Louise's Story
Thank you to all the hundreds of vistors who came to our exciting open house venue, Dymocks End, Ditchling, as part of the 2023 Brighton Festival Art Trails. It was amazing and wonderful. I am returning for May 2024 with new work… We also welcomed visitors for the Lewes Artwave festival, the first 3 weekends in September 23. Thrilled to be chosen as the cover artist for September’s The Lewesian magazine too! Look out for variations on The Vulnerable Planet interactive garden installations of silk prints…and a rustic, authentic studio experience in May. Also some London shows up coming …watch this space…
After two and a half wonderful years at TDS Workshops, Louise has now set up her new workspace at Dymocks End Studio, Ditchling. Lasting friendships and the priviledge of being part of the fantastic art community in historic Ditchling and Sussex will go on…..she is proud to be one of the Ditchling art trail reps as part of the vibrant Brighton art scene. Louise is also thrilled to have be recently selected to be a member of the international art community at ArtCan, and with two amazing London shows already this year, including at the Bermondsey Project Space, she is looking forward to exhibiting around the globe with them.
Now an award winning emerging artist, with an increasingly large volume of sales to collectors, Louise was originally educated as a scientist, reluctantly putting her drive to make art to one side while life needed her elsewhere. After having a family, Louise was first able to formally study art as a part-time Foundation degree student at West Notts College, Mansfield, UK. Despite life’s hurdles, she was finally able to complete a Masters in Fine Art at the University of Lincoln, UK, graduating in early 2019, with Distinction. Louise is passionate about the materiality and intimate physicality of her practice, particularly expedient, novel painting techniques and drawing, but she is also a sculptor in various mediums, including silk, clay and bronze. Emerging socio-political themes of human and ecological vulnerability, diversity and the power of human choice are referenced in her interest in making and installing public works. Through the unique communication of intuitive art making, she strives to allow both herself and her audiences to enter the realms of the sublime: “when the magic happens”. She is concerned about discrimination against and abuse of women and girls: working in the UK and Internationally through work for Siroptimists International, and by sponsoring young girls and women in Uganda. She is also now keen to support older women, whose voices are often rendered invisible.
Louise has travelled widely, visiting, working and teaching in Africa, Asia, Canada, Australia, the United States and Europe.
Louise won the 2017 Artescape Award. She was then selected as an Associate to the renowned Backlit Studios in Nottingham and is the author-publisher of Art Zines "Parergon". For family reasons, 2019 saw Louise relocating her studio to Sussex and in early 2020, she was accepted into the acclaimed Turner Dumbrell Foundation Workshops in the famous Sussex village of Ditchling, historically important for art and making. 2022 brought the exciting opening of her new Artist Open Houses venue, The Dymocks End Studio, at home, as part of the Brighton Festival Art trail. A large, deteriorating, outdoor silk and steel installation, “Vulnerable Planet”, postponed due to the Coronavirus, was exhibited here throughout the Brighton Festival, and a new version will be seen at the Lewes Artwave festival in 2023. Visitors will again be able to experience the beauty of swathes of glorious silk panels within rusting steel doorways.
"The Vulnerables" was begun after a life-changing family accident. It is an ongoing series of unique, fragile porcelain ceramics, mostly in the great "blue and white" tradition, enhanced by gold, and variously staged, outdoors or spot lit, and it references an emerging interest in the vulnerability of humanity, diversity and the power of human choice. Louise began this work in 2018 but the narratives are now startlingly more relevant than ever. With sales to collectors from all over the UK and abroad, the story is continually developing…
A recurring theme in all of Louise's work is her desire for audiences to find their own naratives within the mysteries and magic of her works. Her research work touches on communication in many forms that include verbal, non verbal, written, tactile and visual. She argues that fine art can provide otherwise inexpressible knowledge that can enhance research and debate across all faculties. As the author of an Art Zine, Parergon, Louise promotes her passionate belief in the value of art and art education in advancing human knowledge.
Louise is a colourist underpinned by a lifelong practice of drawing. In both her figurative and abstract work, she applies colour with a carefully constructed juxsta positioning of hue, tone and repetition, designed to manipulate the onlooker's unconscious to create emotional responses and to stimulate narratives and discussion. Her unusual scientific background allows Louise to blend research practice from across many disciplines, for example knowledge of the physics of light and waves in the use of paint and she makes many references to science. Her large 2018 "Vulnerable Sky" public installation was erected between the sister faculties of art and science at the University of Lincoln.
Louise enjoys developing novel, often expedient and primitive techniques, ( she counts contemporary London choreographer, Wayne MacGregor, among her influences…) but often pays homage to a favourite artist, Malevich, in her work. She has also been heavily influenced by the wonderful work of the indigenous peoples she has been lucky to meet in Australia, Africa and North America. There are also visible influences from a diversity of western artists such as Keifer, Pollock, Barlow, Richter, Hepworth, Hodgkin, Cragg, Warren, Tucker and even Carravagio. She very much admires the works of Ai Weiwei.
After a childhood in the East End of London and Essex, Louise gained a place at grammar school and became the first person in her family to go to a university, where she (somewhat reluctantly, always sneaking off to make art) trained as a doctor. She later gravitated towards postgraduate qualifications in philosophy which enabled her to move into more creative work in medical ethics where she advocated listening to hidden voices in medical decision making. Her life experiences continue to inform her artistic practice.
Louise researches through practice using many methodologies. Narratives around aspects of time and the aquisition of human knowledge are introduced alongside arguments for the value of imagination in human experience and the bridging of science and art. Her MA dissertation was entitled "Mental Spaces and Possible Becomings in a Fine Art Practice: towards a denial of time", parts of which are now pubished in the art zine “Parergon”. Louise is interested in the slow degeneration of all matter and how chaos tries to reform into order (there is often a hidden grid or series of squares in her works…) and the effect of human interference. Her Detourned Series of deliberately joyful and naive semi destructed paintings take influence from the Situation Internationist painters like Asger Jorn. Louise's Parergon Series of larger heavily abstracted paintings, influenced by the writings of the philosopher Derrida, also reflects her varied research around knowledge and the Sublime, and often by personal lived moments connected to nature. Louise sculpts in wax, ceramics, glass, plaster and wood and her First Edition bronzes have now sold out. She embraces happy and chaotic accidents in her energetic processes, encouraging audience participation, in her Jigsaw Series, handling the contours of ceramics or by walking through portals of silk and steel. She is emerging as a maker of site specific, public installations, alongside a new body of 2D work that is often heavily layered, textured and tactile as well.