ABOUT THE ARTISTS

British Amy Hughes’s practice is both fuelled by and symbolic of the highly prestigious Porcelain wares produced at the Royal Sèvres Factory in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Hughes’ works reference and pay homage to the originals, but are created with a freer approach, giving them a new lease of life.

After Alhambra pieces take inspiration from the large lustre vases produced during the Nasrid Dynasty (the last Muslim Dynasty in the Iberian peninsula, ruling Granada) in the 14th and 15th centuries which became romantically known as 'Alhambra Vases', and of which only 8 remain in semi-intact existence today. The skill, the legend, the intrigue surrounding these vases captivated and fuelled my fascination to explore a contemporary response to the stunning relics. The forms, the two wing-like handles, the horizontal decorations all reference the originals, the rawness in composition and materiality nodding to their faded beauty. Drawing studies of their intricate surface pattern have been enlarged and explored on the coil and slab built forms creating exciting pattern and shape with a colourful and lively approach.

The 'After Alhambra' pieces may take historical inspiration from ceramic artefacts of an Islamic dynasty from the 14th century, but their modern day interpretation and reworking can be said to be directly influenced by contemporary culture(s), including fashion and print, explored through the bold use and application of colour, surface treatment and pattern across a form.

Physically, the creative worlds of both ceramics and fashion and textiles playfully explore materiality and its expression through their own different mediums but many parallels can be drawn between the two, as demonstrated and discussed here by the 'After Alhambra' vases. The use of texture creates almost fabric like aesthetics on these ceramics, through layers of slip application creating depth akin to a knit or heavy weave, with more exposed or 'faded' areas gauze-like or requiring a darn. Areas of the transparent glaze application vs those unglazed, the smooth vs the rough, a silk vs heavy cotton, playing with light and movement. The wing-like handles and appendages are kindred to pattern cutting but with a rawness of a torn unfinished edge like a fray or a rip.

When making, the Ceramic Artist made multiple drawing studies of intricate Islamic surface patterns before enlarging details and boldly stenciling and tracing areas onto the vase bodies to create exciting and fresh patterns, all of which are applied with confident and lively expression supporting the historic yet present day link between art and fashion.

Amy Hughes works and exhibits internationally, including high profile Collect art fair with the Crafts Council with Cynthia Corbett Gallery and a spell as Artist in Residence at Konstfack School, Stockholm, Sweden. She was nominated to represent the UK in ‘New Talent’ at the European Ceramic Context 2014 as well as being shortlisted for the inaugural Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize 2014 for artists who show an exceptional command of ceramics, alongside an awareness of the heritage of ceramic craft.

In 2015, Hughes was chosen as the first Ceramics and Industry Artist in Residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum working in collaboration with 1882Ltd, as well as being selected as one of eleven artists for AWARD at the British Ceramics Biennial ‘presenting new works exemplifying the energy and vitality of the best of British contemporary ceramics practice.’
In 2018 her first solo show Garniture at Croome Court (part of the National Trust) was funded by Arts Council England – she had the opportunity of working with Croome Court's extensive collections. Most recently she was selected as one of 5 commissioned Artists to work with at The Leach Pottery St Ives on the Leach 100, which is part of centenary celebrations looking at the past, the present and the future of studio pottery. In 2021 she will be participating in For the Love of the Master: 25 artists fascinated by Piranesi – a group exhibition celebrating the legacy of this versatile Roman artist in the 21st century. This homage to Piranesi will be held in Dublin Castle & the Casino at Marino, Dublin.

Amy Hughes made her Art Miami debut with Cynthia Corbett Gallery in 2021 and was represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery at Collect 2022.

-----

In a contemporary art world that condemns beauty as camouflage for conceptual shallowness, championing high aesthetics is nothing short of rebellion. Dutch photographer Isabelle Van Zeijl takes female beauty ideals from the past, and sabotages them in the context of today. As a women she experiences prejudices against women; misogyny in numerous ways including sex discrimination, belittling/violence against women and sexual objectification. Van Zeijl aestheticises these prejudices in her work to visually discuss this troubling dichotomy, presenting a new way of seeing female beauty. An oppressive idealisation of beauty is tackled in her work through unique female character and emotion.

Van Zeijl is invested in her images. By using subjects that intrigue and evoke emotion, she reinvents herself over and over and has created a body of work to illustrate these autobiographical narratives. Her work takes from all she experiences in life - she is both model, creator, object and subject. Going beyond the realm of individual expression, so common in the genre of self-portraiture, she strives to be both universal and timeless, with a subtle political hint.

