Sarah Bold

Originally from Australia, Sarah lives in the Western Isles of Scotland. Sarah is a landscape painter interested in the significant impact of human activity upon the planet’s ecosystems, geology and climate, and more specifically how this relates to the rural environment. Her paintings are in oil paint and hover between figurative and abstraction.

She studied painting at the University of Arts, London and is a graduate of Turps Banana Painting Correspondence course. Sarah is a recent recipient for the Society of Scottish Artists mentor/ mentee yearly programme. Sarah was awarded the Mall Galleries’ ING Discerning Eye Landscape Prize 2023.

Recent exhibitions include Art On A Post Card International Women’s Day 2024, Detail Art Gallery, Edinburgh, Irving Gallery, RSW Annual exhibition, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London, Wells Contemporary, Royal Scottish Academy Annual. Previously Sarah has won the Jackson’s Painting Landscape Prize, was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Art Prize and received the Hulabhaig Curator’s Purchase Award.

Salvatore Fiorello

Salvatore Fiorello’s work deals with perceptions of time, memory, and place. He makes paintings that depict often overlooked sections of suburbia, edgelands, and semi-rural landscapes. Creeping shadows and spectral forms denote odd or uncanny scenes, like recollected memories or nostalgic day dreams.

The locations may at first seem banal or inconspicuous, yet there is often an air of implied or impending suspense, with the implication that the mundane could conceal something mysterious.

Salvatore graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2000. He lives and works in London.

Selected Exhibitions include: ‘Works On Paper 6’, Blue Shop Gallery, Online Exhibition, London (2024); Royal Hibernian Academy, 194th Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland (2024); ‘Recent Paintings’, Solo Presentation, Irving Gallery, Oxford (2023); ‘SFSA Painting Open’, noformat Gallery, Deptford, London (2023); ‘Art on a Postcard’, Gathering, Soho, London (2023); ‘MEPAINTSME Annual Open Call’, Online Exhibition, Arden, North Carolina, USA (2023); ‘Works on Paper 5’, Blue Shop Gallery, Online Exhibition, London (2023); Royal Academy of Arts, 255th Summer Exhibition, London (2023); Royal Hibernian Academy, 193rd Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland (2023); Royal Scottish Academy, 197th Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh, Scotland (2023); ‘Awake Arise’, Irving Contemporary, Oxford (2022); ‘SFSA Painting Open’, noformat Gallery, Deptford, London (2022); ‘ING Discerning Eye’, The Mall Galleries, London (2022); ‘Art on a Postcard’, Winter Auction, The Bomb Factory, Covent Garden, London (2022); ‘Wales Contemporary’, Waterfront Gallery, Milford Haven & Oxo Gallery, London (2022); ‘Think Of Me With Kindness’, Gage Gallery, KIAC, Sheffield (2022); Royal Academy of Arts, 254th Summer Exhibition, London (2022); Royal Scottish Academy, 196th Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh, Scotland (2022).

Dominique Garraud

Bristol-based artist Dominique Garraud explores themes of the human condition, memory, senses, emotion, loss and vulnerability; drawing inspiration from the unexpected attachments relating to recollection, perception and how these themes intertwine and sit (often uncomfortably) beside each other.

Using painting ‘...as a way in - a way to start the conversation…’ Garraud pays homage to the idea of the seen and unseen; expanding on her interest in how layering, exposing, deconstructing and repositioning materials interplay - from the tactile folds of the heavyweight canvas to the purposefully irregular cutting of delicate intersecting layers of individually painted fabric.

‘Movement and the unfolding of transitional abstract gestures play an integral role in my work – intertwining these accents allows the introduction of personal histories, disclosure, and informal figurative resemblance to intuitively translate, reveal and form their own narratives.’

The result of this intuitive process, allows Garraud’s work to be self-defining - not confined to a linear artistic approach, which comes through in her dynamic, considered and impactful compositions.

Catherine Knight

“My recent work has been concerned with nocturnal light and interior spaces. Due to the lockdown conditions in recent memory and the fact of having young children, the domestic space has become more prevalent in my work. The way that a window frames and contains the world strongly appeals to me- a structure to contain the vastness of the sky. I think of the window as a ready-made painterly device, neatly framing and containing the world outside.”

“The window registers connection and difference between interior and exterior. It allows us two scenes at once. It affirms the presence of other ways of being, other patterns of objects, just beyond the concentrated space of the observer.” Gillian Beer, Windows: looking in, looking out, breaking through.

Catherine Knight is a painter based at BV Studio, Bristol and a RWA Artist Network member. Since graduating from an MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University in 2008 with a distinction, she has exhibited widely in both private and public gallery spaces including Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the New Art Gallery, Walsall. She was an invited artist at the Discerning Eye exhibition in 2014 and has exhibited four times at the Royal Watercolour Society Open, winning the Insight Art Prize in 2022.

