Art by Post: Of Home and Hope online gallery
Art by Post Community
The largest collective of artists that have contributed to the Art by Post exhibition and online gallery is the 4500 strong community that has grown up around the project. They have overwhelmed and inspired us with their creativity and passion.
In addition, we commissioned a number of professional artists to create the Art by Post booklets, as well as particular elements in the exhibition which respond to the participants' work.
The exhibition
Persilia Caton is a London-based curator and writer. Her practice is artist-led with a strong background in commissioning, public programming and projects that extend beyond the gallery through socially engaged collaborations and situations in the public realm. Caton has recently delivered programmes at Wellcome Collection, SPACE and The Photographers’ Gallery.
Zoe Kreye, based in Vancouver, Canada, works in sculpture, dance/movement, drawing and somatics. Her installations, performance, workshops, rituals and journeys invite people to embody the transformative capacity of image and sensation while encouraging a deeper self-reflection within themselves and society. Recent projects include: Vancouver Art Gallery; Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver; WAAP, Vancouver; SPACE, London; Kamloops Art Gallery; grunt gallery, Vancouver; and <rotor>, Graz.
Sofia Niazi is an artist and illustrator working and living between London and Birmingham. She currently runs OOMK (with Rose Nordin and Heiba Lamara), a community Risograph print studio in Newham, Rabbits Road Press. She employs various digital, hand- drawn and traditional craft techniques in her work and is currently exploring themes around housing and technology. Niazi has produced work for South London Gallery, Serpentine, Museum of London, Barbican and The Guardian, among others.
Ed Prosser is a self-shooting film-maker, editor and award- winning radio producer based in London. His focus is socially conscious work. He directs and produces video content for brands, campaigns and cultural organisations, with recent work including large digital projects for Greta Thunberg, the Labour Party, Southbank Centre, Hayward Gallery and Arts Council Collection.
Paloma Proudfoot is a London-based artist whose practice includes a variety of media, ranging from textile and ceramic sculptures to performance. Proudfoot is co-director of the performance group Stasis, co-founder of the Proudick platform and often collaborates with Saelia Aparicio. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: TJ Boulting, London; Soy Capitán, Berlin; Editorial Projects, Vilnius; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London; and Hannah Barry Gallery, London.
Maruša Sagadin is an artist based in Vienna. Her work is built on the connections and collisions between sculpture, architecture, urban space, gender and language. Her installations and objects appear in both indoor and outdoor settings, most recently at Christine König Gallerie, Vienna; Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon, Denmark; SPACE, London; NADA, NYC; Austrian Cultural Forum New York, NYC; Syndicate, Cologne; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana; and Grazer Kunstverein, Graz.
Luke Squire is a self-taught artist based in Devon. His paintings, drawings and poetry are inspired by his rural surroundings, his memories and emotions. The basic act of mark making helps to clarify Squire’s thoughts and improve his general mood when feeling a tad manic, whereas writing poetry focuses his mind on exploring and playing with themes and words, switching off the busy head and producing a feeling of calm. Squire’s paintings have been exhibited in waiting and counselling rooms and one of his poems was included in the outdoor exhibition Everyday Heroes in 2020 at the Southbank Centre.
Joey Yu is an artist, illustrator and animator based in London. Her drawings are imbued with optimism and depict the beauty in everyday moments while capturing the essence of distinct places. In both rural and urban settings, her narratives focus on celebrating the human experience. Yu has worked on projects for the New York Times, The Guardian, Tate, The British Council, Hermès and Ermenegildo Zegna, and has attended residencies in Seoul, South Korea, and Trancoso, Brazil.
Bernadette Russell is an author and storyteller. In 2013 at the Southbank Centre she began a project called Dear Stranger. It finds ways for people to have fun, express empathy and share stories with each other, while discovering what we all have in common. Over the past year, she has been focusing on how finding our hopes and acting on them can make us happier, and empower us to make positive and creative changes in our lives, in our communities and in the world. Russell's fifth book, How to Be Hopeful, is out now.
Art by Post booklet artists
Shazea Quraishi (Booklet 1)
Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistani-born Canadian poet and translator. You can often find her writing and reading in the National Poetry Library here at the Southbank Centre.
Rebecca Strickson (Booklet 2)
Rebecca Strickson is an artist and illustrator based in Kent. Her work explores the power of community and working together, and the strength and fun of colour and pattern.
