Focus on the Female

Emilie Taylor was born in 1980 in Sheffield, where she now lives and works. Her large scale ceramics use heritage craft processes, particularly traditional slipware, to interpret and represent post-industrial landscapes. Emilie is interested in the pot as container and metaphor for how we seek to contain different communities within society. Beyond the studio she works with the communities represented in her work, and through interdisciplinary projects hopes to apply the alchemical quality of ceramics in a socially engaged context. Emilie has completed residencies in the UK and abroad, and has exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Ruthin Craft Centre, Gallery Oldham and the Arts & Crafts House Blackwell. Her most recent solo exhibition (May Day, May Day, May Day) at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum concludes 11th of July 2021. Her work forms part of public and private collections.

Cristina Schek is the photosensitive kind. She thinks in pictures; her imagination is always in focus. A Transylvanian living in London, she creates worlds she calls "myth places”; they exist, each in their own ways. 

Far removed from traditional or documentary photography, the camera is merely a tool for Cristina. She enjoys the freedom of layering and manipulating her photographs into creative montages, trusting her instinct for matching the raw material with the suggestive imaginings of her subconscious.

Often whimsical and a touch romantic, her photographs are given subtle alterations in a digital process that often takes months, resulting in carefully constructed compositions, which reveal the influence of the great Surrealists and Old Masters.

In a contemporary art world that condemns beauty as camouflage for conceptual shallowness, championing high aesthetics is nothing short of rebellion. Dutch photographer Isabelle Van Zeijl takes female beauty ideals from the past, and sabotages them in the context of today. Van Zeijl aestheticises contemporary beauty in her work to visually discuss art historical links and a new way of seeing female beauty. Her work is both timeless, universal and uniquely placed in the art historical canon while offering the female gaze.

Van Zeijl is invested in her images. By using subjects that intrigue and evoke emotion, she reinvents herself over and over and has created a body of work to illustrate these autobiographical narratives. Her work takes from all she experiences in life - she is both model, creator, object and subject. Going beyond the realm of individual expression, so common in the genre of self-portraiture, she strives to be both universal and timeless, with a subtle political hint.

Isabelle Van Zeijl has shown work continuously and internationally over the past fifteen years, represented by galleries located in The UK, USA, The Netherlands, Belgium, and exhibiting at emerging and established international art fairs in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, London, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Italy. She was nominated for the Prix De La Photographie Paris, and The Fine Art Photography Awards. She was also one of the winners of The Young Masters Emerging Women Art Prize, London. Her work is held in private & public collections in the USA, UK, Belgium, Germany, France and The Netherlands.

London-based Kathryn Maple studied Printmaking at Brighton University and undertook a six month residency at The Muse Gallery on Portobello Road before completing The Drawing Year at The Prince’s Drawing School (now the Royal Drawing School) in 2013. Kathryn won the 2014 Sunday Times Watercolour Competition and has exhibited in the Jerwood Drawing Prize, Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, at Christie's International for 'The Best of The Drawing Year 2012-13', and at the 'Betweenlands' exhibition hosted by Blain Southern in 2014. She lives and works in Erno Goldfinger’s iconic Balfron Tower, London, and is currently on the Royal Drawing School's International Teaching and Art Residency in India. The main focus of Maple's work has always been drawing. She acts as a hidden observer, using shape and line to paint those parts of the city where nature has been left to flourish and encroach on our concrete metropolis. Her work combines very fine detailing with areas of minimal working, the open spaces enabling the eye to focus on these marks. 

Eve De Haan is a young London-based artist of English and Mauritian heritage, with an incredible appetite for creativity. Her degree in Theology has informed and influenced her work, developing a strong body of installations which examine concepts of change and the imprint technology is having on youth culture.

She has exhibited in Europe and the U.S in iconic galleries such as the Saatchi gallery and the Museum of Neon in LA. She was recently invited to lead on an Instagram Live for Tate London. She has had billboards in London, created artwork for Nike & been featured in major publications.

Her creations are provocative and challenging. Through her love of the written word Eve finds neon the perfect medium to explore the gradients and shades of meaning within a statement.

Anne von Freyburg is a Dutch artist living and working in London. She received a Master degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University London in 2016 and holds a BA in Fashion Design from ArtEZ Arnhem, The Netherlands. In 2018-2019 von Freyburg was part of the Florence Trust Residency and the FT Summer show in London. Her work was awarded for the Art Gemini Prize London. Von Freyburg was shortlisted for the Sarabande Foundation Residency and the Jackson’s Painting prize in 2020. Previously she exhibited in galleries in Holland, Germany and Spain.

