Miguel Sopena – Q&A

Miguel Sopena – Q&A

Miguel Sopena is an artist and photographer originally from Valencia, Spain, but now based in Croydon, South London. He decided to change direction and become an artist as he was finishing his doctorate in theoretical physics at Sussex University in Southern England. Miguel went on to complete a part-time Fine Art Foundation BTEC at City College Brighton and Hove and a Portraiture diploma at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. A highly experimental artist, Miguel combines his ongoing interest in figuration with a developing abstract language in which he explores themes of memory, emotion, and the passage of time. Colour, composition, and the material properties of the painting medium itself are key to Miguel’s painting process.

Polly Bennett – Q&A

Polly Bennett – Q&A

Polly Bennett (b. 1996) graduated from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2018 and in 2019 completed The Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers Decorative Surfaces Fellowship. Subsequently, she is an Honorary Freeman of the Painter-Stainers, and also a member of the Wilderness Art Collective, a group of creatives whose work discusses the natural world.

Anne von Freyburg – Q&A

Anne von Freyburg – Q&A

Anne von Freyburg’s practice rethinks textile and the decorative within the tradition of painting. It embraces and subverts the female gaze, the feminine and pretty. Historically, craft and decoration have been perceived as lesser than the “intellectual” fine arts. By combining them, von Freyburg challenges this underlying hierarchical system.

Katie Jamieson – Q&A

Katie Jamieson – Q&A

After completing a BA in Fine Art at Falmouth College of Arts, Katie Jamieson went on to train at RADA as a scenic artist in theatre and film. She believes working in theatre gave her a foundation to explore creativity in a dynamic and multifaceted way. The range of skills and techniques Jamieson  acquired during this time has enabled her to develop her own individual style and practice as an artist in her own right. Jamieson’s   practice incorporates both painting and sculpture. She likes to move constantly in and out of these two disciplines exploring surface, texture and form. Fragility and the transient nature of life, are two themes that she keeps revisiting whether creating large scale paintings or hundreds of small-scale objects.

Val Murray – Q&A

Val Murray – Q&A

Val Murray has always been fascinated by the ordinary places, objects and activities which make up the world she inhabits. How do humans and their environments, natural and built, interact? Murray is interested in Mabey, Tsing et al’s ideas of complex interrelations between species and survival in a ruined planet through ‘wonderous attention’ and ‘creative curiosity. She documents examples of entanglements aiming to make tangential reference to human impact on the natural world rather than to ‘preach’