Artist of the Month
Andrew Kozlowski process making video for Restriction exhibition submission 2021
.jpg)
Andrew Kowlowski comic book extract
Andrew Kozlowski in conversation with Clayhill Arts podcast
Matt Dart love locks
Matt Dart lock-picking
Matt Dart Love-Locks
Daniel Arteago - Performance Restriction
Quiet British Accent
November 2021
QbA (QUIET BRITISH ACCENT) is Sharon Gale and Jason Gale, an artist duo known for their #pennydrops, hand painted pre-decimal pennies left on the street.
​
Ephemeral and democratic, their pennies feature whimsical slogans and are placed in their environment, offering a thought-provoking, intimate experience for the passer-by.
Language is important to the duo and their love of the vernacular can be seen on the pennies, which often touch upon the themes of change and value.
​
Trained at Technical Colleges in Graphic Design and Fashion & Textiles, the couple began working together as a duo in 2011. Their work has attracted the attention of Time Out, The Guardian, the BBC & GraffitiStreet.
​
QbA exhibit regularly, including a three-month residency at Elements Gallery London in 2017 and a 16-day residency at Shepton Mallet Prison with the Prison Residencies, in 2021. They have taken part in the annual Art Car Boot Fair for the past eight years and have artwork in the Correspondence Collective’s permanent exhibition, called Restriction, at Clayhill Arts, Somerset. The couple have worked on various workshops and commissions with artwork in private collections internationally.
​
Our style is quite homespun and a bit graphic; mostly hand drawn lettering with some borrowed sign writing techniques. Sometimes sewing as well, as we use a mixture of media including, more recently, digital NFTs on the Hic Et Nunc platform. We try to keep to a limited colour palette to focus our minds and for recognition. Some pennies we gild with 23ct gold leaf, again using traditional equipment and techniques. The idea of gold pennies makes us smile.
We’re interested with the history associated with old coins, the bronze pre-decimal penny was in circulation from 1860-1970, their value then and now are all areas of interest to us.
There’s a fair few Monarchs featured on the pennies over that time span and their reigns can sometimes inform our thought process. We all need money to survive don’t we, the fact that wealth is not distributed equally amongst people, gives us lots to talk about.
Language is important to us and hopefully our love of the vernacular can be seen on the pennies, there’s a light hearted humour in most (but not all) of our artworks which often touch upon the themes of value, worth and change.
We came up with the idea of painting whimsical slogans on pre-decimal pennies and placing them out in the environment, we liked the idea that they would offer a thought provoking, intimate interaction with the passer-by. We call our pennies #pennydrops.
Putting the the #pennydrops out on the street is like a gallery. We always take time to find the right position to place the penny and each one is documented in its location with a photograph which becomes part of the artwork. Sometimes we glue the pennies in situ for longevity other times we’ll blu-tac them and put clues to their location on our social media for people to find, it’s a bit like a treasure hunt, we’ve known people go out at all hours of the night to find them.
Instagram: @quietbritishaccent
Twitter: @QuietBritAcc
Vero: @quietbritishaccent
Hic et Nunc: pennydrops.xyz
Links to Upcoming events:
Art car Boot Fair
Nov 6th-8th 2021
https://www.artcarbootfair.com
London international Paste-Up Festival
Nov 4th-7th 2021
Chris Webb
September 2021
Chris is an illustrator and abstract painter that started to lose his sight in 2010. He doesn't let that fact stop him and believes in 'ability over disability' every time.
​
Webb’s recent work is a continuation of a project he started a year ago this month. It was in response to needing a means to express his feelings about his on-going sight loss. The project is called '10x10: a cathartic release' and is now on its 165th set of four miniature paintings, each just 10x10cm in size. A visual diary of emotions and memories in the lead up to being declared legally blind in June 2021.
​
Webb founded an on-location urban sketchers group in his current city of Portsmouth in 2015 and secured it as an official chapter in the urban sketchers non-profit organisation in April this year.
​
Blindness is a spectrum and Webb still has some remaining vision. Muted colours in his vision leads him to paint with more saturated colours. Loss of sight, distortions and blind spots leads him to draw more loosely with a style that gives the illusion of detail that simply isn't there. He uses a scrape technique for his abstract paintings with cut pieces of card being his primary tool in preference to a traditional knife or trowel.
