Final Group Show

To develop our practice as professional artists and ready ourselves for working within the art world, a small group of incredible artists have been taking the Contemporary Art Academy's PG-1, 2 & 3 courses. It's been brilliant and very helpful!

Now, we are all graduating! We're thrilled to be a part of CAA's online graduate exhibition, curated expertly by Kirsty Ogg.

My work investigates the relationship between the inner, outer, and hidden dimensions of the psyche through a personal visual language. I draw upon themes such as dreams, the cyclical nature of life and death, and the symbolic dialogue with the unconscious. A formative moment in my artistic journey was my encounter with the Phowa practice—the transference of

consciousness at death—which deeply shifted my perception of time, form, and selfhood. My

2005 academic research explored the Jungian symbolism of mandalas, which has since evolved into a broader investigation of alchemy and psychology.

My creative process is both meditative and intuitive; commitment to meditation is my gateway. Ideas arise from lived experiences, inner transformations, day-dreaming, or dreams. I record them in written or visual form, then build from fragments, allowing the medium to guide the final form.

Literary and cinematic influences—particularly the films of David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Alfred Hitchcock—as well as myths, inspire a recent desire to slow down my practice and take time directing my paintings. Their atmospheric storytelling and psychological depth mirror my interest in building a bridge between the tangible and the mystical, exploring how perceptual experiences shape our realisation of what feels real.

My paintings create an uncanny space, enticing the viewer into a world poised between the real and the surreal, a world that is both tangible and illusory. Positioned centrally in my work, dolls are a recurring motif. I view them as explorations of self, a non-binary avatar aligned to my own personality, tastes, and memories. The dolls are a form of drag. Purchased as blanks, I make-up and dress the dolls from scratch, determining their persona over the course of their transformation. They offer a way for me to inhabit the painting both as the artist and subject.

Within the paintings there is a slippage, not only in the way that the watercolour resists the gesso panel, but also in the subjects. The colours are heightened and saturated, meticulously rendered to create a sense of unreality. The sources are intentionally perplexing, filtered through my own interpretation of the artist they draw inspiration from. The paintings might include a glimpse of an artwork, a collectable toy, or a chintzy ornament that offers a lure to distract from an underlying cognitive rupture. Located in the studio, the myriad references coalesce to create a dual space, one that is both physical and psychological. My paintings merge still life and the imagination, creating a self-contained subconscious world within a single painted plane, where there is room for exploration of an un-gendered liminal space.

Freedom and autonomy are at the heart of my work. My passion for drawing as a primary language is deeply entwined with my personal journey and life philosophy, and my work continues to reflect the raw, innate creativity I experienced as a child, demonstrating how a simple pencil or a stick of charcoal can articulate complex emotions, desires and ideas before they even form in the brain or the heart.

My practice centres on large scale drawing with graphite, charcoal, chalk pastels,gouache, and watercolour. I begin from a subconscious place, clearing my mind through movement and music to enter a present, thoughtless state where intention is set aside in favour of surprise. The process is both intuitive and deliberate - starting with

automatic, energetic mark making and evolving through considered choices in materials, marks, composition and colour. By manipulating space, scale, and the relationships between forms, I create tension, energy and drama.

I envision my drawings extending infinitely, continuously expanding and reaching out, teeming with a new world, a fresh civilization without borders or constraints.

Tapping into the collective subconscious I see my work as a mirror - a reflection of the viewer - inviting their own narrative. I enjoy the resulting ambiguity, with its depth of hidden material and expanse of conflicting readings.

Here I sit, writing to you on a fancy brick of refined oil, cobalt, aluminum, and sand. A fancy brick made out of rare earth: the kind over which wars are fought. And I am trying to find some way to explain to you that What I Do Matters.

Around the globe: more wars for more fancy bricks. (Never in USAmerica though. War’s only for

the other countries, not here. Because we are exceptional. Unless we try to stop a pipeline. Or

protect our water. Or protest peacefully.)

Never mind that all Earth is rare. Never mind that all life comes from Earth. That we walk around up here; rare and temporary. Acting like our only bones won’t be churned up with the passing of the tides, in the tilling of the soil.

It feels absurd to talk about my work in the midst of global ecological and socio-political collapse. But it is the nature of my work to talk about the collapse.

