An Overview:

Small House Two

Artists in Small House Two:

Roof terrace: Jack Woodward @acardboardmonkey

Attic: Peisley @peisleyart, Penny Hallas @pennyhallas, Caro Williams @carowilliamsartist, Kirsty Hall @kirstyhallartist, Lucie Fitzpatrick @luciefitzcreate, Sara Ulfsparre @saraulfsparre

1st Floor: Ruth Franklin @ruthfranklin_artist, Yvonne Kendall @yvonne.kendall.artist, Sara Ulfsparre @saraulfsparre, Peisley @peisleyart, Lucie Fitzpatrick @craftymissfitz

Ground floor: Octavia Milner @octaviamilner, Sara Ulfsparre @saraulfsparre, Kirsty Hall @kirstyhallartist, Ruth Franklin @ruthfranklin_artist, Penny Hallas @pennyhallas, Yvonne Kendall @yvonne.kendall.artist

Basement: Elaine Luther @elaine_luther, Leanna Moran @leanna.moran, Octavia Milner @octaviamilner, Caro Williams @carowilliamsartist

Small House Gallery One

Artists in Small House Gallery One:

Attic: Jenny Bramley @jennybramley2, Sally Eldars @sallyeldars, Graham Everitt @gapinthemind, Jack Woodward @acardboardmonkey, Nick Ivins @nick.ivins, Lucie Fitzpatrick @craftymissfitz

First Floor: Mary Crenshaw @crenshawpaints, Abby Sonia Davies @orange_tree_art, Lucy Winnicott @lucywinnicottart, Nick Ivan’s @nick.ivins

Ground Floor: Kirsty Hall @kirstyhallartist, Ann Blackburn @papiermaverick, Lucy Bryant @hausoflucy

Small House Cottage

Artists in Small House Cottage:

Zodiac Room: Ann Blackburn @papiermaverick, Ayshe-Mira Yashin @illustrationwitch

Stripe Room: Lucy Bryant @hausoflucy, Ayshe-Mira Yashin @illustrationwitch, Lucy Winnicott @lucywinnicottart

Lemur Room: Susan Schneider #susanschneider, Jack Woodward @acardboardmonkey, Abby Sonia Davies @orange_tree_art, Leanna Moran @leanna.moran, Ayshe-Mira Yashin @illustrationwitch

Kitchen: Carole Griffiths @griffsculpt, Abby Sonia Davies @orange_tree_art

Dining Room: Annie Taylor @whitstabletail, Abby Sonia Davies @orange_tree_art

Rose Room: Leanna Moran @leanna.moran, Abi Lewis @i.am.abi.art

Upstairs Hallway: Lucy Winnicott @lucywinnicottart, Sally Eldars @sallyeldars, Nick Ivins @nick.ivins

Crane Room: Lucy Winnicott @lucywinnicottart, Susan Schneider (not online), Eldi Dundee (and daughter) @eldidundee_art

Lounge: Susan Schneider (not online), Sally Eldars @sallyeldars

Foyer / Downstairs Hallway: Lucy Winnicott @lucywinnicottart

Grey Room: Lucy Winnicott @lucywinnicottart, Sally Eldars @sallyeldars

A Closer Look:

Details of works in Small House Two:

Details of works in Small House Gallery One:

^_(attic)

^{Jenny Bramley – Slides 81, 95 and 97 (each found slide consists of the remnants from 2350 metres of sellotape, 157 A3 sheets of carbon paper, 18 drawers, 44 hours, 2021)}

^{_{(1st/middle floor, left room)}}

^{Clay Books 1-3 by Mary Crenshaw and a surrealist painted playing card by Abby Sonia Davies}

Details of works in Small House Cottage:

And then, is it me, or do these next two shots look oddly pervy?

I was finding it hard to get the tiger in shot without breaking the fourth wall and showing the real sized kitchen outside the Cottage walls. Accidentally creating a naughty poster for a movie called ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Spider-Privates.’

---

Artist Bios:

Insight into artists’ backgrounds and processes, with links to their sites and/or instagram accounts.

^{(For sales enquiries, please contact the artist directly, or for an introduction email us via the contact form)}

^{(Scroll down for Bonus Materials at the very bottom, including curating comparisons and an impromptu show in Mac’s Garage or Small House Garage)}

Ann Blackburn

Ann Blackburn did a dual degree in Fine Art and English Literature. Her focus was on lino printing. When “real life kicked in” she spent many years working in comms, and created art for friends and family in her spare time. She made her first papier mache figures around 30 years ago, but when the first lockdown arrived in March 2020 and her job in the charitable sector came to an end in August the same year, she picked it up again “big time”. She says, “It’s not an exaggeration to say papier mache kept me sane during the bleaker moments of 2020/21!”