Isabelle Van Zeijl has shown work continuously and internationally over the past fifteen years, represented by galleries located in The UK, USA, The Netherlands, Belgium, and exhibiting at emerging and established international art fairs in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, London, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Italy. She was nominated for the Prix De La Photographie Paris, and The Fine Art Photography Awards. She was also one of the winners of The Young Masters Emerging Women Art Prize, London. Her work is held in private & public collections in the USA, UK, Belgium, Germany, France and The Netherlands.

Isabelle Van Zeijl is represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

----

Tuëma Pattie (b. 1938) was born in Dublin and studied at the Belfast College of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and Morley College, London, Piers Ottey and Christopher Baker in Sussex and Robin Child in Devon.

In her days in Belfast and London, she took advantage of urban scenes as her subject matter. She then had a long period in which she took time out to have two children and to support her husband in his career. This meant it was difficult to find the time for her beloved painting, as was the case for many women in that era.

With the move out of London in 1989, she did have the subsequent benefit of much foreign travel. Subject matter was carefully gathered with the resultant explosion of energy into her canvases, with paintings from the Galapagos, Antarctica, Spain, Italy and Uzbekistan as well as her beautiful West Sussex. It is from this period that she was able to develop into the world of experimental landscapes.

Tuëma Pattie has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the Royal Hibernian Summer Exhibition; the Cork Street Gallery; Art for Youth at the Mall Gallery London; London Art Fair; the Chichester Open; the Moncrief Bray Gallery, the Kevis House Gallery and the Rowntree Tryon Gallery all in Petworth; APPART; the East Hampshire Art Fair; the Jorgensen Gallery in Dublin and at Glyndebourne.

“To me, painting has always been an opportunity to interpret imaginatively what I see in front of me. The facts are there – it is how one brings them to life that is the magic”, – Pattie says.

Tuëma Pattie is internationally represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

ArtNet News : Irish Artist Tuëma Pattie Disappeared From Public View for Decades. Now, a London Gallery Is Spotlighting Her Comeback and Artistic Transformation

-----

Emilie Taylor was born in 1980 in Sheffield, where she now lives and works. Her large scale ceramics use heritage craft processes, particularly traditional slipware, to interpret and represent post-industrial landscapes. Emilie is interested in the pot as container and metaphor for how we seek to contain different communities within society. Beyond the studio she works with the communities represented in her work, and through interdisciplinary projects hopes to apply the alchemical quality of ceramics in a socially engaged context. Emilie has completed residencies in the UK and abroad, and has exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Ruthin Craft Centre, Gallery Oldham and the Arts & Crafts House Blackwell. Her most recent solo exhibition (May Day, May Day, May Day) at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum concludes 11th of July 2021. Her work forms part of public and private collections.

Emilie Taylor is an alumna of Young Masters Art Prize.

----

Elin Hughes

Born 1997, UK

Elin’s sculptures are made through a cyclic process of fracturing and reconstructing the thrown vessel. By taking inspiration from British pottery traditions but removing the stable, functional nature of the pots as domestic objects, Elin draws our attention to the unpredictable material qualities of clay. Her glazes and forms reference back to Western traditions in the twentieth century including Bernard Leach’s fusion of Eastern and European aesthetics and the macho, destructive nature of works by American artists like Peter Voulkos. Her work raises questions about the importance of skill and the role of the potter in today’s society through combining throwing with sloppy craft’s disregard for rules.

Elin graduated with a BA in Ceramics from Cardiff School of Art and Design in 2019 and was a recipient of the Potclays Award for innovations in clay. She was a student demonstrator at the 2019 International Ceramics Festival in Aberystwyth and has exhibited in both the UK and Sweden. Elin has recently displayed work at the Jane Phillips Award Graduate Showcase at the Mission Gallery, Swansea and the 25th Art in Clay at Hatfield House. She lives and works in Cardiff.

----

ANDREA TYRIMOS

“A lot of my new work has been created on steel. For me, steel as a material represents the beautiful strength and vulnerability that exists when it comes to our mental health. Steel can be marked and scratched, its smooth finish altered by dents and the surface tarnished by rust - yet it is strong and will stand.These intimate portraits aim to uplift as they explore the themes of mental health and resilience.” Andrea Tyrimos (b.1986) graduated from Central St Martins in 2009 and has exhibited extensively since then including London solo shows and exhibitions in the UK and Europe.

She is a multidisciplinary artist and creates paintings, installations, and public art. She has been featured in several publications such as The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Madame Figaro, the Evening Standard and Ability Magazine. She has also been interviewed live on BBC World News, alongside her installations, and was featured on Channel 4 documentary ‘Flawless’.