It is the nature of my work to reveal and attempt to heal intergenerational traumas within my being. On various scales, using a wide variety of traditional and found materials, I produce records of transient experiences and ancestral communications. The results are both excavations and maps. They are records of inner depths far more cavernous, more daunting, and more beautiful than could be contained in one imagination.

A lot of what I’m doing is trying to feel better in the midst of a world in crisis. To regulate my nervous system and liberate my body of as much distress and trauma as possible. To externalize as much as possible. To be available to serve the Greater Good.

I put my brain, my guts, my heart, and my soul into this art work. I heal with this art work. I record this life, one brushstroke and stitch at a time.

And in doing so: I change it.

I share this all with you, to invite you to delve a little deeper. Find the pain, and feel it. Find the wound, and heal it.

I can earnestly say, now, that What I Do Matters.

It matters to me.

My work explores the games and rituals that govern human interaction. I am particularly interested in the point at which rules twist, bend, and break to reveal underlying tensions. While we seek connection, we often find ourselves trapped in cycles of competition, consumption, and conformity. Through sculpture and painting, I examine the fragile structures that shape our social landscape.

Drawing inspiration from religious artifacts, exotic plants, and everyday objects, my sculptures resemble toys and games. They are playful yet unsettling metaphors for societal dysfunction. My pieces invite interaction but quickly frustrate, exposing the instability of systems built on power, control, and greed.

Materials - fur, fabric, steel, ribbon, rope, underwear and found objects – contrast soft with hard, warmth with coldness, and the precious with the disposable. Intuitively formed, my work bridges both conceptual and formal art practices. Recently, I have expanded these ideas into oil painting, aiming to seduce and overpower the viewer, blurring the boundaries between two and three dimensions.

My work ranges from a giant pink satin and fur chandelier crashing to the ground, taking on the form of a monkey’s cooking pot, to a delicate life-size child’s swing inviting play, made up of plastic sweets, to an immersive installation of oil paintings comprising the 32 pieces of a chess set, each representing a significant archetype in the my life.

Games psychologically function as systems that reinforce social norms, offering an illusion of choice within invisible, predetermined boundaries. Drawing from behavioural theory, I bind material to symbolise how individuals navigate constraints - whether by conforming, resisting, or subverting them - reflecting the tension between autonomy and control. My sculpture tempts touch, only to bite back or disintegrate, mirroring the psychological struggle within competitive, hierarchical, and patriarchal social structures. In the end, no one wins.

I am a local artist on the Isle of Man, where I have lived for nearly my entire life. I create abstract landscapes responding to this captivating island using a variety of mixed media. My work explores how a landscape evolves upon the surface, the essence of place, and our emotional connection to the land and sea. My joy is the history, culture, land and seascapes of the island which is interpreted onto surface through my own impassioned response.

I feel grateful every day that my parents brought me here to live as a baby. I am drawn to the shifting of the tide, the sensation of the salt on my face, the clattering of the pebbles being drawn back by the waves, the cerulean water, the endless colour palette of the sky, the confluence of light, the distant hills, the wildlife as a constant presence, living so freely here.

I explore the building up of textures in different ways, sometimes using leaf skeletons or seed heads working on plein air searching for ways of making new marks, creating symbolic or metaphorical references to the island. I may intuit the ancient beautiful Manx Gaelic to title my work.

I hope to communicate my own passion and gratitude for living in this wild and unforgettable place, evoking a sense of curiosity, wonder and a call to cherish it, along with the rest of our planet.

_____

Artist Biography

Jan Kinrade is an artist based on the Isle of Man, where she grew up immersed in the island’s rich landscape, nature, and wildlife. She graduated from Chester College, UK, in 1990 with a Bachelor of Education degree in Art from Liverpool University. For the past 35 years, Jan has combined her career as a primary school teacher with leading art workshops for both children and adults. Deeply inspired by the Isle of Man, she is passionate about its unique status as the only entire island nation designated as a UNESCO Biosphere. Jan enjoys building up a variety of textures as the foundation for her paintings, often working from research sketches created in the island’s glens, beaches, ancient historical sites, and during its breathtaking sunrises and sunsets. Her vibrant abstract landscapes are filled with expressive mark-making, uplifting colours, energy, and passion—each piece a tribute to the island’s endless beauty. She is an alumna of the Contemporary Art Academy and a member of the Visual Artists Association. Jan’s paintings are currently on display at the following galleries on the Isle of Man: - Pink Seaweed Gallery, Ramsey - Hodgson Loom Gallery, Laxey - Art Vault Gallery, Castletown