Ann is passionate about the craft of papier mache. Being an eco-warrior, she is very serious about not wanting to waste any resources. “You can make anything from glue and old newspapers,” she says, “the only limit is your imagination.”

Her Maverick pieces gently subvert expectations and provide a humorous commentary on contemporary living, usually from a female perspective. Often mounted on reclaimed boxes and cylinders with hilariously left-field yet relatable captions, the plinths double as secret boxes for little ‘odds and sods’. They’re just delightful!

Etsy: @PapierMaverick

IG: @papiermaverick

Jenny Bramley

“The space, walls and/or other surfaces determine the work created. I modify the process to fit the space.

The process is as follows: I remove strips of sellotape from a dispenser in a rhythmic and repetitive manner and adhere to carbon paper, I rip the sellotape from the carbon paper and place it directly onto an interior wall, surface or window. The process is repeated innumerable times which creates a large-scale installation.

The remnants of the used carbon paper become a genuine non-predetermined, simultaneous byproduct of the process. Words and concepts that I associate with the remnants are stripped back, fragile, trace, time, patterns, archival and mark-making.

I video and live stream the performative act on social media in order to document the process. I use the video footage to create a film to show my working process in situ.

Research into site-specificity and working in situ has led me to take my existing process and materials into public and private spaces. In the latter part of [my] MA programme I developed my practice in these new areas. I intend to continue investigating ‘my new studio’ in the real world.

I am also interested in taking the remnants (used carbon paper marks on and sellotape) and finding new ways of continuing the process. For instance I have used the remnants of marked sellotape and placed over found slides. I projected the slides on an 80 slide carousel projector onto an exhibition wall alongside a video.

Artistic influences are Daniel Buren, Richard Serra and Robert Morris.”

https://jennybramley2.wixsite.com/jennybramley2

IG: @jennybramley2

Lucy Bryant

Lucy Bryant (Haus of Lucy) is a contemporary multi-media artist and graphic designer who graduated from the University of Derby. Her art subverts the the banal and disrupts the ordinary; she has a loose, creative approach with varied influences, including Punk music and Pop Art.

Her print series appropriates classic, antiquated landscape painting repros and adds anachronistic motifs onto these to create a jarring and unexpected result – is that an easyJet plane, gliding through a fifteenth century sunset? And what’s that Shell Oil truck doing in the middle of a nineteenth century pastoral? Lucy’s work is brilliantly humorous and refreshing, and leaves us to ponder the true character of art in the twenty-first century.

Applying the same principles to her ceramics, Lucy takes unloved, disregarded chintz and kitsch junk shop found figurines and breathes new life into them. A small boy sitting on a countryside fence becomes urban in his Nike hoodie, whilst an 18^th century gentleman takes a slurp of his giant strawberry frappuccino.

She’s had work showing in the Saatchi Gallery as part of Bob Osbourne and Carrie Reichardt’s project ‘Cash Is King’, (exhibition and book) and following an invitation to fulfil an artistic brief for a massive corporate expo, her work is on permanent display in Footlocker’s flagship store at Marble Arch, London. Pop in and have a gander if you’re in the area!

In response to the pandemic, Lucy created a series of Covid-19 themed figurines: a Regency couple give a piano recital via Zoom (the sheet music being Stormzy’s greatest hits), a beautiful Lady turns panic buyer in PPE surrounded by her shopping spoils, a smart Gentleman is ‘working from home’ but really he’s bingeing GoT on his laptop.

Lucy Bryant is based in Brighton and counts several thinking person’s celebs among her collectors.

www.HausOfLucy.com

IG: @hausoflucy

Mary Crenshaw

Mary Crenshaw’s process is “ruthless” – constantly moving, working in layers, marking, destroying, cutting, and recomposing, smearing, spreading, drizzling, rubbing, and daubing paint onto surfaces. She makes many “failed works” with this form of experimentation and says that it is “my way of finding something that surprises me, and in turn, hopefully, something that will surprise the viewer”.

She relates to Georges Bataille who believed that our compulsion to make marks is human, and that this “ingrained manifestation of defacing” is both spiritual and obscene: graffiti, make-up application, tattoos, illuminated manuscripts, cave paintings, and key scratches on cars. Bataille’s philosophy shed new light on her painting practice and helped her understand how she might incorporate meaning into her abstract works.