Her work is distinctive for its vibrant use of colour and evocative landscapes based on Iceland, Finland and Norway. In 2018 Catherine was one of five artists who took part in the Bristol/ Hannover Artist Exchange, which linked up artists in the two cities and resulted in group exhibitions in both. During lockdown she made a series of gouache paintings based on people’s Isolation Windows crowd-sourced from all over the world. These were exhibited in a solo show at Exeter Phoenix in 2021.

She recently made a pilgrimage to the summer house of Edvard Munch in Åsgårdstrand, Norway, and the resulting body of work was exhibited in solo shows at Petersfield Museum and Art gallery and Irving Contemporary, Oxford.

Louisa Longstaff-Scales

Louisa Longstaff-Scales is a painter living and working in Norfolk, England. She is a graduate of Winchester School of Art where she studied fine art, painting and  her work has been exhibited with the Royal Society of British Artists, The Royal Academy and is held in private collections across the UK and abroad.

The work of Louisa Longstaff-Scales is largely autobiographical and  explores personal narratives and storytelling within the context of the landscape. Sometimes Longstaff-Scales’  paintings are of a specific place and moment, and sometimes they are a conglomerate of landscape,  like a dot to dot of a journey across land and memory. She explores themes such as the passing of time, the possibilities of consciousnesses, and human behaviour.

In her work Longstaff-Scales is taking comfort in finding the familiar and then trying to edge beyond it.During the making of the painting the process becomes as important as the ideas that birth it. These paintings and titles become like small poems which are equally rooted in the quiet charm of fleeting moments, personal interpretation, and a mortal response to the vast.

Gemma Petrie

Gemma Petrie is a visual artist, working and living near the small village of Portmahomack in the North East of the Highlands. She has a BA (Hons) in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art and is currently studying for a Masters in Contemporary Art and Archaeology at the University of the Highlands and Islands.

She mainly works with water based paint and drawing materials, creating abstracted figurative and biomorphic paintings, using symbols, motifs, colours, and patterns from everyday life, the landscape that she is immersed in and moments from the past. Focusing on the surface of our environment, how it holds the past, present and future simultaneously and thinking about what our place is within this space.

Kate Sherman

“Quite often I paint things that remind me of something else; a memory, a feeling, a scene - real or imagined. The initial pull of a subject isn’t always clear, sometimes I work it out along the way, other times not. But always the subject or idea will have resonated first in an emotional way, and this is the starting point, with the formal and visual coming along close behind.

Why realism? In search for truth and authenticity; to create a sense of order and control; or to construct a protective screen? I don’t know, a combination maybe. The paintings feel something like a lens, to be viewed through, an expression of outer and inner worlds, nuanced, layered, complex.

Part hyper-real part gestural, the dialogue between image and surface can create tension, and ambiguity. I like the potential of paint to transform and transport, the alchemy of paint, the rhythm of the brushstrokes, the flow and lyricism of the forms, built up in layers.

The subjects are unassuming: a puddle, a patch of grass; everydayness evoking time, memory, experience. Hopefully these are collective and inclusive, creating a sense of familiarity, and maybe sometimes the comfort of nostalgia.” - Kate Sherman, 2023

Kate Sherman grew up on the Jurassic coast of Dorset. After graduating with a degree in Fine Art she continued her painting practice while working in the London art scene, before deciding in 2005 to paint full time. She lives and works in Sussex.

Kate has exhibited widely, including in juried exhibitions ING Discerning Eye (2019, 2020, 2023), Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2015, 2018), Wells Art Contemporary (2018), and Figurative Art Now (2021).

The paintings, all oil on panel, originate from photographs. This photographic source is important because the paintings capture a reflective notion of memory, of the emotional distance between a real landscape and a photograph, between experience and longing. It is a poignant and quiet melancholy, expressed by the portrayal of sparse unpopulated landscapes and by her restrained palette which is often suffused in a reserved northern European light of chalky blues and pink-blushed greys.

Kate Shooter

Kate studied Fine art at Howard Gardens Art School in Cardiff and then Wimbledon School of Art in London. Her practice is based in South Wales where she paints in her home studio in the black Mountains.

“Often during making a painting I’m reminded of mining or excavating. It’s like searching for a very particular thing that I don’t have a reference for, but I know along the way I’ll find pretty, shiny bits and pieces that will have to be discarded and that’ll be a wrench. Agonising in fact.

I like the idea of unearthing the final work whilst it’s in flux. I stop time at that moment to let it sit on the surface, but the image is in a state of precarious change. In this way I’m less painter more voyeur. I’ve uncovered an image at a very private moment of finding or still searching for itself. It’s a curious, even perverse activity.

I watched a video of an octopus sleeping the other day on You Tube. Rapid and vivid changes in colour and pattern swept across the surface of the creature’s body as it slept, presumably in reaction to whatever scenarios were playing out in its dreams. I was struck by the same voyeuristic feeling that I stumble upon when finishing a painting; guiltily witness to a thing in a state of vulnerable and private transition.”