I am a British-Italian female artist, based near Florence, Italy. My work communicates an original ethic for the 21st century. I seek to contribute to our urgent need for a new psychological and political Left. I started by communicating this ethic, borne of intense thought, over decades, through first poetry, then an education PhD and academic career, although I have always been haptically engaged with craft, drawing and painting. Despite writing being an art form long practiced and developed, I have recently discovered, age 50, as a result of an art world education, that only visual artistic practice can truly express what matters most to me to communicate to you. My practice has emerged as conceptual, whatever aesthetic form it is taking. In constructing the work I use light, space, shape, size, various changing materials and craft techniques. The ideas expressed materially use Hindu and Christian theology, postmodern philosophy, social science research and principles of therapy such as parts work, the drama and winner's triangle, and the inner child. I am offering people autonomy and ways to think their own thoughts. To open doors to new personal freedoms, taking us beyond our current limitations and visions of planetary collapse. My art implies compassionate futures for a world of kind, coping, secure, spiritual, interdependent beings: a future I think is coming. I use whatever might be needed to express an idea and regularly change medium. What I create is an electrical conduit to ignite the viewer's heart and mind, on their own terms.

Anna Levy’s work dances playfully between reality and the mystical. Drawing from nature, the cosmos, dreamscapes, and the unconscious, she recreates experiences to grasp the ineffable and the elusive, variations, change and subjectivity. They capture the poetry of the body in nature, of vapour in the air.

Levy’s process is one of abandon and return whereby each developing piece informs the other,

moving between large and small-scale paintings, pencil drawings, photography and mixed media

works. In her painting and drawing she applies simple marks and lines to create rhythm within the

works, playing with structure and unpredictability.

Anna Levy was born in Poland. She studied at Art School in Poland, Diploma (1989), Camberwell

School of Art, BA (2004), Chelsea College of Art and Design, MA (2014), Turps Banana Painting

programme (2023).

Selected exhibitions include:

Painters, Thames Studios (2023); Reading Between The Lines, Koppel Project, London (2020); Nature/ Nurture, Leyden Gallery, London; Between The Bars, Terrace Gallery (2020); Winter English Garden, Orangery, Munich, Germany (2018); Unspecified, Sluice, London Biennale (2015); Film Screenings, White Chapel Gallery, London, (2014)

Making art, or anything really, can be tough. It's so easy to get sidetracked, to procrastinate. You can even lose touch with that inner child, the things you truly care about as a person.

A few decades ago, I was in a rural village and I watched a herd of goats wander through the area under the watchful eye of their shepherd. Those goats became my focus, my way back into making art, or whatever you want to call it. Goats are now what I paint and make videos about. People always ask me what they mean, and honestly? I don't know. They're just goats.

My background spans over two areas: I studied Fine Art at Newcastle Polytechnic and architecture at North London University and Madrid University. My youth was that of an Irish immigrant in 1970s East London with a Catholic education and a good dose of brutalism and religious art from Da Vinci to airbrushed iconography. These experiences are reflected in what I make, sometimes in the background of artworks, as these are things that are hard to shake off as they are part of you.

The more I paint in the later years of my life, I start to recover and remember who I am.

I paint from a ‘feeling space’, exploring the way in which our psychological atmosphere is created and felt. I translate this emotional response onto the physical surface on the canvas using acrylics, ink, watercolours and dry media.

Inspired by the land and seascape that surrounds me in Dorset and in Cornwall, my home county, I explore the connection between place, memories and human relationships. I translate the geological processes I observe, such as seaside weathering and landslides, through abstraction, creating textured layers of paint, ink or dry media using brushes, found objects, my hands, or a squeegee.

I link these naturally occurring actions with the dynamics that exist in our relationships with others. The fragile threads that bind us. The solid feeling of safety and security that can weaken over time to the point of collapse.

Contemplating the subject of memory, grief, and the complexity of human relationships, my painting is a reflection of life, love and the natural world, often juxtaposing light and darkness. This is expressed in an explosion of colour or monochrome, layer upon layer, just like memories. I want the viewer to feel as deeply as I do.