Mary has exhibited in Europe, Asia, and the United States, and participated in residencies in Vermont, France, New York, and most recently, Italy. In 2018 she completed the Professional Doctorate Programme in Visual Art at University of East London and later had her first solo exhibition in London at Poplar Union Arts Centre. Another solo exhibition of Mary’s paintings has taken place in March 2020 in South Korea.

www.MaryCrenshaw.com

IG: @crenshawpaints

Abby Sonia Davies

Abby Davies is an artist who aims to explore the ideas of the human concerning objects and physical space. She creates art based upon her individual visual and sculptural ways of thinking. The ideas and concepts demonstrated through her painting and illustration practices are inspired by the vast history of the surrealist artists and mystical ideas such as that of tarot cards. She says, “My art is a conversation with the part of myself I didn’t know existed and many places I still do not understand. This self-reflective and conversational narrative allows for the viewer to be made a part of my art in their own subjective way. The collection continues to grow day by day the selection of works and cards is hard for the viewer to fathom but for now, let yourself get lost amongst the archives of visual and experimental dialogue.”

Abby graduated from Cardiff Metropolitan University this year, and what a year to graduate from Uni, eh? When asked about this experience and how she coped, she responded, “It was tricky for a while because we didn’t know if we would be proposing work for an in person or online [degree] show , but it was in the end online. It definitely challenged me to think about why and how I present all my work and how to adapt to changing briefs.” (Impressive and inspiring resilience right there. Big-time Congratuations to you Abby! We wish you every success with your future.)

OrangeTreeArt.squarespace.com

IG: @orange_tree_art

Eldi Dundee (and daughter)

Eldi Dundee is a NY-born-and-bred interdisciplinary artist. She moved to London after ‘college’ and worked as a model, actor and visual artist over a period spanning more than 30 years. She did her art degrees at CSM/Byam Shaw, UEL, and Chelsea.

Her work utilises many mediums (writing, performing, sculpture, assemblage, installation, painting, video, photos, collage, printmaking & textiles) Her output has Feminist leanings with a psychoanalytic bent, & straddles autobiography & invention. Processes (material, manual, & cerebral) are often exposed; she resists the beautiful, refined, commercially viable finish, favouring instead the unease of the un- or under-concluded which holds myriad potential resolutions & completions in a state of extended suspension. She occasionally gets to work on other artists’ projects, which she adores – she views collaboration as an integral part of her own multidisciplinary practice.

Alongside her art practice & occasional acting jobs, Eldi has taught and led workshops in art, drama & movement at primary, secondary and FE levels. She coordinated a programme of lectures for an alternative postgraduate art school, has been a peer mentor on postgraduate art courses, edited publications and websites, & once balanced a part-time research role within a feminist social history project with working in the art department of a feature film as a set dresser, while singly-parenting a teenager. She has been primarily focused on the latter since completing her MA, giving up her studio practice, but as her child gets older, she is returning to art via curation of Small House Gallery – her other labour of love.

EldiDundee.co.uk

IG: @eldidundee_art

IG: small_house_gallery

Sally Eldars

Sally Eldars’ work examines and conceptualises social-political, cultural and environmental issues which she makes intuitively and spontaneously using found objects and recycled materials. Place and identity, fragility of our environment and of the human beings within a landscape resonates with her and she has been making works in both 2d and 3d that address these charged issues.  

Eldars is curator at TOD Gallery (aka The Open Dresser Gallery) which she set up in a repurposed old dresser converted into an art gallery at the start of Covid lockdowns. She curates and showcases artists’ work that have a particular focus and examine identity socio-political, cultural or environmental issues. She is also one of the founders of the Micro Gallery Guild.

Most recently, and during Covid lockdowns Eldars has been collecting single use plastic/household plastic waste, using these materials in her sculptures. ‘Child’s Play’, a series of sculptures which were on show during Art In June in Kent. One of the sculptures, a large sphere ’ Spawn Zone’  is now on show outside the home of the Mayor of Sevenoaks to support her recycling and reducing plastic campaigns. Living near the shores of Kent she has been collecting plastic waste and micro plastics from the various beaches which she has used as materials for ’Sea Monsters’ mini sculptures that are currently on show at the Big Small Summer Open @small_house_gallery.

IG: @sallyeldars

@the.open.dresser.gallery

 

Graham Everitt

Graham Everitt was born and bred in Wolverhampton. He is an artist turned surveyor turned artist and surveyor. Bringing the laser scanner he uses in his surveying business into his art making in 2008 “after seeing its curious image making abilities” restarted his art practice. He found that scans he made of the human form “illuminated the fragility and transient nature of our lives and [he] wondered how these would transcend if digitally projected.” Drawings, films and projections are used throughout his practice to explore his fascinations within a range of subjects, including mental health, the human form, and music, and his experiments adapting a 3D scanning instrument into an art tool over the past few years has meant that the scans have taken precedence with the scanner as his main art making tool.

