Storytelling in clay and print
Our R&D proposal is to explore collaborating on our studio practice sharing our thought processes and skills, learning from each other through cross fertilisation.
We’ve identified common themes in our practices : storytelling, collage, expressive markmaking, humour and imagination.
The project will give us time to work together without worry, allow us to discuss and move our ideas forward with our creative and communication skills and help us cross fertilise our respective practices in clay and print .
Developing work together
Our collaboration on the Metamorphosis project run by artists at City Arts Newbury in the piece entitled Pandora’s Hope proved fruitful with each other understanding the others process and ideas.
We want to have more time to exchange ideas and explore common themes together. Preliminary topics to explore are storytelling, sketchbook practice, character, collage, line and colour. However other themes may present themselves in our exploration.
During our R&D exchanges, we plan to work separately and together, sometimes blurring the boundaries of our two different practices, combining, merging or separating them as appropriate..
We would relish the opportunity to work more closely together. There are lots of places where our ideas and ways of expressing them overlap, plenty of places where they don’t and a huge amount of scope for cross-fertilisation.
We’ve been looking for an appropriate grant for a while. We’d like more time and space to explore ideas and to teach and learn from each other, to push our own practice forward and to collaborate.
This Arts Council Research and Development Grant seems to fit our needs.
The process of working together on the grant application has been quite cathartic. It’s left us with great sense of anticipation at what we might be able to achieve with some financial support
Who are we?
Isabel Carmona Andreu
Artist Statement
I draw, paint and print. I witness stories on location and retell them through printmaking. As images move through the printing process, stories shift, morph and are reimagined. Printing lets me abstract and simplify, so the key elements can speak for themselves. Complex situations are condensed into single images, layered with colour, contradiction and humour.
I love reading and writing, and many of my works draw on existing texts to express emotion visually. Formerly an architect, I’m interested in space and how people inhabit it — how interactions unfold within built environments, and how we respond to traces of past lives in historic buildings and ruins.
Recently, I’ve been working with local ruined monuments, imagining their former inhabitants through what remains. Earlier projects used printed vignettes to explore Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Alongside this, I’m always sketching everyday situations: friends meeting, people waiting or going about their lives.
Qualifications and experience
Formerly an architect, since 2018 I have dedicated myself to my artist career with focus on drawing/sketching and collagraph printmaking. In 2021, I developed my multiplate collagraph printing with help of a DYCP grant and I have since taught collagraph workshops at various local community art centres.
I have taught sketching and drawing for over 10 years and share my love of sketching on location both locally and internationally via Pushing Your Sketching Boundaries.
I organise various local exhibitions mainly at City Arts Newbury and have taken part on group exhibitions with Open Studios in West Berkshire, Hampshire and Oxford.
Contact Isabel
Email: info(at)isacarmona-art.com
web: isacarmona-art.com
Instagram (printmaking): isacarmona-art
Instagram (sketching): isacarand
Katherine Kingdon
Artist statement
Years of studying and teaching art have left me with a deep interest in the nature of creative thinking and its relationship to play and storytelling. I’m currently exploring this in my own work.
By using domestic ceramics as my canvas, I can place an artwork directly into the viewer’s hands. This creates an experience which is both haptic and visual. I use human form, ambiguity and suggestions of narrative to set off a natural process of interpretation and storytelling, as the viewer holds and turns the piece.
My aim is to create work which is non-threatening and cross-culturally relatable, exploring universal experiences and using humour and elements of magical realism to promote conversation and storytelling.
Qualifications and experience
BA in 3D Design (Ceramics and Glass), MA in Applied Art and Visual Culture and a Secondary PGCE in Art with Special Needs as my second subject.
I’ve taught Art and Ceramics for over 30 year and have run both a secondary school art department and a sixth form college ceramics department. I’ve also always kept a sketchbook and created and exhibited my own work.
I am passionate about access to the arts. Alongside my paid work I work in the voluntary arts sector, I have experience of organising exhibitions, running workshops and enabling people of all ages to access the visual arts locally.
