Associates 2018

Ian Bride

Ian Bride’s previous creative practice has been inspired by a critical engagement with the fields of biodiversity conservation, education and anthropology – with a view to exploring and challenging some of the fundamental epistemological parameters thereof – for instance, the value of the use of positivist scientific method to the sustainable uses of natural resources, the neo-colonial text underpinning the conservation discourse, representations of nature and the human condition, and the ‘language’ of tools. He is most comfortable working with 3D form and in wood, but as an Associate his intention is simply(!) to immerse himself in creative thinking and practice, both individually and as part of the group process.

Coral Brookes

Coral Brookes is an artist from Shropshire. Her work so far focuses on sculpture and drawing to explore play, functionality and imagination as languages for navigating the world. She is interested in embarking on playful and explorative processes of making whilst the work also manifests as a playground visionary. The work has recently drawn parallels between museum objects as well as industrialism with the biomorphic and metamorphic motion in the cartoon landscape and the language of form and motion, visualised as cast forms folding, curving, balancing, wiggling. She graduated in 2017 from Goldsmiths BA Fine Art & History of Art and is keen to stretch out ideas underpinning her practice through workshops and a greater collaborative and socially engaged arena during her time at OSE.

Rosa Irwin Clark

Rosa Irwin Clark is an artist and musician working in site-responsive performance, traditional folk music and DIY self-organised arts events. With arts/activism collective Degenerate Space, their work explores regeneration, land ownership and architecture with a community-led creation process. Rosa’s practice investigates and is informed by non-hierarchical collaboration, embodied knowledge and the oral tradition. In 2016, they co-founded The Palace – an annual arts residency taking place in Piotrowice Nyskie, Poland.

Katie Fiore

Katie Fiore (b.1993, Chatham) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work may manifest in forms including text, sound, video, photography, digital collage, readings, collaborative workshops and exchanges. Through obsessively documenting and re-assembling collected fragments of our physical and digital worlds, she aims to excavate the in-between spaces and the margins that give way for resistance and love. She is drawn to the cracks and tears, the familiar out of joint, borders and portals, language and iconography, echo and haze, and ghosts of the future.

Una Hamilton Helle

na Hamilton Helle is an artist and art worker who utilises images, installation, collaborative workshops and writing to explore how we construct meaning through fictional structures. She is preoccupied with ideas around nature and how we are formed by landscape and our surroundings. She recently published Becoming the Forest #2, a journal which forms part of a wider arts project about forests, molecular biology, animism and black metal. She curates and commissions art projects as part of the contemporary art organisation Legion TV.

Sarah Karen

Sarah Karen (b. 1993, UK) works across various disciplines. Her most recent work explores the subject of journey, aiming to encompass particular thoughts or moments experienced whilst travelling. Beginning with drawing, the work fluctuates between meditative and decorative, replicating the shapes, shadows and other visual observations experienced whilst weaving from one place to another. Interested in how we navigate our environments, she seeks to do so through acts of weaving and plans to map the movement of others whilst at OSE.

Antonia Luxem

Antonia Luxem creates abstract videos, documentaries and paintings. Her documentary work explores current social and environmental issues, which are the focus of her debut film Perceptions on Chaos: Hackney, selected for the East End Film Festival 2017. Her most recent video work is an intimate investigation into human visual and temporal perception. Recently, Antonia co-founded ANTIKO, an online platform documenting the architecture of London’s East End through photography and video, as well as lastnightwolves, a virtual gallery which seeks to make sense of the everyday through written and visual mediums.

Dipesh Pandya

Born in Tanzania, migrating to England with his grandmother at the age of three, Dipesh has lived and worked in France, America and India. His art practice draws from research and reflection on sensory and auto-ethnography, post-colonialism, activism, ritual and linguistics.
Using a range of alter egos, he explores the fluidity of chronology and diasporic identity. Music, sound and words are used throughout his work as mnemonic devices for excavating autobiographical and cultural memory. Complexities in the navigation of sociocultural space as a Brown person, form the critical questions explored across his research and work as an activist and artist.
Through cross-examination of the creation, expression, preservation and suppression of cultural identities; the work merges personal, historical and contemporary material in an attempt to find sanctuary from trauma and strength through resistance.
Currently living and working in Margate, England.

Lizzy Rose

Lizzy Rose came to OSE hoping to expand on her previous work around nostalgia, hidden culture and communities to include new research around disability and illness. Rose spent the year thinking about what it means to be an artist and have a chronic illness and how to create a sustainable practice with a glitchy body.

Over the past year, she has been exploring how to use her experience of illness to make work. The video work Sick, blue sea, shown in the final show Gut Feelings in December 2018, was the culmination of several ideas Rose explored throughout her year as an Associate at Open School East. The work follows a fictional narrative spoken by a teenage sperm whale blogging about her chronic nausea. The work links several of Rose’s key interests: chronic illness communities online and the culture surrounding them, narrative storytelling, and humour.

In 2019, Rose will spend the majority of the year in hospital but plans to continue working from her hospital bed.

Elinor Stanley

Elinor Stanley works in painting, drawing, sculpture and performance to explore how humans use myth and illusionary narrative to make sense of the world, considering how these myths impact on contemporary concerns. She is particularly interested in the use of stylisation as a tool for comprehension, using theatrical artifice, frames, stages and screens to address these concerns, as well as questions of inter-subjectivity, intimacy and guilt. Her current interests range from plumbing, celebration, and embarrassment. Elinor Stanley studied at Glasgow School of Art.

Tom Verity

Tom Verity’s work explores a variety of materials and objects through mixed media sculpture and composition. The work often deconstructs traditional elements of painting to be recombined into pieces, which are activated by gravity, balance and tension. His recent projects include the graduate residency at AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, ‘The Glasshouse Residency’ at The New Art Gallery Walsall and ‘Mostyn Open 20’, Llandudno.

Louise Webb

Louise Webb’s practice focuses on the interaction between the interpretive material and the materialised object. Playing with the perception of boundaries and the idea of misinterpretation, she creates multidimensional installations reflecting constructed narratives, usually exploring the merging of fact and fiction. Recently Webb has exhibited in We: You, Me – Narrative Whispers (2017) at Firstsite, Colchester.

Melanie Wheeler

Melanie Wheeler’s multi-disciplinary practice is an amalgamation of sculpture, installation, and publications containing collage and texts. Most recently she has been curator of a project that aims to provide a platform for young artists. She views art as a tool for social impact and focuses on collaborative projects that aim to both engage and benefit the community. Melanie has recently taken part in ‘ The Floating Island residency’ and completed a curator internship with a sustainable events company in Manchester. Recent exhibitions include shows in Manchester, Liverpool and London and her work has been featured in FOCI, Nous and Aesthetica magazine.