​
Webb was accepted to the recent 'Restriction' exhibition by the collective and submitted a set of pieces to fit the print press draws reflecting his sight loss and feelings of isolation during the pandemic.
You can follow Chris's work on Instagram, twitter and his website.
Twitter & IG: @chriswebbartist
Website: www.chriswebbartist.com
Andrew Kozlowski
July 2021
​
Andrew Kozlowski earned his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and his BFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. His prints, works on paper, installations, and sculptural work works have been featured in more than a dozen solo exhibitions, and over 50 group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. In 2009 he completed a residency at the Frans Masereel Center in Belgium and was awarded 2011-2012 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship for his work in printmaking. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of North Florida.
Kozlowski work considers aspects of time, history, and how we collect, share and disrepute stories. Over the past year Kozlowski's work has changed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Kozlowski has had to move away from large scale installations which required travel and collaboration and spent more time working within a sketchbook.
​
Starting in January of 2021 Kozlowski made a goal of posting a 4 panel comic each week with the idea of capturing a year through weekly autobiographical stories that will be collected in a book in 2022. This practice of journaling and recording daily routines has lead to other mini-comics and zines, like the mini book “Restricted” featured in the exhibition “Restriction”.
​
With galleries shuttered and exhibitions postponed Kozlowski extended his practice into curatorial practice and publishing. This manifested as a new project called “Amplifier!” an umbrella project to support the work of artists through actions as a curator, publisher, editor, and organizer, an effort to build and sustain a greater creative community. Currently the first two projects of Amplifier! are underway:
The first is a themed portfolio of new prints titled “Routine Maintenance” by emerging and established artists from across the United States. For “Routine Maintenance” Kozlowski held an open call for artists, selecting 24 applications from 65 submissions. Each artist was assigned one hour of the day and asked to create a work inspired by that time. The result is 24 prints by 24 artists that represent a one day, fractured and reconfigured, reflecting the diversity of experience in how we now conduct our days. The collected portfolio will be shown in the University of North Florida Gallery of Art in the Summer and Fall of 2021 before traveling to additional venues.
The second project under the Amplifier umbrella is “Multi-Tasker”, a limited edition broadsheet newspaper featuring the work of 12 artists from the United States and the United Kingdom. Each artist created a new artwork to be featured on a 19”x13” page in the newspaper, and provided 15 addresses for where they wanted to have copies of the project shipped. A copy of the project will be printed and shipped to these addresses creating a new network for each artist’s work.
​
This project takes inspiration from Fluxus artists in the 1960s who experimented with collaborative publications, whose small print runs established alternate channels outside the world of mainstream publishing. While the COVID 19 Pandemic has impacted traditional venues for display of artwork, Kozlowski sees publishing as a unique platform to promote ideas and share work.
​
You can see Andrew's work at www.andrewkozlowski.com or follow him in Instagram @andrew.kozlowski
​
Matt Dart
June 2021
​
Matt Dart was born in 1988 and grew up in Cornwall. Dart studied Graphic Design at Plymouth College of Art from 2007 to 2009. Dart went on to work professionally as a designer, until deciding he didn’t want the 9-5 anymore and became an Artist. Dart is currently studying Creative Arts at Bath Spa University.
​
Matt’s work comes in a variety of forms, it could be seen as performance, visual arts, or just pure day light robbery. Dart’s motivation for his work stems from humor, forming an idea and being able to laugh about it is a genuine motivation for making. Dart’s practice currently involved lock picking, this steamed from in 2014 part of the ‘Pont Des Arts’ bridge in Paris collapsed under the weight of locks attached by couples; relationships can get a bit heavy. Dart uses non-traditional forms like lock-picking which still have a relationship with culture or an idea to validate the process. Dart is interested in making work by taking something away or devaluing something.
Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dart has taught himself to lock- pick learning to pick -locks took months of practice; although it only took one afternoon to remove a large number of people’s romantic sentiments from Pero's Bridge in Bristol. The resulting padlocks hold cultural value to some (couples), Dart’s intervention aims to interfere with this narrative and provoke a response. Responses have included being called cruel and evil.
