Intention and Flux

Bettina John produces art works in an array of mediums ranging from drawing, photography and video through to performance. Born in East Germany ten years before the reunification with West Germany she has undergone a lot of changes most notably that from a communist system to a capitalist. These major events have shaped her probably most importantly in her interest in choices life presents one with and subsequently how those choices one makes form one’s life. It comes as no surprise that she has been taking up all chances to explore various different lives. She lived in mega-cities like Berlin, New York City and Rio De Janeiro and visited others like New Delhi, Istanbul and São Paulo to further her art practise. With her Alter Egos, an expression of the various options to become different people, she travelled around the world to create work, exhibit and perform it. Her training as a fashion and costume designer gave her a solid fundament from which she departed after studying at Goldsmiths University in London New Media Art. Bettina John exhibited in group shows and self initiated shows in London, Rio De Janeiro, New York and Halle, her hometown in Germany. She was funded by the german art council and the IFA to go on artist residencies and develop her work.

 

Alison Gibbons Watt is a visual artist and textile print designer who develops collections of prints and drawings that cross between art and design. Her design style is influenced by her background as a fine artist painter. Alison studied BA Fine Art painting at Grays School of Art, Aberdeen followed by an MA in European Fine Art in Barcelona with Winchester School of Art. Alison has a large archive of textile prints that she has created over the last ten years, exhibiting them in the UK and internationally, often developed in collaboration with or for world-renowned fashion labels.

Her prints and drawings explore a variety of mediums predominantly ink, using the nature of the medium to express a reflection of the human spirit. Her designs have been shown at London Fashion Week and New York Fashion Week whilst also being shown seasonally at Key Textile Shows in Paris, New York and Italy. She has won several awards including The Royal Scottish Academy Painting Prize and has a painting held in the Robert Gordon’s University Collection.

 

Ricca Kawai Kalderon was born in Japan. Having been brought up by her grandfather who was an award winning Kimono weaver and artist whose contemporaries included Kenkichi Tomimoto, Shouji Hamada and Keisuke Serizawa, she was exposed to an artistic environment from an early age. By living in the countryside, and nature forming the subject matter of her grandfather’s art, Kawai Kalderon was deeply influenced by the nature she saw around her and encouraged to find her own way of experiencing it. As a child, she was taught Aikido and Calligraphy and in adulthood she has experienced G Force 2 by flying combat aircraft, climbed mountains in Japan and scuba dived in oceans – through all of which she has developed a heightened understanding of invisible energy flow. Kawai Kalderon graduated from Musashino Art University,Tokyo. She studied advanced life drawing at St. Martin’s School of Art, and from 1989 to 1991 she worked at Pentagram Design whilst developing her Fine Art practice. Kawai Kalderon has had several solo exhibitions in Japan including at the legendary Gallery Ueda and Isetan Gallery in Tokyo. She has been included in group exhibitions at The Museum Tokyu Bunkamura; Tochigi Prefectural Museum of FineArt;and Wakita Museum of Art in Japan. In 1995 she was awarded the Shinjin Fine Art Award and was nominated for Goto Memorial Foundation by IkkoTanaka.In 1998 she won the Sainsbury Art Scholarship exhibition prize at the Oxo Tower. Her work is in public and private collections worldwide including Neiman-Marcus USA, and she has also worked closely with the interior designer David Champion on private commissions.

Amy Bridges is a contemporary painter and installation artist living and working in London. Her work is sensitive to the ideas of beauty, human perception and the processes involved in the creation of art. After studying fashion design in England she moved to Paris from which she returned to England after five years. Part of her practise is to look into neurasthenics, psychology and philosophy. These ideas often form the experiments and variables to manipulate the creation and outcome of her artwork frequently produced as a series. She works with different materials and techniques such as painting with oil on canvas, stitching onto canvas, cutting and sculpting. She has exhibited her work in galleries and unconventional spaces as well as applied it to a commercial environment as an illustrator.