Jacqueline Saphra (Booklet 3)
Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright and teacher. Recent collections are All My Mad Mothers, shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize, and Dad, Remember You Are Dead. A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller and Veritas: Poems after Artemisia were published by Hercules Editions. Her most recent play, The Noises, was nominated for a Standing Ovation Award. One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets was published by Nine Arches Press in 2021.
Seiwa Cunningham (Booklet 4)
Seiwa Cunningham is a textile artist. She has a keen interest in alternative methods of printing and image transfer, working with layered textures, fabrics and mediums. Her tools are paints, vintage papers, ephemera, stitch and fabric. She recently worked on small dresses onto which she recorded her early memories, using photographic imagery and text on fabric, which she calls ‘reminiscence dresses’ or sketches. What she is trying to do is capture memories quickly – emotions, times and places.
Bernadette Russell (Booklet 5)
Bernadette Russell is an author and storyteller. In 2013, in The Clore Ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall, she began a project called Dear Stranger; a fun way for people to express empathy and share stories with each other, while discovering what they all have in common. This year, she’s been focusing on how identifying our hopes and acting upon them can make us happier. It can also empower us to make positive changes in our lives, our communities and the world. She’s inspired by the words of poet Ben Okri: ‘stories can conquer fear... they can make the heart bigger’.
Cherelle Sappleton and Barbara Clarke (Booklet 6)
Cherelle Sappleton is a mixed-media visual artist. Her art practice is as much about processing her experiences as it is about creating something beautiful to look at. She believes being creative is not about being a ‘good artist’. First and foremost, it’s about taking the time to be in your body.
Barbara Clarke was born in Grenada in the Caribbean. Her head teacher, Miss Louison, taught her a valuable lesson: ‘Do not bring me a problem. There is a solution for everything. Whenever you encounter a recurring decimal, put down a full stop’. With this mindset, Clarke felt unstoppable. She trained to become a nurse in Yorkshire. Ever since, she has been dedicated to helping people and serving her local community. Now retired, she feels more can be done to work across generations, and that having the right mindset can help you enjoy your space and inspire you to be creative.
Joseph Coehlo & Rob White (Booklet 7)
Joseph Coelho is a multi-award-winning children’s author and poet. His debut children’s collection, Werewolf Club Rules, was the winner of the CLPE Poetry Award. His poetry collection Overheard in a Tower Block went on to numerous long- and short-listings, including the Carnegie Medal.
Rob White is a photographer and reminiscence therapy practitioner based in London. Both as a spectator and player, he is a self-confessed sports enthusiast. Over the past four years, White has delivered a series of creative programmes aimed at helping people to connect using the positive power of sport.
Bibo and Brian Keeley (Booklet 8)
Bibo and Brian Keeley are an artist duo based in Aberdeen. Brian’s serious illness and subsequent heart transplant in 2013 brought many changes and restrictions into their lives. Their art practice is informed by those shared personal experiences and themes around the need for healing, allowing time and space for reflection, re-thinking and connecting. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic they have been shielding together, due to Brian being clinically classified as ‘extremely vulnerable’. They have spent a lot of time in the small garden of their city flat, which has been a source of inspiration and creativity. They have created a short film for UNFIX, Glasgow’s festival of performance art and ecology, and been commissioned to create the centrepiece for the Edinburgh Climate Festival 2021.
Tim Steiner (Booklet 9)
Tim Steiner is Artistic Director of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Hear and Now project, which brings together adults living with dementia, their partners and carers, young people and musicians from the orchestra. Steiner makes music with people. Some of these people are professionals, some amateurs, some beginners. The people in the room are the people in the band. Sometimes the music is brand new; sometimes it is old. He always tries to make it unique.
Cheddar Gorgeous, Anna FC Smith, Samantha Edwards (Booklet 10)
Cheddar Gorgeous is a drag artist and idealist. They believe life is too short to just be one person.
Anna FC Smith is a multimedia artist preoccupied by history, ritual, folk art, public space and power.
Samantha Edwards, also known as Phoebe Foxtrot, is an illustrator, craftivist and community artist.
HOME, Manchester's centre for contemporary theatre, film, art and music brought together these three very unique artists to create Booklet 10 for Art by Post, entitled You Exist.
Suzie Larke (Booklet 11)
Suzie Larke is a fine art photographer based in Cardiff. After graduating with a degree in photography and working as a commercial photographer, she became interested in digital art and taught herself photo-editing skills using online tutorials.
Through her creative portraiture she explores identity, emotion and the human condition. She uses photography to take the everyday and skew it. By combining several photographs so that they appear as a single image that defies logic, she plays with the fine line between the possible and impossible. This is known as ‘magical realism’.
