting and design skills whilst cultivating a passion for modern art. After collecting his diploma, he won a place at Manchester Metropolitan University where he studied illustration, obtaining his degree in 1995.
Upon leaving university, David moved to Knutsford, Cheshire where he has lived ever since. After spending several years pursuing a career in commercial illustration in which he had considerable success, he decided to concentrate on his own work, producing fine art canvases.
Since he had his first one-man exhibition in 2004, David has gone on to exhibit in galleries all over the UK, including the renowned Biscuit Factory in Newcastle-Upon- Tyne, and the Wendy Levy Gallery in Didsbury, Manchester introducing his work to a wider audience and garnering great praise. In 2023 David was a finalist in the British Art Prize organised by Artist & Illustrators Magazine and was one of 50 finalists who took part in the BAP exhibition at the OXO Gallery in London.
He has also undertaken many commissions over the years including one for Lola Cars International, the race-car giant, who commissioned him to produce a major piece for their headquarters in Cambridgeshire.
As well as art, David’s other great passion is music. Over the years he has played guitar and sang with several bands including his current projects Fine Lines, with whom he has recorded and released 3 albums, and a duo with BBC radio presenter Mark Radcliffe. The pair have just released their second album ‘Hearsay & Heresy’. He has also shared a stage with acts such as Elton John, Kiefer Sutherland and Texas.
David lives in Knutsford, Cheshire with his family.
www: davidboardmanart.com
Clinton Cahill
Clinton is a Sandbach-based artist, where he continues his visual art practice, having retired from teaching art and design in 2019. Much of his painting and drawing is driven by a fascination with interrelations between literature, landscape and imagination, represented for example in several projects concerning the visualisation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. His work has been presented, published and exhibited nationally and internationally, including in China, Mexico, the USA, Australia and Ireland.
Clinton and Debbie Goldsmith co-curate the Goosfest Art in the Barns exhibition.
www: cahillclinton.com
Instagram: @clinton.cahill
Nerissa Cargill Thompson
Nerissa Cargill Thompson creates contemporary textile art and mixed-media sculptures that explore juxtapositions of texture and colour, particularly where nature meets manmade. She blends and embroiders recycled fabrics to produce her signature textiles and highlights environmental issues by casting these with concrete in waste packaging to form future fossils.
She originally trained in Theatre Design but returned to college after having children to study MA Textile Practice. She regularly exhibits in open calls, member exhibitions and as an invited artist. Member of Prism Textiles and Design Nation. Nerissa runs workshops using recycled materials and creates miniatures and brooches from her offcuts to limit her waste.
www: ncargillthompson.co.uk
Instagram: @nerissact
Joey Collins
After graduating from University of Salford in 1997 with a first class honours degree in Visual Arts, I’ve been working in various forms of the creative industries including graphic design, interior design, textiles and chocolate. From 2014 I’ve been developing a body of work exploring the medium of printmaking and sculpture.
I work in series, combining silkscreen, collage and drawing to intuitively build my compositions. Each piece exploring traditional silk screen processes creating one off pieces of work; silkscreen mono prints. My practice is centred around both digital and analogue drawing. Initially working very freely, then slowly organising my visual language into a more formal structure. This becomes a conversation, which I begin and the work concludes. A constant dialogue throughout the process where I’m continuously talking and listening, editing and responding, observing and exploring.
The elements within my work are all derived from drawing and also continuously gathering references of colour, found drawings, photographs and found objects from the city in which I live and work. The work is abstract, although my love of the city inevitably leaves its mark. I work with screen printing because for me it’s a similar process to sculpting, building images like I would if I was making a sculpture. My work is very layered, each process and colour leaving a trace behind the next. Collaging each element in various places around the image. These elements hop from work to work. Landing in different places, sometimes changing colour and interact with each other in different positions. Like an animation, an ongoing narrative, layered on top of each other creating images that have a relationship with each other. All similar but different. Almost multiples, obsessed with the same process but searching for a resolution where each piece has its own personality. I have recently started to explore the medium of sculpture which borrows images and processes from both my printmaking work and my degree show back in 1997.