My mark making is formed by energy and vibration, a bit like an electrocardiogram. A unique moment in time captures my heartbeat and the electrical impulses sent around my body. Each movement is impossible to replicate.

My work is straightforward to understand, even though I struggle with it. The artist does not always tell us something essential or know much about his work. Artists should be convinced of what they are doing, but this is not certain in my case. I could be more enthusiastic, but these were just crazy moments when I was young. Scribbling is a good exercise for becoming an artist. Thinking isn't essentially wrong but should be avoided. Don't drink and drive; as an artist, don't think and paint. So, my paintings began always in madness. Madness became my favourite painting style. I encountered this method until I ended up in a psychiatric clinic. And here, uncreditable happened. The doctors had forbidden me to paint; even drawing was prohibited. You must imagine that I have found a unique but forbidden painting style.

Fortunately, the doctors did not want to hospitalise me forever. And so I came free but just with antipsychotics. These antipsychotics replaced painting; they worked like pink glasses, so you did not need a brush to redye the world. I was released with a diagnosis, but nobody wanted to tell me the reason why I should not paint. For this, psychoanalysis was suggested, and Dr. Freud would help. I agreed. After some sessions, I realised that my childhood was not as lucky as I was told. There were some dark moments even my mother didn't know. It's about the lonely hours with my grandmother, a Gacowo-survivor. Telling the truce about Gacowo is not impossible, but I want to avoid it on this occasion. My grandmother did not realise that babies have a memory that lasts the rest of life. Her experiences, I now understand, have profoundly influenced my art and my struggle with mental health as I grapple with the intergenerational trauma she carried.

And here comes the million-dollar question: Which kind of painting style can express what my grandmother experienced and, more importantly, what helped her to survive without becoming crazy, as I was not so lucky? Could it be I just lost my humour? The only way out is one with humour. So you must keep the balance: Black thoughts should be compensated with funny stuff. Returning to the slogan: Don't think and paint. Maybe you should drink when painting? As time went on, my painting style changed, and my alcohol consumption as well. I had to split from an action painter to a rather conceptual artist. This is not to say that conceptualists are always drunk, but what they create can convince us that thinking will lead to nothing in the arts. It's all about Dada or what? Don't worry, you will not find out.

hello world

I am an artist and academic based in Edinburgh, UK. Framed by imaginaries of tourism and the tourist gaze, my paintings invite the viewer to engage with narratives around the visual culture of tourism. My work evolves through gradual layers of transparent oil paint and mediums, in series, over time, and across scales.

I am influenced by material artefacts, public discourses, memories, imaginaries, and lived experiences. Photography, sightseeing, memory, and further visual practices and performances of tourism are core concerns. These mirror the mutual gaze and othering of tourists and locals, alongside the non-contextualised spaces and places of tourism. Visual imaginaries emerge through historical and contemporary lenses that reflect key discourses around tourism. Reflexive dialogues amongst the artist, subject, and viewer question how we gaze, with curiosity, as tourists and at tourism, as both viewers and fellow tourists.

My recent series of paintings is concerned with tourism and leisure hauntologies, where past, present, and future, interplay with figures performing leisure in non-spaces. Concrete and intangible imaginaries, memories, artefacts, and experiences evoke the ‘no longer’, and ‘not yet’ through associations and memories of tourism. Spectral figures emerge and fade within uncertain places. They appear to play and perform for of the viewer, while returning a curious gaze.

I draw because I have always been compelled to. It feels child-like and innately human as a form of expression—simple, innocent, uninhibited. There is a pleasure that comes from the spontaneity and freedom it allows, yet it can also be controlled, meticulous, and precise, bridging the rational world with the curious depths of the subconscious.

The vibrant dreamscapes that emerge in my coloured pencil and oil stick drawings blur the line between the ephemeral and the eternal, the natural and the artificial. Soft structures, occasionally ostentatious, hold a sense of intimacy beneath an expansive sky. Do these spaces depict a refuge? A womb? A portal? An escape into the future or perhaps the past— somewhere between inflated dreams and whispered memories.

Grounded in my present-day experiences of motherhood on the Portuguese coast and the fragmented nostalgia of my childhood memories in Australia and Greece, I explore how we navigate our polarised world and the constructed realities of our digital lives. My work fosters a nuanced understanding of the collective experience, inviting viewers into a quiet space of introspection.