Associate Artists
Featuring some of our Associate Artists
Jelly’s Associate members are a diverse group of more than 50 independent practising artists at different stages of their creative development with covering varied art forms who form a reciprocal support network. Our members currently include artists from Reading, the UK and further afield.
Associate Artist membership offers artists an experimental and supportive space to develop their creative practice and professional development.
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Linda Newcombe - Associate Artist Facilitator
Linda is an artist and award winning illustrator based in Reading. Rooted in printmaking techniques her practice features delicate naive storybook-like imagrey and suggests a folksy environment with emotive content. Her silent storytelling alludes to themes such as longing and loss. Her practice took on an additional dimension in 21/22 when she was awarded Arts Council funding to develop her 2D illustrations into animations. She now makes jewel-like stopmotion animation sequences using charming though crudely made puppets and sets to relate her narratives.
Instagram: @linda_newcombe
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Natasha's passion for colour runs deep in her practice, underpinned by a curiosity to explore its qualities, interactions and how some combinations can effect an emotional response and resurrect memories.
Much of her inspiration is drawn from wild spaces, particularly around water. Working through experimental marks, creates some considered, intentionally placed layers of detail and textures that are balanced with swathes of blended spaces. Ideas to lead in a flow as they develop and change, in an almost playful exploration.
Website : www.natashasamasuwo.co.uk
Instagram: @tashasamasuwo
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Helen Westhrop is a printer and artist, who since undertaking an MA in Textiles at the School of Crafts and Design, University of the Creative Arts joined Jelly Reading and a hub of kindred souls.
She draws inspiration from a creative childhood where ‘make do and mend’ was the basis of her discovery of sewing and creation using textiles and found materials. Growing up, she then moved into a love of fashion and the clothing culture of a wide range of alternative music. Now, developed creatively into a world of Stop-Motion-Animation using a community of ‘Coat Hanger Dolls’ which is now her main area of preoccupation.
Her passion is writing, printing, drawing, and sculpting dolls when she allows her travel experiences and curiosity to guide her creative journey which she shares through her blog nelabligh.com.
While she is on the Instagram @coathangerdolls and @nelabligh her preferred domain is at Jelly Reading each Thursday where she has a tiny studio space to make films and watch the world go by and welcomes visitors to share tea, cake and experiences.
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Caroline Streatfield is a painter whose work investigates ideas around memory, history and identity.
Caroline has just finished working on an arts council funded project ’People of Oxford Rd’
Website: www.carolinestreatfield.co.uk
Instagram: @carolinestreatfield
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Sue Malvern is a weaver who makes woven art works including experimental works in contemporary materials such as paper.
Her work is concerned with weaving as a metaphor for migration, where crossing borders merges and shifts identities. She investigates how these concerns can find form in woven work, in materials, structure and imagery. She has been weaving small pieces that explore the politics of cotton in Lancashire and India, and a project addressing the crisis of the Channel crossings. She is developing new works that further explore cloth as a cultural paradigm for migration, especially the textile as a portable form of cultural expression. Sue graduated in fine art, and completed a doctorate in history of art. She worked as an academic, publishing on modern and contemporary art, and trained as a weaver in London. She has exhibited her weaving in London and Denmark.
Instagram: @suebmal
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Chris’s visual art focuses on and is inspired by dance and music, elements of these vibrant arts lending flow and rhythm to her abstract and figurative paintings.
She recently featured in Feeling the Beat at South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell, a multidisciplinary project bringing artists and musicians together to work in responsive ways.
Website: www.chrisholleyart.com
Instagram: @chrisholleyart
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Peter creates very animated pictures, sculptures and films which have featured in many exhibitions and been broadcast widely.
He disregards established hierarchies and boundaries between disciplines. He paints sculptures, draws paintings and in his 3D work, he replaces concave with convex and material with emptiness. He is obsessed with imaginary still lives shot through with a distinct lack of stillness, non-existent sculptural monuments, and fictionalised nudes. Figurative, yet far from realistic, his work is lateral rather than literal. Filled with ideas, every picture tells a story and if the story happens to be fun, so much the better. He insists that fun and playfulness are intrinsic to creativity.