Joan Connor
Joan Connor was born and educated in the North-East of England and then studied sculpture at the Norwich School of Art. For many years she devoted her efforts to teaching art and music to children who had special needs, or had been excluded from mainstream education. Now in her own work she paints and draws directly from the landscape, responding particularly to the stunning landscapes in the West Of Ireland. Her book ‘Sharing the Shore … a Donegal Collection’ was published last year, bringing together for the first time, her paintings and drawings with the poetry of her husband Noel.
Noel Connor
From his studio high on Biddulph Moor, Noel Connor has looked out over Cheshire and the iconic Jodrell Bank for 40 years. Originally from Belfast, he studied Fine Art there and in the North-East of England where he was later awarded a scholarship to pursue post-graduate research into Irish Literature. His visual work has always maintained a close affinity with the written word and he has been involved in collaborations with many poets including Gerald Dawe, Maura Dooley, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and John Heath-Stubbs. His work has been exhibited widely in Ireland and Britain, and his own poetry has been awarded prizes at various festivals including The Allingham, Canterbury, Buxton, Portico and Whitworth.
www: noelconnor.com
Brendan Fletcher
Brendan is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Fine Art at the University of Salford. He has exhibited recently in ‘Enough is Definitely Enough’: Contemporary Artists Respond to Las Meninas, OA Gallery, Salford, (2020), Fully Awake, Freelands Foundation, London, Inner Landscapes, Hilbertraum, Berlin and Inter-Section, Huddersfield (all 2019). He was long- listed for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2019. He has presented papers at Albert Irvin and Abstract Expressionism, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 2019 and Teaching Painting, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2018. Previous exhibitions include: Prefab at Leeds Mint/Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery 2011, Nice to Meet You, Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, 2005, Terrain: Contemporary British Abstraction, Museum of Non-Conformist Art, St Petersburg, 2004, Chorus, Gorton Monastery, Manchester, 2004, Departure Lounge, Mart’99, 1999, Rising Stars, London Contemporary Art Fair, 1996.
Facebook: brendan.fletcher.1426
Instagram: @brendan.fletcher.1426
Lucy Gell
Lucy’s hand printed original prints and illustrations blend simple design, line and textures, with an emphasis on character and personality. Much of Lucy’s work focuses on acid plate etching, however more recently Lucy has become completely obsessed with screen printing. Now a member of the West Yorkshire Print Workshop, Lucy creates all her artwork for screen printing by hand using tracing paper, black ink and pencils. The hands on approach to this kind of printmaking is what she loves so much. “I don’t want things to be perfect, I love the surprises you get with printmaking” Lucy says. She illustrate the wonderful creatures that walk and fly around our crazy world. Animals have played a very important role in her life and each one has its own individual character and personally that make them all so special and unique.
Debbie Goldsmith
Debbie’s work is vibrant, abstract, and brimming with energy. Drawing inspiration from her surroundings in the Cheshire landscape, she creates dynamic and expressionistic abstract paintings. Her use of joyful color and unique mark-making techniques adds depth and layers to her work. Through drawing and gesture, she captures the essence of different seasons or changes in weather, infusing her pieces with a dramatic and joyful palette.
Debbie and Clinton Cahill co-curate the Goosfest Art in the Barns exhibition.
Marie Jones
Marie Jones is an artist (b.1983) currently based in Warrington UK. Jones has an ideas led practice and is interested in: the snippets of everyday conversations that linger and our interpretations of them. Our relationships with one another and how transcribing may enable empathy and our ability to look beyond the limitations, expectations and probable outcomes to create new systems with their own eventual limitations, expectations and probable outcomes.
