Pip Barfield – Walking through the Wildflowers

November 26, 2024 26th November - 24th December, 2024

Pip Barfield’s art is inspired by nature and walking in wild places with her lurcher! The colours and textures of hedgerow flowers, beach flotsam and windblown baler twine all influence her mark making and sensory recall. As a printmaker and painter, the blending of inks and paints to create vibrant and poetic interpretations of flowers and abstract landscapes is how Pip creates a narrative of nature.

She is moved by ancient places, often slipping through a thin place and sensing previous ancestors and events that inhabit our landscapes. Much of her work evolves from visiting local beaches and exploring coastal hill forts, collecting feathers and worn fragments of pottery and rusty metal. These found objects inform her images, patterns and textures which appear on paper while making monoprints and etchings.

Pip started her artistic journey after her parents died and she adopted a lurcher for company. This led her to a foundation degree in Leek, followed by a move to Cornwall in 2018 where she studied BA Fine Art at Falmouth. Since graduating in 2022 she has exhibited her work in Morgans Gallery, Newlyn Gallery and The Exchange, The Crypt St Ives, Falmouth Art Gallery and the Poly.

Marylouise Delaney

October 22, 2024 22nd October - 23rd November, 2024

Marylouise Delaney just loves food; growing, cooking, eating (sometimes photographing in Lidl) and painting food. From necessity to sensuality, food is central to our very being, but there is a profound beauty within the modest vegetable, fruit or dish which is often overlooked.  Painting is her reverence to the humble ingredients which sustain us and a celebration of The Joy of Food.

Marylouise is a nurse by night, painter and gardener by day and a parent 24/7, all of which require observance, thought and creativity. She paints in her kitchen when the house is quiet and spills into a world of colour, detail and uninterrupted thought where she is simultaneously lost and found. She likes to think that when you look at one of the paintings for a length of time, you might enjoy sharing this experience.

Marylouise has lived in Falmouth since 2010 and has a BA Hons Art for Community from Roehampton University and and MA in Three Dimensional Design from Surrey Institute.

Helen Leaver – Liminal

September 24, 2024 24th September - 19th October, 2024

Liminal – from the Latin word limen – meaning threshold
Liminal – The space between spaces
First light, before dawn
The moment before you realise you were dreaming
The innate threshold
Emerging….crossing.…
Hesitate.
A beacon, calling you to stay awhile…pause…notice…

Meditative oil paintings, inspired by the shapes and patterns noticed when in quiet, still places. It’s often the spaces between objects that Helen is most drawn to. The act of creation for Helen is a form of meditation, a deeply absorbing process where she’ll enter a flow state and where time passes unnoticed. She intuitively responds to marks, resulting in soft organic forms and uplifting gestural arc lines. Primarily working with oils, either thinned down ink-like or mixed with cold wax medium, Helen’s paintings hold multiple layers, which she often scrapes back to reveal the colours beneath, imbuing a liminal quality.

Sharon Bruster – Beachcombing

August 27, 2024 27th August - 21st September, 2024

Sharon Bruster is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in St Mawgan on the north coast of Cornwall.

Her creative inspiration is the water’s edge and the spaces between high and low tide. Walking, photographing, gathering, writing haiku, drawing, printmaking and painting are all integral aspects of Sharon’s practice.

In this mixed media exhibition Sharon will share her fascination with the ‘tiny treasures’ gathered on her daily beach walks and the shapes, textures and patterns observed along the water’s edge.

Aimee Willcock – Land and Sea

July 30, 2024 30th July - 24th August, 2024

Aimee Willcock grew up in Nottinghamshire and earned a BA in Fine Art from Loughborough University School of Art and Design, often traveling to Cornwall to gain inspiration for her practice. After graduating Aimee moved to Cornwall where she now lives and works, using the changing Cornish coastline and landscape to inform her practice.

Rooted in romantic traditions, the paintings are an investigation into mark, colour, and the language of paint to form a contemporary depiction of her local environment. Exploring the repetition of mark, simplifying shape and colour, responding to the environment both all prima and building layers over sittings to form an impression of a place, evoking a sense of space and capturing a moment. The transformation of the familiar into something less familiar, the desaturation of colour and the overpowering experience of nature, combine in a landscape structured yet ambiguous.

By uniting contrasts – sky and earth, painterly and illustrative, desaturation and contrasting colour, the paintings invite the viewer to experience the atmosphere and emotions conjured by our experience of nature, the calm and serene, or the most powerful and dramatic aspects of landscape.

Rebecca Van Vestraut

July 2, 2024 2nd July - 27th July, 2024

Lyndsey Vowell

June 4, 2024 4th June - 29th June, 2024

Surrounded by the natural beauty of the Cornish coastline, Lyndsey Vowell uses her contemporary style to capture and create paintings that are unique and inspiring. Born and raised in Cornwall, Lyndsey lives and works from her home studio in the stunning seaside town of Falmouth where the ever changing light, sky and sea ignites her passion for painting. Often using acrylic paints, her confidence to explore other mediums and experiment with different techniques truly brings each painting to life with its atmospheric style.

