Eleanor Shipman

Ellie Shipman is a visual artist and illustrator living and working in Bristol, based in a studio at Bricks.

Ellie's work is concerned with concurrent states of being and the process of drawing out shared commonality between those dichotomies: hope and fear; isolation and togetherness; the domestic and the public; grief and joy. The liminal space where these states rebuff, align and overlap is explored, shared and reflected on through multimedia artworks using found objects, textiles, drawing, audio and installation. Ellie is also interested in what it is to be a woman; the experience of birth and new motherhood as well as notions of community; sustainability and anticipatory mourning for climate collapse.

Works are often site specific, participatory or interactive - including people in research, process and product. Eleanor regularly collaborates with researchers, scientists and fellow creatives as well as the general public and a diverse range of community groups.

Ellie studied BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art (2008 - 11) and deepened her research into climate resilience and participatory art through undertaking a MSc Sustainable Development in Practice at UWE (2015 - 16). Ellie's background includes working in public engagement and community development roles alongside her art practice, and Ellie has been a full time freelance artist, illustrator and pattern designer since 2018.

Ellie was awarded Arts Council ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ (DYCP) funding to pursue new avenues in her creative practice in 2023 and is currently working on a year-long programme of residencies and new projects.

Ellie is a member of Spike Island Associates and a member of Spilt Milk Gallery. 

Commissioners, funders and partners have included:
Arts Council England; We the Curious; The Vietnamese Women’s Museum; Pump House Gallery; The University of Bristol; Historic England; The Royal Shakespeare Company; Wellcome Trust.

Read More
ContributorEleanor Shipman
John Whall

John Whall is a Digital Participation Artist, Curator and Producer who uses digital tools and materials to creatively engage audiences with arts and contemporary culture. His work explores the intersectionality between digital and participatory practice, through collaborative and co-creative processes, with a focus on creating together. This involves the developing of processes that translate complex digital practice into accessible creative activities, which inspire and empower audiences in the creation of immersive experience.

John was recently supported by the Arts Council England’s (ACE) Developing Your Own Creative Practice (DYCP) fund, where he explored participant-led co-creation in immersive spaces, with the aim of developing high quality digital experiences that championing the diverse creative expression of our communities. He also provides specialist sector support through digital skills, knowledge and experience, to help participatory, learning and socially engaged organisations to realise their digital ambitions.

John’s work also includes exploring participatory practice through our conscious experiences of online and offline immersive creative spaces. Aligned with phenomenological philosophies and the basic intentional structure of consciousness, I’m intrigued by how our first-person perspectives of collaborative physical and online spaces can allow us to explore our individual conscious experiences and their relationship to others.

John supports the collective approaches to sector development and is the Specialist Interest Representative in Digital for Engage Visual Arts, Digital Champion for ArtWorks Alliance (AWA), as well as East Midlands Participatory Arts Forum (EMPAF).

Read More
ContributorJohn Whall
Stephen Duncombe

Stephen Duncombe is Professor of Media and Culture at New York University and author and editor of numerous books and articles on the intersection of culture and politics. A life-long activist, Duncombe is the co-founder and Research Director of the Center for Artistic Activism, a research and training organization that helps activists create more like artists and artists strategize more like activists.

http://www.stephenduncombe.com/

Read More
ContributorStephen Duncombe
Deborah Nash

The clothes we wear replicate a body shape and envelope a memory, of a time or occasion we wore them. In children’s stories, garments are invested with special powers, and although today’s real-life equivalents sparkle less, they are no less protective: the face mask, surgical gloves and apron; the PPE synonymous with 2020/21, when our mouths disappeared behind a fabric wrapper and the sight of a care worker’s apron became a badge of honour.