His installation of the jelly babies in the Small House Gallery is about mental health. The title ‘1 in 4’ relates to the statistic that 1 in 4 people will be affected by mental health issues during their lives. “I think it’s closer to 1 in 1, as, if you have a brain, then at some point it will experience some kind of illness or stress – just as the body does from time to time.” Mental health is a subject he continues to work with, and the jelly babies are a medium that he returns to as a way of representing people’s differences – obvious differences like colour and subtle variations in face and body shape – the addition of pins signify further differences people may have, like mental health issues, and putting them all in a room together ‘is a statement on acceptance’ and solidarity. He sees no reason why people should be “isolated or ‘made’ to feel different or less equal due to mental health issues.”

Ephemeral states and scale are themes he often explores with visual projections. “During lockdown, with few opportunities to exhibit, I began projecting images and film with music sequences onto buildings in Wolverhampton, including an art projection show staged at the White Ladies Ruins in Staffordshire in August 2020.” Visual projections and installations allow him to explore his sense of intrigue about scale, and juxtaposing various subjects in abnormal environments allows him to further explore these concepts that have fascinated him since childhood, and throughout his surveying work.

www.GapInTheMind.com

www.NewWaveArt.org

IG: @gapinthemind

Lucie Fitzpatrick

Lucie Fitzpatrick is a Bath-born Mancunian and a keen ‘arts for wellbeing’ advocate. She studied photography at A-Level and currently works in art marketing for a mental health arts organisation in Greater Manchester.

Photography serves to keep her grounded, creative and noticing the world around her, and keeping emotional rumination at bay. She is inspired by everything around her. Her varied style reflects her eclectic interests. “You don’t need a fancy camera or to have trained for years to take beautiful or fun shots,” she says, “just an open mind, a keen eye and the ability to look at things from a new perspective, both physically and metaphorically.”

Her 3D work is conceptual, playful and fun, and for her, represents “distinct sides of the brain”. Her main inspirations are: vintage colours and fade, Instagram and squares, miniature, outdoors, pattern, weather, symmetry, perspective shifts, texture, decay, nostalgia, Wes Anderson films, darkness and near blackness, and her urban neighbourhood. 

IG: @craftymissfitz

Ruth Franklin

While studying on the MA Printmaking course at Camberwell College of Art in the 90s, Ruth Franklin began reflecting on childhood stories and making work inspired by family histories, combining photographic screen printed collages, with 3-dimensional forms in metal, cloth and plaster, into 3D collaged wall pieces.

Ruth reflected on her Jewish grandparents’ professions: they were East End tailors who had fled to London from Poland and Russian around 1915. In their memory she created sculptures of sewing machines, scissors, and other tools of their trade out of stitched wax paper. Her father was a hairdresser and wigmaker; Ruth made pieces called hairdressers objects – tools / utensils, real and imaginary, out of real objects and waxed paper forms. Her own professional tools (drills, hammers, etc) she replicated in 3d soft sculpture.

Ruth’s working life began in advertising, in art direction. Her creative work has developed in many directions and mediums since. Frequently there are graphic and drawn elements in it. She had initially studied Ceramics at Harrow College of Art in the 70s and she worked with clay for many years afterwards, “creating sculptural forms that expressed my own experiences and passions of living in London, travelling and being an Arsenal fan!” However themes of family history and ways of making that began on that Printmaking MA at Camberwell remain inspirations to this day.

Alongside her continued art making practice, Ruth Franklin has taught adult art education: at Camberwell for the past 20 years and City Lit for 16.

“My collage work in Small House Gallery began while in lockdown, with the world suddenly having shrunk, the teeny scale, and collage fragments felt so apt!”

IG: @ruthfranklin_artist

Carole Griffiths

Carole is a practicing Sculptor and full-time lecturer at Bradford School of Art/ She studied Sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art and completed an MA under Leeds Metropolitan University. Currently she is a research student at Coventry University (Sculptural Representations of the Kitchen Utensil). “Found domestic objects are a starting point for all my work. I remake and rearrange inanimate objects to create symbolic references and metaphors of how we relate to one and another . The sculptures represent the life cycle of relationship’s, our desires, the need for physical and emotional attachment and inevitably the realities of disconnections between people,” she says.

Carole’s work offers a poetic reflection upon both the process and content of her making, allowing the viewer to observe and encounter surreal, and complex relationship between objects, subjects and language. Her subject is the self, as being mother, artist, nurturer. She extracts experiences through the remaking of functioning objects in order to reveal the poetic chaos of domesticity . The objects are present in daily life and are reformed and portrayed through drawings, sculpture and words . The works can exist as couplings, of splittings and reconfigurations. Carole’s work identifies with the intensity of human intimacy by exploring the incongruous juxtapositions of both the spaces of making and the space of exhibition.

