NPA Lab | 2021

 

Acts of Representation: A Collaboration

 

Sally Roberts

Sally Roberts is an emerging artist who works primarily in oils and is based in Lancashire, England. She paints portraits usually of women from the perspective of a female artist, using traditional techniques to represent the modern world. The artistic tradition comes into tension with her own womanhood and female gaze. She feels an urgency when she paints, a desire to capture the moment before it disappears. She wants her art to say: this is us, in this moment. This is who we are now. Sally holds a BA in painting from Wimbledon College of Arts with First Class Honours. Recently she exhibited in the Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibition and the Holly Bush Emerging Woman Painter Prize.

Lee Hardman

Lee Hardman is a figurative painter intrigued by the potential for a painting to capture and hold, the sense of something meaningful.  Based in Manchester, he is a painter predominantly interested in the human condition, who explores aspects of our human nature and the human experience that connect us all.  He initially trained and then worked in healthcare as a community pharmacist and it is perhaps the influence of this experience that informs his art practice today.  He has exhibited Nationally and been shortlisted for the Threadneedle Prize.

Marigold Plunkett

Marigold Plunkett has an MA in Printmaking from Camberwell College of arts. She works from her studio in Kent and editions at Artichoke Print Workshop in Brixton. Marigold won the Artichoke Print fellowship and won the Ingram purchase Prize, Founders Choice, in 2020. She exhibits regularly online and recently had etchings selected for the INGDiscerning Eye and the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair. In print and in paint her practice is drawing based and expressive in its nature; underpinned by a concern with the role of the female gaze in contemporary portraiture.

A collaboration by three artists; this is a figurative painting in oil on paper and shows three overlaid self-portraits in an expressionist style.

Lee Hardman

‘Collaboration One’  (2021)

Oil on paper (29 x 38cm)

Our hopes for this collaboration were to challenge or disrupt our individual ways of working. Practically, we each took about creating a self-portrait on paper, which we then posted to the next artist.  This acted as a basis for the recipient to respond with their own self-portrait, drawn/painted directly over the first one. We envisaged this very personal collaboration to build upon one another’s perception of ‘self’; taking an element from, and leaving traces of, the previous self-portrait.

This is a painting of a young woman seated on the bedroom floor in an expressive and figurative style.

Sally Roberts

‘Collaboration One’ [In progress] (2021)

 

 

A collaboration by three artists; this is a figurative painting in oil on paper and shows three overlaid self-portraits in an expressionist style.

Marigold Plunkett

‘Collaboration One’ [In progress] (2021)

 

 

A collaboration by three artists; this is a figurative drawing of three overlaid self-portraits in pencil.

Sally Roberts

‘Collaboration Two’ (2021)

Pencil on Japanese paper (43 x 52cm)

As artists working in isolation, we don’t always realise the self-imposed constraints and methodologies we develop, yet these can become restrictive to creative development. It was hoped that by relinquishing control through this exercise we would free ourselves to explore new ways of creating and seeing. On reflection, we feel that this process has, in subtle ways, allowed this. Whilst we were separated by distance, our work has physically interacted and been in conversation.

 

This is a figurative monoprint of a seated woman against an orange background.

Marigold Plunkett

‘Collaboration Two’  [In progress] (2021)

 

This is a figurative drawing of two overlaid self-portraits in pencil.

Lee Hardman

‘Collaboration Two’  [In progress] (2021)

 

A collaboration by three artists; this blue self-portrait in oil paint on paper is of a female figure removing makeup.

Marigold Plunkett

‘Collaboration Three’  (2021)

Oil on paper (76 x 56cm) 

We found working on top of an artwork to be more intimidating than we had foreseen, drawing upon each other’s work literally and metaphorically has been creatively challenging as well as exciting, something we ultimately had to embrace. By responding to another artist’s self-portrait with our own we have had to re-consider how we normally represent ourselves; a challenging process of self-reflection in the act of representation.

 

This is a self-portrait in oil paint on paper of a man in a striped work shirt fixing his tie.

Lee Hardman

‘Collaboration Three’  [In progress] (2021)

 

This is a self-portrait in oil paint on paper of a woman in a striped work shirt fixing her tie.

Sally Roberts

‘Collaboration Three’  [In progress] (2021)

 

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