Anne von Freyburg’s practice rethinks textile and the decorative within the tradition of painting. It embraces and subverts the female gaze, the feminine and pretty. Historically, craft and decoration have been perceive as lesser than the “intellectual” fine arts. By combining them, von Freyburg challenges this underlying hierarchical system. Von Freyburg's recent work translates Old Masters paintings from the Rococo period into paintings constructed of a mixture of tapestry and contemporary fashion fabrics.

With these works von Freyburg attempts to raise questions about taste, femininity, high and low art and the constructs of female identity. Her work is a celebration of the sensual, textural and visual pleasures of materials and ornaments.

Von Freyburg’s work is in several private collections all over the world. Recently her work has been published in Art Scope magazine (US), Embroidery art magazine (UK), Textiel Plus magazine (NL), Art Verge, PAN and many others.

Israel-born, New York-based Tami Bahat's portraiture is fuelled by a deep love for imperfect beauty and the belief that art is in everyone. As a conduit to other lifetimes, she constructs stories of the past through the people of her present-day life. Inspired by the Old Masters, the series Dramatis Personae exhibits her personal connection to history and a deep longing for times that no longer exist.

Most recently Bahat has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Australia and Chicago, and her work has been shown in prominent photography events, including Fotofever Paris, Scope NY, The Photography Show (AIPAD), as well as the LA Art Show. 

In 2019 Tami Bahat won the 2nd prize for the Young Masters Emerging Woman Artist Award.

Deborah Azzopardi acquired her worldwide fame for the joyous Pop Art images she has created over the past 35 years. Her unique and feminine take on contemporary art is best described by the esteemed art critic Estelle Lovatt: ‘America has Lichtenstein, we have Azzopardi!’ Lovatt goes on to comment: “Sometimes you just want to curl up under a blanket. With a good book. A piece of chocolate. A man. This is what Deborah Azzopardi’s pictures make me feel like doing. They are me. They remind me of the time I had a red convertible sports car. I had two, actually. And yes, they are you, too. You immediately, automatically, engage with the narrative of Azzopardi’s conversational visual humour. Laughter is the best aphrodisiac, as you know. ... There’s plenty of art historical references from... Manet’s suggestive ‘Olympia’; Boucher’s thought-provoking... ‘Louise O’Murphy’ and Fragonard’s frivolous, knickerless, ‘The Swing’.... Unique in approach, you easily recognise an Azzopardi picture. ... Working simple graphics and toned shading (for depth), the Pop Art line that Azzopardi sketches is different to Lichtenstein’s. Hers is more curvaceous. Feminine.”

The world is familiar with Azzopardi’s artworks, as many of them have been published internationally. Her original paintings, such as the Habitat ‘Dating’ series (2004/08), the iconic ...One Lump Or Two? (2014) and Love Is The Answer (2016), created by the artist at the request of Mitch and Janis Winehouse as a tribute to their daughter, are in great demand.

Based in Toronto, Amanda McCavour is a Canadian artist who works with stitch to create large-scale embroidered installations. She holds a BFA from York University, where she studied drawing. In May 2014, she completed her MFA in Fibers and Material Studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. From 2007 through 2010, McCavour was an Artist-in-Residence at Harbourfront Centre’s Craft & Design Studio. Her work has been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions in 2019 Pink Field, Blue Fog at the Art Gallery of Northumberland, Cobourg (ON); Consumed by Clouds at the Kootenay Gallery of Art, History and Science, Castlegar (BC); The Floating Gardenat Workhouse Arts Centre, Lorton (VA); and Pink Field, Blue Fog at Washington Pavilion Visual Arts Center, Sioux Falls (SD). Upcoming projects for 2021 include new installations for Paige Court, Chazen Museum of Art, Madison (WI) and The Delaplaine Arts Center, Frederick (MD). She is also working towards a commission for Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia (SC) in 2022. McCavour has received numerous awards and scholarships from the Ontario Crafts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, The Handweavers and Spinners Guild of America, The Ontario Society of Artists, The Surface Design Association, and The Embroiderers Guild of America.

Rebecca Harper was born in London in 1989, where she continues to live and work. She studied at UWE Bristol then The Royal Drawing School and Turps Art School (Postgraduate’s). Rebecca was Artist in Residence at The Santozium Museum, Santorini, in summer 2019, and Artist in Residence for the Ryder Project Space at A.P.T Studios, Deptford in 2018-19 before becoming a studio and committee Member in 2019. 

Much of Rebecca Harper’s work has revealed itself through a Diasporic consciousness which can often involve a multiplicity of belonging and a sense of difference, often one of ‘otherness’ and displacement. The identity of the displaced positioning is a paradox between location and dislocation, out of place everywhere and not completely anywhere. Generally, the work frames expressions of ‘being’ and manifests itself within an unfolding, wondering, allegoric commentary on the locations that she inhabits and those which inhabit her.

Rebecca Harper artwork is courtesy of Anima Mundi gallery.