Carole’s work has been exhibited in numerous places throughout the Yorkshire Region. She is a member of two collaborative groups: The Unlocked Collective (responding to historical environments and archival content) and Yorkshire Sculptors Group (exhibitions / contemporary issues).

CaroleGriffiths.co.uk

IG: @griffsculpt

Kirsty Hall

Kirsty Hall is a disabled artist living and working in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. She describes herself as “an artist & purveyor of obsessive projects”. Her work is rooted in sculptural practice but encompasses drawing, performance, mixed media and book arts. She has a strong interest in serial repetition and favours humble everyday materials like paper, pins, string and fabric. She is currently making hundreds of little art cards, collaging everything in sight and putting thousands of pins through fabric.

IG: @kirstyhallartist

Penny Hallas

Born and raised in Leeds, England, Penny Hallas now lives and works in Llangattock, a small village in the Black
Mountains, Wales. She is a multi-media artist, using video, painting, photography and sculptural elements, often in the form of found objects, and drawing is at the heart of her practice. A long standing artistic concern of hers are perceptions of the countryside and the relationships, processes and impact between interconnecting systems: environment, industry, tourism, agriculture, rural/urban.

Most of the paintings in the Big Small Summer Open were made as part of a collaborative project about the role of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ in relation to place, but recently she’s returned to them as an ongoing series. More can be seen about the project at: http://boxingthechimera.blogspot.com/2020/01/binocular.html

www.PennyHallas.co.uk

IG: @pennyhallas

Nick Ivins

Nick Ivins statement starts: “As if the bastard grandson of Alfred Wallis careened from a dockside bar, and drunk on colour, set sail in a stolen super yacht around his own leaking bathtub.” [Something that was said of him by a mysteriously unnamed individual.]

He says of his own practice: “Right now I’m making big splashy colourful paintings on panoramic, door-sized, plywood panels featuring trophy fish the size of kayaks, cocky show off fuck boats, nostalgic three masted square riggers crewed by pantomime pirates, and aspirational super yachts that are never quite big enough. Sometimes they sink.”

A list of recent exhibitions and publications tells a story in and of itself:
2021 The World’s Shittest Exhibition – Uncovered Collective
2020 Umbrella Open – Umbrella Art Collective, Cardiff
Press & Publications
House & Garden
BBC Radio 4
The New Homesteader

Nick was born in Kent, and now lives and works in Lyme Regis in Dorset. He studied at Canterbury College of Art. He is an “ex-tractor driver, photographer, one off actor, [and] Cornish pilot gig crew.”

(Mic drop!)

www.NickIvins.co.uk

IG: @nick.ivins

Yvonne Kendall 

Yvonne Kendall was born in Birmingham, England in 1965, and emigrated to Australia with her parents at the age of 9. She studied sculpture at the Victoria College, in Melbourne, and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1987.

Her works are mostly biographical, sometimes disarmingly honest, often humorous and whimsical. She predominantly works with found objects and household textiles to investigate social, psychological and cultural themes.

She started collaborating with Henning Eichinger in 1997 on a project called Kultural Kommuting, and was invited to Germany in 2000 to give a workshop at the University of Reutlingen. She has lived and worked in Germany ever since. (21 years and counting.)

She has exhibited widely throughout Australia and Europe, been awarded a number of prizes and grants and is represented in many international collections.

IG: @yvonne.kendall.artist

Abi Lewis

Abi Lewis is a visual artist working in illustration, object placement and sculpture. Her work features imagined objects or situations that cross over between nature and whimsy with a nod, and a wink, at folklore, rites and rituals. The material work has a lo-fi aesthetic and considers how physical objects can lose or gain power through the value placed on them by individuals and their beliefs. She creates fantastical and vibrant otherworldly scenes where imaginary, yet oddly familiar creatures inhabit their own strange spaces and threaten to creep out into the material world.

Abi Lewis is the founder of Edinburgh-based art collective place+platform, producing a regular programme of events and exhibitions, and she is also co-director of sett studios and an events producer at sett cinema, a community-led art and film club in Bonnyrigg, Edinburgh.

www.Abi-Lewis.weebly.com

IG: @i.am.abi.art

Elaine Luther

Elaine Luther is an independent studio artist with a mission to make art that’s brave, vulnerable, true, and sometimes funny, exploring issues around death, motherhood and doing the dishes. She says, “While I have tried to make art that’s more universal, and to not be stuck in a feminine corner, the truth is that my art is about my life and my responses to it, and this is my life: motherhood and dishes and death.” Her goal is to communicate and connect and finds that the more honest she is in her art, the more others can connect to it.