His animation work has been seen at festivals, broadcast and exhibited internationally and even won an award or five.
As well as all that, he illustrates books, conceives picture books, games apps, devises instances of Augmented Reality, teaches animation, runs stop-motion animation workshops and sometimes even writes blurb about himself.
Website: www.veryanimated.com
Instagram: @coodonttweet
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Lisa-Marie Sealey is a Reading born printmaking artist using watercolour monotype to create work inspired by plant life.
Using the unpredictability of nature, her practice combines spontaneity and delicacy creating ethereal, semi-abstract work.
This is underpinned by the environment and the importance of reconnecting with the natural world.
Instagram: @lisamariesealey
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Susan Cunningham is an artist who explores the presence or absence of ‘nature’ within urban environments. This involves documenting her experience as an artist, following the Western tradition of landscape painting from the 18th and 19th century. Responses are made by drawing and painting in the open air, utilising sketchbooks, creating model landscapes and building artefacts.
It is an investigative process and asks questions: what is ‘nature'? and how do artists contribute and shape ideas about ‘nature'?
The practice is often site-specific and embedded in discourses surrounding the construction of landscape and nature, including: Lucy Lippard 'The Lure of the Local’, Jean Beaudrillard 'Simulacra and Simulation' and Hal Foster 'Return of the Real’.
website: www.susancunninghamart.co.uk
Instagram: @susancunningham_artstudio
Twitter: @SuzanC9
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Julie a visual artist, working with mixed media. She is predominately a 3D artist, drawn to creating figurative and illustrated pieces. Most recently, she has been working on using a sewing machine as a means to draw and create collages. Using the sewing machine to draw is a tactile and meditative way for her to create. Needle work gives her a sense of permanence and strength. The images she creates draws on gender equality and unheard voices.
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Antoinette Brown is a visual artist working with the human condition and the cyclical nature of life. Her practice encompasses drawing, painting and sculpture, sensitively pulling together compositions that embolden the quiet and seemingly insignificant moments of life.
Her practice turned a pivotal point after the birth of her second daughter and also, the decline of her grandmother's health shortly afterwards. Both events fuelled a sense of urgency and newfound relevance. Her drawings and paintings place particular emphasis on the profound and transformative journey of matrescence: the transition into motherhood.
Drawing from her own personal experiences with her daughters and her connection to her own mother and grandmother; these experiences sparked internal dialogues about interdependent female relationships. Life itself hangs on a precipice of fragility, and the quiet, seemingly insignificant moments of motherhood gain immense significance as time passes and children grow.
website: www.antoinettebrownartist.com
Instagram: @antoinettebrownartist
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Matt Pearce is a painter mainly working in oils on portraits and figurative pieces.
Most of his work deals with themes that include identity, family and interpersonal relationships.
In a departure from his usual area of focus, he is currently working on a series of landscape paintings influenced by the New Zealand landscape.
Website: www.mattpearcestudio.com
Instagram: @mattpearcestudio
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Laura de Moxom is a Socially Engaged Artist, Activist and empathy-led Cultural Manager.
In her personal practice she describes herself as a mixed media alt-photo artist, who creates alternative archives. She explores her past, collective memory and forgotten places to tell stories. She explores memory; its attachment to objects and the materiality of photographs, using a visual language of historic alternative photographic techniques, image transfer, assemblage and paint.
Her practice is inextricably linked to her past life as a librarian. Inspired by her activism she is currently exploring sustainability in relation to her practice, thinking about kinder materials and processes.
Website: www.laurafrancesd.com
Instagram: @alibraryoflaura
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Originally from Belfast, Heather McAteer studied BA Fine Art at Belfast School of Art before relocating to Reading in 1992 to complete a Master of Fine Art degree. Working predominately in graphite, her drawings investigate themes of identity, memory and history.