-----

Tami Bahat

Born 1979, Israel

A deep love for imperfect beauty and the belief that art is in everyone fuel Bahat's portraiture. As a conduit to other lifetimes, she constructs stories of the past through the people of her present-day life. Inspired by the Old Masters, the series Dramatis Personae exhibits her personal connection to history and a deep longing for times that no longer exist.

She left school at the age of fifteen and was given guidance by her father who had taught at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He encouraged her independent study through workshops and seminars of art history, photography, sculpture and design, further enhancing her creative vision. A series of family trips around the world exposed her to humanity as a whole and the myriad ways that people live, providing her with a keen awareness of the beauty and loss that an earthly existence brings, an undertone in much of her work.

Most recently Bahat has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Australia and Chicago, and her work has been shown in prominent photography events, including Fotofever Paris, Scope NY, The Photography Show (AIPAD), as well as the LA Art Show.

-----

Highly acclaimed French painter Anne Françoise Couloumy, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, has been named 'La Hopper Française' by the French press.

A student of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, she has exhibited in France since 1994 with great success. Mentored by XX century French painter Boris Taslitzky, whose paintings are in the Tate Gallery's collection, she has a unique pedigree. In contrast to Kamps – French by nationality and Northern European in her use and sense of light – Couloumy paints as if she spent her life on the foggy banks of Amsterdam' canals. The intimacy and the serene silence of Couloumy's quiet paintings are reminiscent of Hammershøi and Vermeer. Nonetheless, Couloumy doesn't fit in any particular school of painting and her work is timeless, classical and contemporary. There is an air of mystery that surrounds her work, which suits the artist as she has little time for explanation and analysis. A Couloumy painting is much more than just a painting, it is a reflection of life.

-----

The paintings of Susanne Kamps ´are chromatic organisms, entirely of their own kind. On the one hand, they assert their obligation to tradition, on the other hand they celebrate individuality and boundless independence, as if they never heard of the great role models they evoke…´ wrote one art critic, adding: ´And the beholder, the more he or she tries to grasp the tension, experiences deja-vu – the ´aha´ effect. Who would not, while looking at the painting of Susanne Kamps, think of Matisse…´ - and indeed, her painting Behind the screen, shortlisted for the 5th Edition of the Young Master Prize, pays homage to Matisse´s Intérieur aux aubergines (1911).

Here is the story of Susanne Kamps's tea paintings, as told by the artist: "I have several tea paintings. Fortnum & Mason is one of two twins born from an earlier still life called Smokey Earl Grey: this is the name of a tea flavour sold by Fortnum's which I love. Smokey Earl Grey is a table setting with a lot of grey wall in the background – made with some metal paint rollers I found in a flea market in Budapest (that’s another story). However, it is big and many people do not want to buy big pieces. So, I focused on what was on the table – the cake stands, tea pots and cups – and the twins were born – Fortnum& Mason being the things on the left side of the table and the things on the right I called High Tea. All these paintings were done in 2017".

Susanne Kamps studied under the late Prof Herman-Josef Kuhna at the Academy of Art in Munster, Germany. She works in Dusseldorf, and has also worked in France during several extended stays in Paris (Cite des Arts) and at Roquebrune on the Cote d´Azur. She has also worked in Israel at the Ein Hod artists´ village. Her paintings have been shown in Germany, France and Israel and are in several collections, including the German Re-Insurance Company, WGZ Bank and the Heuking, Kühn law firm.

Susanne Kamps was the recipient of the 2019 Young Masters Art Prize Highly Commended award.

-----

Born and raised in New York City, Elise Ansel translates Old Master paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. She mines art historical imagery for color and narrative structure. Her paintings use the Old Masters as points of departure. They move into abstraction by transforming the representational content, which is obfuscated, if not entirely obscured, by her focus on color, gesture and the materiality of the paint. Ansel’s work strikes a balance between conscientious precision and irrational improvisation. She begins with a series of small spontaneous oil studies and subsequently transcribes these into large scale paintings, using Renaissance methods and a grid. The large paintings embrace the choreography of the small works with an increased emphasis on color and gesture. Spontaneity, instinct and intuition eclipse rational, linear thinking during the process of making the small works. Ansel's work fuses accident and design, intuition and intellect, abandon and constraint. The real subject becomes the substance and surface of oil paint, the range of its applications, the ways it can be used to celebrate life.