She’s exhibited in Chicago and across the US (eg. Gallery I/O in New Orleans; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago), had solo shows in public libraries all around Illinois, and speaks regularly at conferences and professional association meetings (in person and online). She’s been an Advisory Board member for Woman Made Gallery, an ambassador for the Self-Employment in the Arts Conference, and President of the Board of the Chicago Metal Arts Guild. She’s written for the Craft Industry Alliance and Moore Women Artists and her work has been included in national and international publications.

She is currently working with clothing and the house form. In the Jungian tradition houses are a metaphor for the self; Elaine says that her Tiny Houses are often about identity and feelings.

www.ElaineLutherArt.com

IG: @elaine_luther

Octavia Milner

Octavia Milner is a Peckham based artist who paints abstract landscapes. She also assembles small sculptures from the found materials (e.g., pieces of rusty metal, fishing floats, stones and springs) that she has been collecting for years. Recently the sculptures have become an integral part of her art practice. She says, ‘When walking outside I am always on the look- out for things that catch my eye; manmade or not, discarded things that I might use in my sculptures and to draw and draw on in my paintings. I will pick something up and carry it for a while and see if it lasts the walk or gets rejected before I get back to the studio. As far back as I can remember I have picked things up off the ground.’

The three sculptures in the Big Small Summer Open are made up of things found on many walks made over the last few years. Although the first one was assembled some years ago and the third one in the rusty setting made from materials found on a lock -down walk in 2020, they naturally formed a group. When she came across the Small House Gallery, she felt she’d found the perfect temporary home for that rusty family.

Octavia originally trained as a Textile Designer (Print) and and then later as a Speech and Language. She has been painting for over thirty years. She has been working as an artist professionally and exhibiting steadily since 2013.

OctaviaMilner.com

IG: @octaviamilner

Leanna Moran

Leanna Moran explores fears and anxieties, focusing on the fragility of the underlying human mental condition.

References of abandonment paralleled with memories of oppressive household environments, surrealistically delineate Moran’s dreamlike universe. With interpretations of the subconscious she teeters on the blurred edges of reality. Moran’s bedroom scenes; simplistic in style with paradoxically complex narratives; often depict the act of sleeping, an escape where subconscious would influence her waking life.

Grey House depicts a fractured family home dynamic and refers to the ever-growing distance of haunting memories and vulnerabilities; with rooms embodying a personal angst or recollection from childhood.

The house represents a place where most poignant encounters occurred; a place where nobody truly knows, yet we are all familiar with.

IG: @leanna.moran

Peisley

Peisley is a multidisciplinary artist who translates the every day dramas of existing into psychologically compelling works of art.

Peisley’s work is about engaging the viewer into an intimate engagement with her subjects, she asks the viewer to lean in and to consider their personal truth, which she conveys through showing the human form in fiercely vulnerable states of reflection. Her miniature figures are made from porcelain, a clay body that shrinks and remembers its form as it goes through the firing process, increasing the sense of distilling them to their essence.

The figures fire to look molten as if made of an edible melting fondant. Their spirits seem soft in our hands. Peisley suggests the the sculptures have the gravitas of the giant marble statues in museums, erecting each on its own plinth. In the imagination they hold their space. The portal we view these through gives them their context.

“Peisley’s figures are made for the hand by the hand. Physical remembrances, they are like rosary beads that turn over in your fingers, making prayers of transformation or holding, protecting or moving. Their physical being is at once finished – baked in the kiln and glazed – and unfinished, contingent, provisional; the head becomes a mantle, the surface erupts in smooth lumps, the form changes. Their whiteness belongs to the unknown, and they remind us of our being.” (Excerpt quoted from a review by Charles Williams, 2021)

www.TraciePeisley.com

IG: @peisleyart

Susan Schneider

Susan Schneider is a painter and batik artist based in Seattle who makes an artist’s pilgrimage to Cornwall annually (before Covid-times). She lived in South London for 14 years where she raised a child, taught oil painting to adults, and made contemporary paintings on stretched silk in her garden studio, inspired by the Modernists and the Impressionists, and using the techniques and materials of the batik tradition. She was a member of the UK Batik Guild, participating in many shows throughout the 90s and 2000s, including the Battersea Art Fair, and a Batik Conference in Ghent with Noel Dyrenforth, the award winning internationally acclaimed fine artist whose silk and cotton batik paintings pushed the boundaries between fine art and craft and textiles since the early 1960s as part of the shift towards dissolving the categories of art disciplines, media and procedures, and whose works have been acquired by the V&A Museum’s permanent collection. This is relevant because he was a major influence on Schneider.

Schneider’s departure into oils for the purposes of teaching was not without precedent. During her time in Canada’s countryside in the 1970s, she had begun making small-scale landscape and cityscape oil paintings on cedar cigar box panels, much like the seascapes seen in this show, and some of the landscape abstracts from her solo show with Small House Gallery back in October 2020.