Using a combination of scale, colour, humour, and domestic craft techniques Jones creates works such as large scale site responsive installations, wall hangings, soft sculptures, art garments & performance. In 2017, Jones launched Ride Your Pony, an international group exhibition and residency that she organises and curates.
www: mariejones.info
Instagram: @_marie__jones_
www: rideyourpony.club
Instagram: @rideyourpony.club
Bill Ollier
My studio is based in the Electric Picture House artists collective at Spindle Mill Congleton. My work is largely focused on figurative representations of form and function using a variety of media including cast bronze and aluminium, stone and wood. I also have developing interests in the use of mosaics and acrylic sheeting in this area.
Instagram @William.ollier.7
Adam Quinn
I am a Cheshire Based Artist and a member of the Electric Picture House Collective.
My work is an intuitive, subconscious-driven process that relies heavily on chance and randomness. I feel my work lies somewhere between abstract expressionism and surrealism.
Of late I have been exploring the possibilities with found objects which often feeds back into my painted canvas. My most recent works have been influenced by the cosmos and the everyday world around me.
Sue Roberts
Sue Roberts is a Cheshire-based artist who works from her own home studio. She completed a 4 year City and Guilds Creative Embroidery course and has exhibited in collections in the UK and overseas. During ‘lockdown’, she concentrated on developing the painting which had always been at the preparatory stage when creating her textile / mixed media artworks. This is now the main focus of her practice. She uses a variety of media to create expressive and intuitive pieces that are a response and reactive both to the inspiration and the previous mark laid down.
Social Media:
Instagram: @sueroberts_art
Facebook: suerobertsartist
Alex Russell
Alex is a Manchester based artist. His practice is an exploration of opposites: handmade and digital, methodical and intuitive, science and art, faith and doubt, pattern and chaos. He creates systems of rules as code or instructions that form a stochastic space somewhere within which will be a sweet spot where something mysterious and mercurial can be coaxed into being. Alex is intrigued by expressing compositional structures as a grammar and combining them with scientific concepts of complex systems and emergence. His works are richly layered maps of their own making, joyfully celebrating colour, form and composition, and rewarding the viewer with ever-changing new interpretations.
Gary Spicer
I am an artist and writer based in Macclesfield. My practice is engaged with how ‘remembering, as a vital activity, shapes our relationship with the past’ and how this in turn defines our present, where time operates as a distancing mechanism between the events we are ‘remembering’ and ourselves. I am interested in how the relationship between selected sites of Holocaust history and myself can be interrogated using a phenomenological approach, which is concerned with how the world appears to the individual experiencing it and not with explaining experience but is focused on methods by which that experience can be described. My creative practice has greatly informed the knowledge and understanding of my own genealogical history and how this relates to the wider Jewish narratives of diasporas, displacements, and assimilation. It has also facilitated an expanded notion of self and identity relative to my own past, particularly as someone of mixed antecedence, with a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother.
www: garyspicer.net
Instagram: @recips
Art in the Barn – Graduate Showcase
For the first time this year Art in the Barn is pleased to announce a new venture to support arts graduates in the Northwest. We have teamed up with University of Salford BA (Hons) Fine Art to offer 3 new graduates the opportunity to exhibit with us. It is hoped this professional experience in a friendly and supportive environment, will help early career artists looking to take initial steps towards independent practice. This is a chance to test work in a different environment and reach a new audience with the potential to sell their work.
This year we have selected 3 urban landscape artists:
Farhan Khan
My practice revolves around the urban landscape particularly in Hyde where I was born and raised. I am interested in capturing the famous landmarks and producing paintings of the mosques, which have been repurposed from old derelict buildings into places of worship which bring members of the community together. My paintings of Hyde try to capture the life of a town in Greater Manchester.
Harry Mfum
My paintings depict the urban landscape now. The city is constantly in flux and changing with people coming and going. I capture the street with different classes of people, workers, and shoppers. The paintings capture the city, and the way in which people navigate their own pathways through it. Street signs and information graphics shape our cities and are key signifiers present in my painting.
Adam Wearden
My practice consists of urban landscapes of the North of England painted in oils. I paint working-class neighbourhoods. I paint the ginnels and back alleys behind terrace houses and try to capture their essence. People rarely feature in my paintings but I think these images and motifs tell a story of the people who inhabit these spaces.