Portrait commission photographer bios
Elena Gallina
Elena Gallina grew up in Kosovo in the aftermath of the war there, has since lived and worked in various conflict settings across the Middle East, and is currently based in Oxford, England on a research fellowship. Her photography explores the quiet moments in often misunderstood and sensationalised environments. She believes colour and beauty inform truth.
My Linh Le
My Linh Le is a UK-based freelance photographer and photographic artist specialising in creative spaces – museums and galleries, art events, performances and projects – as well as independent artists. Her personal practice is fluid as she connects through thought and emotion and is drawn to the transitional in-betweens of absence and presence. She is a lover of nature, of light, of shadow, and has also worked locally and internationally for charities, social enterprises and NGOs.
Elle Brotherhood
Elle Brotherhood is a photographer and facilitator who has worked in and around Manchester for the past 15 years, documenting creatives, independent companies and commercial clients. Brotherhood has experience in photography and also works with set design and art direction.
Guy Oliver
Margate-based Guy Oliver is an artist and film-maker who works across various media. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2015. His work explores notions of masculinity, identity, comedy and tragedy, using a highly personal but irreverent methodology. In 2020 he was selected for the Jerwood Film and Video Umbrella Award. Recent solo presentations include The Year Everyone Died, New World Symphony, The Bass x Daata at Soundscape Park, Miami, USA (2021); Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020: Hindsight, Jerwood Space, London (2020); and And You Thought I Was Bad?, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2018).
Rosie Barnes
Rosie Barnes is a fine art/documentary photographer making work connected to the environment and our relationship with the natural world. She also has a particular interest in family, disability, and community. She is the author of photobook Understanding Stanley – Looking through Autism, a highly personal, long-term project about her eldest son, which has been exhibited at venues including the National Portrait Gallery. Barnes was a contributing photographer on the 209 Women project – part of the centenary commemorations of the suffragette movement. She is currently working on a portrait commission for the Wellcome Collection about autistic women.
Kate Elliott
Kate Elliott is a London-based photographer and visual artist. Elliott's work has been exhibited and published internationally, including The National Portrait Gallery and The Photographers’ Gallery in London, and The Museum of Moscow. Her photos have featured in publications including British Journal of Photography, Source Magazine, Uncertain States, The Independent, The Guardian, Grazia, Hufvudstadsbladet, Capricious and Photographica Japan. Elliott's work explores ideas surrounding identity and representation. She uses photography as a way of storytelling and, through her work, she raises questions about the relationship between the self and other, the public and private, and the natural and built environments.
Kuba Ryniewicz
Kuba Ryniewicz is a photographer based in Newcastle upon Tyne. His work challenges traditional portraiture and travel chronicles to narrate stories in the context of landscape, history, fashion and broader culture. His work has featured in magazines including Fantastic Man, Vogue, Luncheon and The Plant. Ryniewicz's artwork has been exhibited at Somerset House, London and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Ryniewicz’s first monograph is published in November 2021.
Colin Thom
Colin Thom is based in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is a full-time lecturer in photography at North East Scotland College. Working in series, his current area of interest falls within the natural and built environment and our relationship with the different spaces we inhabit.
Eoin Carey
Eoin Carey is an Irish portrait and documentary photographer based in Glasgow, whose work ranges from people to place to performance. He creates permanent images with colour, humour, subtlety and emotion. Carey shoots creative portraiture for editorial, publicity and advertising. He really enjoys working with people and the challenges and nuances of representing them in an image, embracing photography’s capacity for storytelling and always exploring ways to engage people and the human element at the centre of a photo. His work has been published in The Guardian, The Times, FT, The Stage, Outside Magazine and She Shreds, along with many poster campaigns.
Robert Darch
Robert Darch is a British artist-photographer based in the south-west of England. His practice is motivated by the experience of place, in which the physical geography and material cultures of places merge with impressions from contemporary culture that equally influence perception. From these varied sources, both real and imagined, he constructs narratives that help contextualise a personal response to place.
Darch is an associate lecturer in photography at Plymouth University. He has recently been awarded a major commission by Beaford Arts to document Ash dieback in Devon. He recently published his second book, Vale, under his own imprint, LIDO books.
Collection
Find out how our Art by Post community responded to the creative activities from the booklets in our exhibition, Art by Post: Of Home and Hope.
Installation Photo Gallery
A selection of artworks, audio recordings and films presented alongside newly commissioned large-scale tapestries and an illustrated publication. Sculptural furniture and batiks create a domestic setting where visitors can engage in making and posting their artworks.