Ansel currently lives in Portland, Maine. She received a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1984. While at Brown, she studied art at both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. She earned her MFA in Visual Art from Southern Methodist University in 1993. Ansel has exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe, and her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences.

In 2014 Elise Ansel was a Finalist of the Young Masters Art Prize and her artwork has since been exhibited and represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery internationally.

-----

Freya Bramble-Carter is a London based ceramics artist, known for creating contemporary designs, strongly inspired by the ethos of beauty and nature. Freya combines her lifestyle, work and enjoyment in one and tries to live in the most true and authentic way she can learning and expanding on a personal level as well as professionally in this art form.

Before studying fine art at Chelsea College of Arts Freya learned the craft of clay under her father Chris Bramble's guidance, and then through teaching, but enjoys the process of ‘unlearning’ the rules when it comes to making her own pieces. Having always felt a strong physical connection to the clay she works with, Freya believes in creating pieces with soul, that inspire and become a source of energy in the home.

Freya’s work ranges from fine homewares including plates and bowls to sculptural pieces for the home and garden. Applying her talent to artisan glazes and handcrafting unique silhouettes, Freya's limited-edition pieces are designed to elevate and space with their beauty and tactile appeal. Crown the Clown Collection by Freya Bramble-Carter was specially crafted for the Meaning Behind Materiality exhibition with Cynthia Corbett Gallery as part of London Craft Week 2021. Her latest series, Pearl Parade, was created during her 2021-22 studio residency with Florence St George in the Bahamas. This collection of ceramics from Freya Bramble-Carter and Florence St. George was born of their mutual love of the Bahamian land and sea. Using clay that they foraged three years ago from East End Grand Bahama, they patiently waited for the clay to mature so that they could work with it. This year Freya returned to the Islands and the two potters worked night and day for two weeks collaborating on this collection also using a finer clay to complement their new clam formed vases. Their studio space is filled with love, fresh thoughts and a buzz of creative energy as they make together describing by section and play with the clay together. These vases reflect the waves that crash on the sandy shores of the Bahamas, the petals and leaves that grow from the inside of the pots belly are like tongues, the voices echoing their journey. The pots are delicate, feminine yet strong and proud.

A portion of our profits go to the Beacon Sheltered school in the Bahamas – a sow it needs.

Freya Bramble-Carter was represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery at Collect 2022.

-----

‘America has Lichtenstein, we have Azzopardi!’ - Estelle Lovatt FRSA

Deborah Azzopardi acquired her worldwide fame for the joyous Pop Art images she has created over the past 35 years. Her unique and feminine take on contemporary art is best described by the esteemed art critic Estelle Lovatt: ‘America has Lichtenstein, we have Azzopardi!’ Lovatt goes on to comment: “Sometimes you just want to curl up under a blanket. With a good book. A piece of chocolate. A man. This is what Deborah Azzopardi’s pictures make me feel like doing. They are me. They remind me of the time I had a red convertible sports car. I had two, actually. And yes, they are you, too. You immediately, automatically, engage with the narrative of Azzopardi’s conversational visual humour. Laughter is the best aphrodisiac, as you know. ... There’s plenty of art historical references from... Manet’s suggestive ‘Olympia’; Boucher’s thought-provoking... ‘Louise O’Murphy’ and Fragonard’s frivolous, knickerless, ‘The Swing’.... Unique in approach, you easily recognise an Azzopardi picture. ... Working simple graphics and toned shading (for depth), the Pop Art line that Azzopardi sketches is different to Lichtenstein’s. Hers is more curvaceous. Feminine.”

The world is familiar with Azzopardi’s artworks, as many of them have been published internationally. Her original paintings, such as the Habitat ‘Dating’ series (2004/08), the iconic ...One Lump Or Two? (2014) and Love Is The Answer (2016), created by the artist at the request of Mitch and Janis Winehouse as a tribute to their daughter, are in great demand.

Deborah Azzopardi is represented internationally by Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

-----

Cristina Schek is the photosensitive kind. She thinks in pictures; her imagination is always in focus. A Transylvanian living in London, she creates worlds she calls "myth places”; they exist, each in their own ways.

Far removed from traditional or documentary photography, the camera is merely a tool for Cristina. She enjoys the freedom of layering and manipulating her photographs into creative montages, trusting her instinct for matching the raw material with the suggestive imaginings of her subconscious.

Often whimsical and a touch romantic, her photographs are given subtle alterations in a digital process that often takes months, resulting in carefully constructed compositions, which reveal the influence of the great Surrealists and Old Masters.

Focus On The Female: London Art Fair Edit