During lockdown, Deborah Nash used kitchen materials - plain flour and water - to mix paste and draw on old shirts, upcycling them into artwork diaries, annotated with the catch-phrases of the terrible twins, Brexit and Covid, yoking political jargon with autobiography. Words written in shapes within the boundaries of the body express the limits of language and the narrowness of present-day circumstance, while a uniform is close to body and heart, vulnerable and fallible, symptomatic of a fragmented world.

https://www.whatmoreproductions.co.uk

Read More
ContributorDeborah Nash
Get It Done

Get It Done is a community arts organisation based in Manchester and London. Get It Done works directly with communities to facilitate creative projects, workshops and events to create measurable social change, and upskills young people with the tools to lead impactful projects themselves and professionalise their creative practices. Get It Done was founded by Axis member Mimi Dearing.

www.getitdoneart.com

Read More
ContributorGet it done
Kymba Nijuck

Kymba Nijuck is an autistic crone who has worked as an artist for over a decade. Her community-based artworks include a series of conceptual projects involving dreams that had several hundred people participate and the Skyclad Tarot, a nude tarot deck featuring gender fluidity, racial and body-type diversity that over 50 people modeled for.

ChurchOf.Art

Read More
ContributorKymba Nijuck
Rebecca Edery

Rebecca Edery is a Bristol based, socially engaged artist, working to form communities. She works with situations and conversations, acknowledging dialogue as a creative act. The work ranges from scripted encounters to extremely open works, always leaving room for elements of the unknown to encounter and become a part of the work. The continuing creative process is foregrounded over finality in the form of outcomes and art objects.

Edery’s practice is concerned with exploring ways to dissolve the social boundaries which inhibit both individual agency and connections between people. Her aspiration for next year is to design a collaborative project where fluidity is the organisational principle. By enacting these qualities within the artistic process, participants might continue this ‘mode of being’, beyond the work. She aspires to show how the artistic process is analogous to the process of living.

Read More
ContributorRebecca Edery
Sophie + Rachael

Sophie Lindsey and Rachael Disbury have been collaborating since 2016. Through loose and seasonal art making, creative conversations and their personal friendship, they question conventions of food, participation, labour and communication.

Sophie is an artist-curator based in Wales, part of the artist group SUll Collective and collaborative duo Site Sit. She works responsively across text, GIFs, performance, workshops, video, and public-space interventions.

Rachael is an artworker based in the Scottish Borders, with a focus on social practice. She is a Director of Alchemy Film & Arts, a cultural organisation invested in film as a means of generating discussion and strengthening community.

Read More
ContributorSophie + Rachael
Lady Kitt + Dan Russell

Dan and Kitt are artists based in Newcastle upon Tyne. They facilitate the Social Practice Surgery https://www.lladykitt.com/blank and have an ongoing collaborative chatting/thinking/walking practice investigating stuff relating to:

· Creative- intimacies

· Live(ly)ness in research

· Mutual support in social practice

· Social-ness in institutions


Twitter: @dandidthis "| @Lady_Kitt

Instagram: @daniel_stewart_russell "| @lady.kitt1

Read More
ContributorKitt + Dan
Lexa Walsh

Lexa Walsh is an artist, cultural worker and experience maker. Walsh makes projects, exhibitions, publications and objects, employing social engagement, institutional critique, and radical hospitality. She creates platforms for interaction across hierarchies, representing multiple voices and inventing new ways of belonging, not only for people, but also for collections and archives. Walsh has done numerous exhibitions, tours and artist residencies internationally. Currently, she is launching the Bay Area Contemporary Arts Archive (BACAA), and is a virtual Artist in Residence at the Frank Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.

Read More
ContributorLexa Walsh
Lena Chen

Lena Chen is a Chinese American writer and artist creating performances and socially engaged art. Awarded “Best Emerging Talent” at B3 Biennial of the Moving Image (Frankfurt), her work has appeared at Transmediale (Berlin), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), Baltimore Museum of Art, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Derry~Londonderry), Museum of Contemporary Art (Jacksonville), among others.

She has been awarded grants and residencies from Sundance Institute, UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, Millay Colony for the Arts, Office of Public Art, Burning Man Global Arts Fund, Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and Arthur Boskamp Foundation. She has spoken at Oxford, Yale, Stanford, and SXSW.

Based between Pittsburgh and Berlin, she earned a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University, and is a MFA candidate at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art. She is founder of Heal Her, an expressive arts initiative that supports survivors of gender-based violence.