Although Lyndsey studied Fine Art and Design, she considers herself self-taught in the terms of the skills and processes she has developed over the last 18 years and with her background of interior design, she feels working on paintings and commissions to fit with interior schemes is a passion of hers.

Lyndsey has had an overwhelming response to her solo exhibitions with celebrity collectors such as the critically acclaimed Stephen Graham and partner Hannah Walters as well as selling internationally across the globe.

Following on from that Lyndsey was recently commissioned by The Headland Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, working alongside interior designers Lomax & Chi and Cornish Gems Interiors to create original paintings for the stunning new ocean suites.

Fran Marks – Embodying the Light

May 7, 2024 7th May - 1st June, 2024

After a long career in the arts, Fran Marks is now based in North Cornwall and has returned to painting. She has been a professional artist since 2020.

Lockdown provided an opportunity to deepen her practice with online tutors and she completed a year-long in person course at Newlyn School of Art in 2023.

She has travelled extensively through India, North Africa and the Himalayas and her work is an emotional response to the light, shapes and colours of the land and sea both at home and abroad.

Using both oil and acrylic Fran plays with bold colours and textures to create semi abstract paintings on a variety of surfaces.

Roberta Hopkins – Grounded

April 9, 2024 9th April - 4th May, 2024

Roberta was born in the West Country and although originally training as a Graphic Designer in Bristol, has more recently worked as a jewellery designer since moving to Cornwall in 2010. It was during lockdown, unable to work and looking for another creative avenue, that Roberta rekindled her interest in painting. Deciding to close her jewellery business meant that she could then concentrate on painting full time.

Moving to Cornwall was where Roberta finally felt at home, walking the coast path and exploring the rocks and pebbles around the many coves and beaches, taking endless photographs of the details that catch her eye. She can often be found scrambling over the rocks, studying the colours, textures and marks, and noticing the found compositions of the natural folds and strata and the interplay of shapes.

Slipping the odd pebble in her pocket, it is this and the photos taken that inform the work back in the studio. Using acrylics and mixed media on board, Roberta works abstractly, sometimes incorporating collage pieces that she has printed herself with rock textures and repeat patterns. Working in many layers of paint, textured gels and collage which are then sanded back and scratched into to reveal previous layers with unexpected results, which echo the erosion and passing of time of the natural landscape. Roberta has also been developing her love of monoprinting and collage to work alongside her paintings.

Kirsten Basram – Thresholds

March 12, 2024 12th March - 6th April, 2024

Kirsten Basram works from her home studio near Redruth. Although she has always been creative, she did not have the opportunity to take up painting full time until 2020, having followed a varied career path, including speech and language therapy and university teaching.

She paints mainly abstract landscape, using either oils or watercolour. The physical act of making art connects her with the landscape and sensations around her. At the same time, it opens up expression of her inner, spiritual landscape and this becomes one with the outer form of the earth, sea and sky.

Kirsten paints and draws intuitively, both from sketches made in the landscape and responses to direct experience of landscape and what the paint or pencil are doing on the paper. She then refines and composes as the work reveals itself. She is interested in exploring the idea of “thin places” where heaven and earth meet.

Georgia Parkin-Jones

November 28, 2023 28th November - 23rd December, 2023

Georgia Parkin-Jones was born and lives in Cornwall. Having experienced a portion of her childhood growing up in rural France as well as residing on Dartmoor, she is widely inspired by and actively seeks out the natural world that has encompassed her life growing up. She offers the viewer insight into her world, a fragmented place of her external and internal self, resulting in very ethereal works. Georgia works predominantly in oil, water mixable oil and charcoal.

Georgia studied at Plymouth University and received a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Photography. She is currently undertaking part time study in counselling, aiming to combine her practices and work as an Art Therapist,
alongside her personal Art practice.

Mick Dobie

October 24, 2023 24th October - 25th November, 2023

Local favourite, Mick Dobie returns for his third exhibition at Inspire Makers following two successful shows in 2021.

Showing a brand new collection of paintings Mick further explores his love of the Cornish landscape and seascape.

Mick finds the simple act of painting therapeutic. Concentration comes easily, with hours passing in what seems like minutes. Art can take you into your own world in so many ways.

Mick became captivated by Cornwall since moving here 15 years ago to study Fine Art at Falmouth. Currently Mick spends his time painting outdoors around the River Helford. Constant changing light brings a different feel each time he returns to his regular stomping grounds. Long walks with his dog Fergus feeds his inspiration.

Mick works with watercolour, acrylic and pastel mediums.  He hopes his paintings resonate with viewers. Should his work achieve this, then it can only serve to strengthen his enjoyment of the medium.