Events

Archive Event

Graduate Studio Bursaries 2015-16

Platform Studios in partnership with Heart of Glass offered three Studio Bursaries to recent graduates for the period between January 2015 - March 2016 The successful applicants were Jane Barwood, Isobel Wood and Karen Thompson.

ISOBEL WOOD
Graduate Bursary Studio holder 2015-16

Isobel is a recent graduate of  Swansea College of Art where she studied on the Photography in the Arts programme.

Despite a strong interest in photography, her current practice explores appropriation and archive. Creating new images from found photography, predominantly the plethora of photographs donated by family; she explores the relevance and aesthetics of photography in a digital age.

Hailing from St.Helens, where many of the donated photos in her archive were taken, she is returning to the town to undertake the Platform residency. Her aim is to use the creative environment within the studios to play with making large scale mixed media images that take as a starting point her archive of family photographs. Working intuitively and with manipulated composites she aims to create artistic outcomes from the stasis of past realities. 

KAREN THOMPSON
Graduate Bursary Studio holder 2015-16

Karen is a North West based painter who explores self expression through the stimulus of everyday sounds and sights.

Her work draws on the precedents of the New York \school of abstraction and the work of artists such as Kasimir Malevich, John Cage and Wassily Kandinsky, renowned for his synaesthetic works connecting music and paint and who said “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings – the artist is the hand that plays touching one key or another to cause a vibration in the soul.”

Karen’s paintings are the result of her automatic response to external stimuli and through repeated layering result in highly abstracted outcomes. Her aim throughout the residency is to produce an experimental and creative body of work in response to the St.Helens environs using a variety of shaped supports in an attempt to determine how shape and colour influence the viewer.

 JANE BARWOOD
Graduate Bursary Studio holder 2015

The theme of my work is the relationship between modern day urban living and our emotional response to our environment, particularly the relationship we have with what we perceive as the natural landscape.

The landscape in my work is an imaginary space rather than one that is a true representation of the physical world. I use colour, mark-making and atmosphere to create meaning in my paintings rather than depicting realistic detail. I am interested in the physicality of paint, colour relationships and the process of painting.

My paintings feature the house as a motif to describe the human experience of existing within the landscape, yet feeling detached from it. Houses are private spaces full of secrets. They hold memories and emotions. The houses in my work express the strange dichotomy in which we are in and of the landscape but we feel alienated from it.