Before repatriating to the States, Susan had been volunteering in a particularly unusual charity shop in South London that Small House curator, Eldi, frequented at that time. Susan donated a series of small colourful abstracts on wood that Eldi acquired soon after for her toddler daughter’s bedroom. The two American artist-mothers never met. 15 years later, Covid hit, and Small House Gallery, which was a project that had been shelved for a couple of years prior, was revived, and Susan’s show was the first of a continual schedule of exhibitions.

She is still painting and teaching painting back in Seattle. She hasn’t got a webpage or an instagram account. But she’s given the first show her stamp of approval and sent new work for subsequent shows, this one included.

Susan_Schneider_oil_sketches (Oct 2020)

Susan Schneider update (Dec 2020)

Susan’s reaction to the Big Small Summer Open (Aug 2021)

“Extraordinary achievement!! Magnificent… can’t imagine how much work and thought has gone into this project. Thanks so much. I am on line at [contact Small House Gallery for details] if someone wants to contact me. I have a FB page but don’t check it too often. Not on instagram or twitter. Would rather sketch at the Pike Place Market.”

Annie Taylor

Annie Taylor is an illustrative and textile artist and doll-maker based in Whitstable. An artist of whom it was once said “has she nothing better to do?” Her work is inspired by fairytales: “where mermaids and fairy folk flirt with carnies and Kahlos, and Alice and her Wonderland is never far away.”  

She uses materials that often have been inherited as hand-me-downs, or recycled bedding. She says she loves to use calico “because of how paint works on the cloth.” She finds that she is increasingly using her sewing machine to translate a sketch into stitch, creating stitched illustrations that aren’t entirely 2D or 3D, but something between. Dimension 2 1/2, leading to the 5th dimension, perhaps, kind of like platform 9 3/4?

Annie Taylor is co-founder of The Profanity Embroidery Group with @pegwhitstable 

WhitstableTail.wordpress.com

IG: @whitstabletail

Sara Ulfsparre

Sara Ulfsparre is an artist from Sweden, who came to London in her early twenties in 1997 and has lived and worked here ever since. She is mainly self taught.

She creates soft sculptures using needle felted wool, currently focussing on cylindrical solid shapes, which she uses to essentially draw in felt. She uses three dimensional lines, networks and structures, to create her sculptures. “I find the process almost magical, how taking a piece of fluffy wool and only using a felting needle (and stabbing it multiple times) I can create soft and squishy, yet firm and solid shapes.” She creates instinctively, making shapes she’s pre-occupied or “obsessed” with. The scalariform, or ladder shape symbol, is one that holds particular fascination for Ulfsparre due to its abstract, yet concrete shape of vertical and horizontal lines, that create a structure together. She recently discovered that a ladder symbol found painted on a cave wall in Spain can be dated back 65,000 years. “The ladder symbol predates language, and is as old as mankind. For me it can embody human emotions and represent states of being. For others, it can symbolise escape, or ascending/descending.” She is also inspired by organic shapes in nature and Folk Art created by indigenous cultures. She is process oriented, and likes to explore form, colour and material.

The work Sara made for the Big Small Summer Open are scaled down versions of her larger sculptures. Sara will be having a Solo Show of her miniaturised soft wool works in the Small House Cottage this November.

SaraUlfsparre.com

IG: @saraulfsparre

Caro Williams

Caro Williams is a London-based artist predominantly working with installation and sculpture. She uses various methodologies in the production of the work often translating or ‘processing’ things – sounds, words, film clips, lines from poems, ideas – into another materiality through erasure, covering, digital manipulation or reconstitution via another substance. There is a poetic oddness to these processes. Sounds are silenced as they get transformed into materials (for example, sound waveforms in glinting metal as in this proposal) and these in turn become apprehended by another sense – sight – as well as a visceral appreciation of the material used. The process of translation leaves a kind of poem in the viewer’s mind. We are suspended in a dreamlike space where meaning is ambiguous: we see and hear something that is familiar yet at the same time it is out of reach.