Recent works on paper depict beautiful, cruel landscapes suffused with a melancholic sense of loss and absence. They attempt to reconcile ideas of place and home, in terms of longing and belonging.
Website: www.heathermcateer.co.uk
Instagram: @heathermcateerart
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Carrie Grainger is a visual artist and Doctoral student based near Reading, Berkshire.
Graingers practice explores different cultural superstitions, symbolic connections and ritual and ceremonial practices through multiple forms such as mask making, sculpture and film. She draws from different belief systems and cultural attachments largely based around nature and the spiritual and engages, entwines and recycles both physical and intangible threads within her work. Graingers practical and theoretical interests predominantly engage with themes such as mysticism, folklore, concealed societies and pop culture.
The artists Doctoral research explores the material and impalpable histories, narratives and traces that become attached and embedded in particular landscapes and form place identities. The main line of interest is in how visual arts practices are engaging with place in order to illuminate, commemorate and provide re-tellings of the past within the present moment.
Instagram: @Carriegraingerart
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Robert Fitzmaurice makes paintings, prints and ceramics characterised by figurative and abstract elements contained by networks of vibrant colour. His small scale works include references to historical narratives and the art of the past, especially medieval and Indian art, where the figure often emerges in a frontal stance that suggests some sort of encounter with the viewer.
He grew up in Coventry, where contrasts between the old and new cathedrals, the history of the blitz and his father's accounts of being a prisoner of war fuelled his imagination. After studying Fine Art at Sunderland he took a studio with Sunderland Artists Group for a year before moving to Reading to take his MFA. Early encounters with the painters John Emanuel and Adrian Heath went on to become lasting friendships and their insights into materials, processes and approaches to abstraction important touchpoints in his own studio practice.
Selected group exhibitions include Whitworth Young Contemporaries, Manchester; International Print Center, New York; NN Contemporary, Northampton; and APT Gallery, London. Solo exhibitions include 'Artist of the Day,' Angela Flowers Gallery, London; 'No Eden' Greenham Control Tower, Newbury; and currently 'No Sudden Moves', West Berkshire Museum.
He lives and works full-time on his art in Reading, Berkshire.
Website: www.fitzmaurice.works
Instagram: @Robert_fitzmaurice
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Eoghan Collins works predominantly from life using a mix of marker pens, colour pencil, pencil and inks.
Influenced heavily by the graffiti, comic books and vibrant west Reading community he was immersed in during the 80s and 90s.
Eoghan rediscovered the value and importance of art for managing serious anxiety - he finds the act of focusing so intensely on something that has no right answer provides a mental reset.
This, perhaps, is what drives the sense of energy and exploration in his work.
As an Associate Artist, Eoghan is using the opportunity to learn what's possible and how to grow his approach and thought processes.
Instagram: @eoghancollins
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Miranda lives and works in Oxford, UK. Since 2018 Miranda has been making hand cut analogue collage works using a variety of vintage ephemera and papers. As a creative hunter-gatherer Miranda is fascinated by the mundane items we decide to preserve, and conversely what we decide to abandon. Of particular pertinence to Miranda’s practice is how reminiscence, memory and nostalgia can be both collective and individual.
Miranda has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally and has had her work included in several magazines, publications and books including Contemporary Collage Magazine, Kolaj Magazine, The Cutting Chaos, Collage Care, and several publications Edinburgh Collage Collective publications. Miranda has several works in the prestigious Kanyer Art Collection. In 2022 Miranda was a winner of a Contemporary Collage Magazine Award.
Instagram: @scissorspaperpaste
Image title: sweet tooth (2023)
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Kristin Rawcliffe is predominantly a portrait and figurative artist working in oils and is compelled to tell peoples’ stories though paint.
Kristin feels that the materiality of paint can be harnessed for emotive power and storytelling. The stories that they currently want to tell are about motherhood and social isolation. With these larger, more complex paintings, Kristin uses compositional sketches, collage, and maquettes to plan multi-figure layouts thinking about traditional compositional schemata and how they can subtly subvert these.
