The Artists

Drywells Farm with Sue Peach
Jennie Hayes, Lead.  Jennie is interested in the role of photography in relation to memory which can be seen in some of her earlier work.  She is also interested in narrative and the stories that can be told through the photographic image.  Her current work combines photography and text in the form of handmade books.  Past work has been related to issues around memory and loss, the mother/daughter relationship and female identity. Jennie has an MA in Women's Studies from the University of Warwick and was founder researcher for Iris, the Contemporary Womens' Photography Archive at Staffordshire University.  She was also a founder member of the women's photography group, 'Her Camera Has Wings'.  Jennie lives in Winkleigh, North Devon. Read Jennie's Final Report (pdf) .

Louise Evans, Apprentice.  Louise uses her photography as a hybrid form between art and craft.  She applies photographic images and scraps of scanned documents to metals and textiles, combined with found objects and clothing.  Her work explores the theory of family photography and issues around narratives of identity.  She is interested in how family photographs can move from being personal to collective history, evocative of an era or a place.  She uses images and objects to explore the role of women in society, women's work and domesticity.  She received her MA in M.A. Jewellery, Silversmithing and Related Products from the University of Central England, Birmingham in 2005.  Louise lives in Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire.

Louise has sent this information about her current work:

"...The craft fair has a website and I am exhibiting as an 'emerging maker' in the Springboard feature area on week 1 (3-8 Oct) - you can find out more at www.craftsonline.org.uk/origin/springboard On this site my details show the MA show website which was all I had this summer, but as from today my newly designed very own website has gone online so my work can now be seen at www.louisefrancesevans.com (just in time for me to tell visitors at the craft fair next week and give out my new postcards and business cards - phew!..."

Wingstone Farm with Juliette Rich
Tot Foster, Lead.  Tot currently works in two areas, both of which combine making films with education.  Firstly she produces/directs and shoots videos, to bring learning materials alive.  This work covers everything from videos asking people to take up the Arts, to mentoring young peoples film projects, to filming a robotic milking machine!  Most of this work is for the Open University where Tot also develops interactive DVDRoms.  Recently Tot’s work has been shortlisted for two educational media awards.  Secondly, Tot is a part-time Senior Lecturer at Kingston University in the School of Design, leading a new BA course called Television:  Design and Production where students learn all sorts of programme making techniques and can experiment with them.  In all own her productions Tot is interested in the creation and mixing of visual textures –– such as bringing home-made animated cut-outs to documentary, or using super-8 film projected onto woodchip wallpaper to add atmosphere to dance.  She also intrigued by new narrative forms, particularly sets of very short films –– micro-narratives –– which can come together in different ways to create meaning.  Tot attended the National Film and TV School ('94-'97) where she was awarded the three year Post Office/BAFTA Scholarship to study Documentary Direction.  Tot freelanced as a director, sound recordist and a camerawoman, and then worked at the BBC as a Producer for several years.  She has directed more than 25 programmes for BBC2 and Channel 4, and produced and developed many more.  Tot lives in Bristol.

Maddy Pethick, Apprentice.  Maddy responds to locations and spaces through research, photography, digital imaging, found objects, book-works and installation.  The camera is central to her practice as a framing device along with the computer as creative tool, archive and site of exchange.  She enjoys colour, simple details, tender stories, shared memories, family photographs, and cherished objects.  She has completed a bursary project for Beaford Arts in which she used photography to explore a Norfolk sugar factory and recently showed new work in a beach hut at GeekFest in Dorset where she explored retro Poole Pottery ware through the use of found photographs.  She graduated from Dartington College of Arts in 2005.  Maddy lives in South Brent, Devon.

Batworthy Farm with Mary Lou North
Anthea Nicholson, Lead.  Anthea is a writer with a long background as a visual artist.  Her current projects include a novel set in the post-perestroika period, 1994, at the end of a civil war in Georgia.  Anthea and a partner in Tbilisi are currently building a small house on the edge of a village just outside the city.  Other recent work has included an exhibition of rain prints on fax paper in which people from around the world posted or faxed the results to her along with their own observations.  In her travels she has often come across a sense of the outsider, especially in the Caucasus where great changes are occurring and there is a strong desire to belong, for example, to the EU, countered with a deeply felt national identity.  She is intrigued by the notion of belonging and the question of identity.  To Anthea, freedom and estrangement seem to go hand in hand when one chooses not to follow the given paths.  With these observations and interactions the result is that much of her work has been informed by a sense of shared humanity across political, cultural and linguistic borders as well as a sense of the natural world as a binding force across disparate experience.  In 2005 she completed an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University.  She lives in Bristol.

Penny Klepuszewska, Apprentice.  Penny is a photographer.  Intrinsic to her work are the details and scenes of contemporary human existence, whether actual or fictitious.  The ‘photographic worlds’ she creates are both self-contained fictions and accounts of the real world which often incorporate slightly obscured personal experiences or found occurrences taken from newspaper articles, stories, conversations or everyday life.  A recent project, 'End. (Part 1)', was based on the work of the ‘Protection of Property Department’.  This is a local council department that deals with the possessions of those who die alone.  With no next of kin to take care of their belongings, it is left to this department to deal with the evidence of their unclaimed lives, the traces of their human existence. 'End. (Part 1)' considers both the fragility and the brutality of contemporary life in work that evokes human presence but actually depicts human absence.  Penny has an MA in Photography from the London College of Communication.  She lives in Apperley Bridge, West Yorkshire.