Read More
ContributorLena Chen
Harvey Dimond

Harvey Dimond (b.1997) is a British-Barbadian researcher and writer living and working between Athens and Glasgow. Their writing examines the intersections of the climate crisis, anti-Blackness and queerphobia.

Read More
ContributorHarvey Dimond
Denise Laura Baker

Denise Baker is a photojournalist, documentary, and portrait photographer. Her work focuses on social and environmental issues and draws on influences from her previous career as an ethnographic psychologist, where she interviewed and collected the stories of the people with whom she worked.

Denise continues to collect and tell stories though her photography, matching them with recorded or written dialogue, sound and moving image. She is currently working on a long-term project exposing the impact of the High-Speed Rail (HS2) project on the communities lining the proposed route, and frequently photographs environment and climate change activists, Black Lives Matter Protests

Although Denise received her first camera at the age of eleven, she only began exhibiting her work in 2016. She has exhibited widely in Wales where she lived until earlier this year holding her first solo exhibition as part of LLAWN 2019 (Llandudno Arts Weekend).

Denise has received Arts Council support for her documentary work, has been featured as an emerging female voice in film. She received an honorary mention at PX3 2020 (Prix de la Photographie Paris) for her lockdown project ‘The Bottom Field’ a story of survival in unprecedented times and most recently won PX3 State of the World 2021.

https://deniselaurabaker.co.uk

Read More
ContributorDenise Laura Baker
Ashokkumar Mistry

Ashokkumar Mistry is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator working across the UK and internationally. At the core of his work Mistry explores conflict and its ability to create new realities. Conflict is framed in different ways; destructive, necessary, cyclical, transformative and creative. By subverting situations and technologies using conflict, he challenges conventional ways of making and viewing art.

“As a person who sees and experiences the world differently some would say I am in dispute with it, I would argue that I am compelled to provide a unique perspective”.

Mistry didn’t identify as neurodivergent until he was in his 40s, and it was a seminal moment for his artistic practice. Since then, he has focused on researching and writing about disability and neurodiversity through examining his own internal conflicts. His writing encompasses direct research and personal experiences relating to neurodiversity with a view to sharing experiences and changing attitudes.

He is currently Associate Artist with Disability Arts Online, a Development Artist with The Spark Arts, a Fellow of the International Association Of Art Critics (AICA-UK), and a member of the Wysing Arts Centre’s Accessibility Steering Group, part of DASH Arts’ Future Curators Programme. Mistry was commissioned to write for British Art Network, Shape Arts and Unlimited.

Mistry has been commissioned by the BBC and a number of galleries including the Lowry in Manchester and Southbank Centre London to create artworks and exhibitions.

As a curator, he has worked with Inspirate’s ‘An Indian Summer’ for a number of years delivering innovative and thought provoking exhibitions. Mistry has also developed and presented a number of exhibitions and performances in Taiwan for National Cheng Kung University and A-Glow Space.

Contact/Follow -

Ashokkumar D Mistry

Artist-Writer-Curator

art.ashokdmistry@gmail.com

07968 977 820

http://ashokdmistry.com

Twitter/Instagram @ashokdmistry



Read More
ContributorAshokkumar Mistry
Paul Drury-Bradey

Paul Drury-Bradey works across culture and social impact, helping creative people and places. He was born in Scunthorpe and today lives in Scarborough. His career started in local newspapers before he moved to Shoreditch in 2007 to work for an arts agency called Idea Generation. He spent twelve-years in London in a variety of arts and a social impact roles before family reasons brought him back to Yorkshire about three-years-ago. Since moving back up north, Paul has worked as a sole trader - doing a mix of writing, publicity and strategy. Recent clients have included East Street Arts in Leeds, the indie film company Studio Canal, and the Middlesbrough Art Weekender. He recently started a future of storytelling fellowship with Screen Yorkshire which is exploring new and experimental ways of telling stories across alternative platforms. Paul has completed four international projects with the British Council's Creative Entrepreneur programme too.

- www.cultureandsocialimpact.co.uk



Read More
ContributorPaul Drury-Bradey