Sometimes the style is traditional, sometimes experimental. With Kristin’s more experimental work, abstract areas are incorporated ; ‘active’ areas using impasto, coloured lines for emphasis, and in quieter areas, the images left to disappear into drips in places to become more intangible. It is an evolving and exploratory process where experiments with colour and mark making can steer Kristin’s direction.
Website: www.kristinrawcliffe.co.uk
Instagram: @kristinrawcliffe
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Or Williams work is predominantly research based, with particular interest in how AI “sees” the world. As a middle-aged woman, Or explores agency and visibility (or lack of) when it comes to images of middle aged women in both historical and contemporary visuals.
The main theme that Or is looking into at the moment is women on sofa or women in their living room. This resonates with Or’s thesis subject which questions the “Pro-Aging” trend.
Website: www.orwilliamsartist.co.uk
Instagram: @beatricevonmillhouse
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Rae Mason is an Artist and Art Therapist. Her intention is to help people to express their internal world through image and metaphor. She works intuitively in oil pastel and ink, with dreams, myth and metamorphosis as her main inspiration.
Instagram: @raemasonart
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Linda’s work focuses on landscape in its varieties – urban, rural, coastal and sometimes wild. She is interested in how the landscape changes with the passage of time – not just seasonal change but how the landscape is shaped by human intervention, environmental forces, climate change and nature’s adaptations.
Her process involves the use of mixed water media on paper. Works are typically built in layers of paint and collage which are often torn back. This process continues until the desired effect is achieved.
Collage papers sometimes include printed text but are usually hand prepared papers.These exploit the textural effects that can be achieved with the physical behaviour of watercolour on various paper types. Sometimes paper properties such as texture or absorbency are modified to get different effects. Linda also uses innovative techniques exploiting the interaction between watercolour and acrylic on different papers.
Linda is chair of the Reading Guild of Artists and has exhibited with the Royal Watercolour Society Contemporary Watercolour Competition, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colour, the Discerning Eye and the Sunday Times Watercolour competition. Linda was the originator and main organiser for the Reading Gaol Hug which saw Reading Gaol surrounded by about 1000 people linking hands in 2019 as part of the Save Reading Gaol campaign. In 2020, with Terry Dixon, she co-authored the book “Reading’s Influential Women” published by Two Rivers Press.
She was elected an Associate of the Royal Watercolour Society in 2021.
Linda’s work has been featured in The Artist magazine (April 2021) and the Spring 2022 edition of the American publication Watercolor Artist. It has also been included in several books.
Website www.lindasaul.co.uk
Instagram @linda.m.saul
facebook: @lindamsaul
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Paola Minekov's paintings and portraits capture vital sentiments and moments of life in a distinct visual language, evoking the spirit of early Modernist tradition through the combination of abstraction and figuration.
Her art captures fleeting moments, both beautiful and unsettling. Beyond the studio, Paola creates large-scale mosaics and even painted a life-sized elephant sculpture for charity! Her work exposes the depths of human experience, leaving viewers with a captivating glimpse into her artistic world.
Paola accepts both private and corporate commissions.
Website: www.paola.art
Facebook: @paola.minekovv
Instagram: @paolaminekov
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Helen is a painter who explores emotion and experience through mark making. She works in an abstract, experimental way incorporating debris like rusted objects and manipulating the paper surface. Transitions interest her, whether it be erosion, emotional or chemical processes.
Exhibitions include The Last Gasometer and Reading's Changing Skyline at The Turbine House, Reading 2021, the Contemporary Watercolour Exhibition at the RWS Bankside Gallery London 2018, Solo show at New Era Theatre in Newbury 2016 and Wallflower, In Transit site specific mobile art space, Cornwall 2009.
www.instagram.com/helenlunnartist/
Image title: Regrowth
Rust, ink and pencil on paper
40cm x 60cm
Associate Eye - Artist Films