Caro was born in Hong Kong and studied fine art in London and Auckland. She was awarded a postgraduate research scholarship and an MA in sculpture from AUT Auckland. Caro exhibits widely both nationally and internationally and has received a number of awards, commissions, and funding. Caro is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (MRSS), Arts Territory Exchange, and Axisweb.

www.CaroWilliams.com/a-song-to-the-moon

IG: @carowilliamsartist

Lucy Winnicott

The theme of play is prevalent throughout Winnicott’s practice, exploring the haptic, sensorial and therapeutic dynamic that playing can bring and the ways the practice of play can enter the gallery space, debating if it is a natural, undirected enjoyment or is affected to some degree by the institution of the white cube. A comedic, sensorial dialogue of working and interacting with materials is an important part of Winnicott’s practice in understanding the role of practical play and the active participant as opposed to the passive viewer.  In exploring these ideas, Winnicott uses textile-based materials within sculpture through sewing with various fabrics and stuffing to create squishy forms that are often based on the natural or geometric. The work mainly consists of pastel and bright coloured materials to connote a sense of child-like objects and environment.  These sculptures are transitional and malleable where they can be forms of comfort and manipulated by the viewer’s perception and tactile dynamics, furthermore, are utilised to produce environments akin to soft play areas or sensory rooms. The otherworldly spaces are intended for people to play, explore and ultimately experience through their own phenomenology.  During recent times, Winnicott has explored animation and film work as a way of manipulating colourful forms in a virtual presence, moreover, using physical sculptures in conjunction with moving image to create a multi-sensory environment. 

Lucy completed her BA Fine Art from the University of Creative Arts, Farnham this year! (Another recent graduate in our midst. Congratulations to you, Lucy. Wishing you all the luck and success Life can offer!)

LucyWinnicott.wixsite.com

IG: @lucywinnicottart

Jack Woodward

“My name is Jack Woodward, other wise known as A Cardboard Monkey. My work is about Play and enabling adults to have childlike fun while also manipulating space and adding a healthy dose of dark humour. These works are miniature versions of works that I have either made or plan to make (hopefully).

“[The making of] my work is fairly fast-paced, and has a ‘less than perfect’ visual (I say ‘intentionally shit’) as I feel everything now has to be prefect, otherwise it’s [considered] trash, but [to me] a trash bag with googley eyes is still somewhat funny.”

www.aCardboardMonkey.com

IG: @acardboardmonkey

Ayshe-Mira Yashin

Ayshe-Mira Yashin is an 18-year-old lesbian artist and poetess from Istanbul, Turkey, and Nicosia, Cyprus. She is currently based in Cambridge, England, and is a prospective UAL Camberwell art foundation student. Her poetry and art focus on themes of sapphic intimacy, healing and spirituality, with large ties to the occult. She is currently working on her illustrated poetry zine, to be published by Zines and Things, and is also completing her 78-card Tarot deck. She independently runs the Illustration Witch Shop (www.ayshemira.com/the-illustration-witch-shop) where she sells handmade bookmarks, necklaces, stickers, zines, art prints, handmade notebooks, and her major arcana Sapphic Enchantress tarot deck.

She connects with ink on paper the most of all mediums she’s tried. Her art is largely tied into my spiritual practice; she uses lines and patterns to represent waves of energy. Her art exclusively depicts women and non-binary people, using the absence of men to carve out a safe space for sapphic intimacy, which is so often underrepresented in the arts, especially visual art. She’s drawn to art as a means for activism (feminist, body positive and intersectional themes). She aims to evoke feelings of positivity and warmth in those who often feel underrepresented in art. She’s also very interested in art as a spiritual practice, with art-magic being one of the forms of spellwork she regularly engages in within her pagan witchcraft practice.

(SHG wishes you all good things, Ayshe-Mira, as you embark on your arts higher education journey. Bon courage et bonne chance!)

www.AysheMira.com

IG: @illustrationwitch

And the show’s original ‘confirmed artists’ preview page, in case you were missing it: https://smallhousegallery.uk/2021/05/03/big-small-house-summer-open

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BONUS CURATION COMPARISONS: BEFORES & AFTERS – SHG1:

^{(Move the ‘sliders’ left and right to see both photos in each pairing in full)}

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EXTRA SNEAKY BONUS SHOW: SMALL HOUSE GARAGE!

^{Even though we had 27 artists and over 80 individual artworks, there wasn’t enough work to spill over into filling Small House Garage as well as the 3 main Houses at the time of the main show. Small House Two and Small House Cottage are quite big and ate up all the work! So Mac’s Garage, the ‘outdoor’ sculpture park/microgallery in the borrowed handmade toy car garage we had access to, didn’t get used at the time. The Garage is made to a much smaller scale to the other 1:12 scale houses, so not all small artworks suit it. But before the show closed completely and all the works got sent back to the artists, there was an opportunity to bring the tiniest of the works into the studio and try them out in the ‘Garage’ – which is currently stored on the roof of the shed that the original Small House Gallery is housed in. The roof of the shed is connected to the loft of the studio up in the eaves, it’s above the lighting fixtures and though it’s brightly lit during the daytime thanks to skylights, by the time curation was finished, it became very dark up there. Another quick shoot on a sunny day later, and here’s how the photos in all the various lighting conditions came out. Enjoy.}