Dart has found lock-picking engaging thing to do. It became necessary to learn how to pick a large variety of padlocks, by doing so has leant that some are easier than others to pick. Each padlock becomes a small puzzle which needs to be cracked. Dart has taught himself a number of techniques and after months of practice has become quite competent in lock-picking. Dart has taken on some interesting reading as well as using various online tutorials, but admits it does take practice, until becoming attuned with the art of lock-picking.
Dart has documented his work with video footage of him picking locks on bridges, along with photography. Dart has gone on to exhibit these padlocks, displacing them from their original purpose and place. This practice is something that is not only part skill based but also, performance as well as commenting on our society.
Matt has exhibited a larger and crueler version of ‘Lots of Love’ as part of ‘In the Meanwhile...’ 17/18 Milsom Street, Bath from 17th to 30th of May.
In The Meanwhile… is a project aims to reinvigorate temporarily redundant spaces into productive use by showcasing local Artists after the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent economic crisis has seen a large number of shops in the city center become empty.
Instagram In the Meantime: https://www.instagram.com/inthemeanwhile.bath/?igshid=763v6milw3ir
​
Matt Dart website: https://mattdart.pb.online/
​
​
​
​
​
​
Daniel Arteaga
April 2021
​
Daniel Arteaga born in Colombia and now 3 years in London, with a degree in Fine Arts from the Department of Trans disciplinary Arts, University of La Laguna (Spain). Arteaga is trans disciplinary artist, working within the field of performance and painting, actions make his work.
Arteaga is an emerging artist; he has found many limitations in searching for materials. Arteaga’s work explores new approaches to making art, developing an ecology of the image using the materials at his disposal. Arteaga opens the debate on the modes of consumption of represented images (paintings) in the present time and how these are currently relatable in a digital world.
​
Arteaga’s work seeks to illustrate experiences through documentation. His work explores the capabilities of painting through video and photography. Arteaga deals with themes such as the concept of non-place, displacement within spaces, and the mechanical capacities of representation. Throughout his work the recurrent use of the mixture of disciplines is clear. Arteaga, constructs visual narratives through the intervention of urban spaces and what it means to be within the urban landscape.
​
Arteaga settled in the city of London three years ago, which has become his territory of exploration artistic research. Arteaga is a citizen in a constant migration, he has an obsession with connection to place, as someone who often finds himself disconnected to his local surroundings. Arteaga’s work aims to connect people, by building visual narratives from the intervention of urban spaces. Arteaga’s work uses tools such as Google maps to start as artistic research moving onto working in video and physical travel along with painting. Arteaga’s aims to create small landscapes of the city finding places that attract him. Arteaga’s process is to document the process of installation using video footage along side having to physically go somewhere, this whole journey of process becomes the artwork itself, then to complete a fraction of painting of these places found online (Google maps) are then left back in the place of origin, forming a full circle of migration of place.
During the lockdown period, and his submission for ‘Restriction’ exhibition, Arteaga had the opportunity to give form to an idea that I have been development for some time. The project ‘Titles’ aims to connect through landscapes, paintings in oil. ‘Titles’ refers to the original place the landscape images come from. For ‘Restriction’ Arteaga developed a ‘Titles' (landscape) and installed it in person in a location in the city of London. Arteaga’s wanted to store the information for the future, keeping this work as a time capsule for the uncertain times we have all experienced over the last year. The work also seeks to create a place of pilgrimage within the city of London, to search out these works that the missing piece holds within the exhibition.
Arteaga creates a story/ memory that the spectators never lived but that they could recreate if they wanted to, to be able to retrace Arteaga’s steps with access to the video footage and fraction of the painting that is within the ‘Restriction’ exhibition, a puzzle of place worth piecing together. Arteaga’s work was submitted in part on a USB drive as well as fractions of paintings removed from the location where the full painting is installed in the outside world.
​
Website: http://danielarteaga.art/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/d.arteaga.f/
​
There is also a video on our videos and media page with Amanda Lynch and Daniel Arteaga, featuring on Clayhill Arts digital forum.
​