Collect Connect

Tuesday, 13 February 2018

Year 2132 - Wayne Sleeth - #smallworldfutures

Wayne Sleeth, #unsettledgallery No.6

Small World Futures is a collection of 38 miniature sculptures depicting what life could look like in years to come. Each of these small artworks will be placed in public spaces (#unsettledgallery) around London Bridge. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these worlds here on the website. A writer will also use the world as inspiration to create something new and fresh, their words describing the shape of a new world.

Today we discover the Small World Future of.... Wayne Sleeth
Year 2132

'Stand in line children, hold your partners hand, don't push'
The children crane their necks and jostle to get a view of the exhibit.
Safely encased in translucent aluminium sheeting, Exhibit Number 5 seems to hang in mid air, untouchable and pristine.
'Now class, can anyone tell me what we are looking at here?'
Dorotha puts her hand up, 'It's the RealPlant, one of the last RealPlants left alive since the Chromocrisis in 2085.'
There is a murmur of agreement from the fifty or so children in the class.
'Yes, well done Dorotha, this is a RealPlant, unpolluted by any of the genes that destroyed 90% of the planet's vegetation last century.'
'What's it for' asks Pimlico.
'Good question, any ideas class?'
'It's a small vegetable transformer, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugars using sunlight as a fuel'.
'Yes, a very clever and elegant little transformer'
'It's quite pretty as well Ms Dalex, I like the colours'
'Mmm, yes I suppose so TamTam, I never really thought of that before. Does anybody else have anything to say before we move onto see the next exhibit? No? Okay, don't push, hold your partners hand, keep the noise down!'

Dean Reddick

Wayne Sleeth

You can find Wayne's Small World Future located down Gibbon's Rent alleyway at #unsettledgallery No.6. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

In his mature work since moving to the Lorraine region of France in 2001, Wayne Sleeth reiterates and re-explores the source and schema of his more formative sensations; the big skies above the flat lands of both the Lincolnshire coast of his father and the polders of maternal Flanders, where he also spent his childhood. The Lorraine region for this confirmed European is not only geographically strategic, but offers an echo of that very play of horizontality and verticality where the artist draws freely on “l’espace” as he knows and feels it, as far as the canvas edge…
http://www.waynesleeth.com/

Dean Reddick is an artist, an art therapist and a lecturer. He uses a range of media and enjoys experimenting with casting processes using plaster, metal and resin to explore the tensions between organic and geometric forms, positive and negative space and the distortions that occur in producing casts. As an artist and art therapist Reddick has a keen interest in the role of art as a cultural phenomenon and as a container for inter-personal meaning. He enjoys working collaboratively and has been a regular exhibitor at Walthamstow's E17 Art Trail as well as exhibiting with CollectConnect. Recently he published Art Therapy in the Early Years: Therapeutic Interventions with Infants, Toddlers and Their Families (pub. 2016, Routledge) alongside co-editor Julia Meyerowitz-Katz.

Monday, 12 February 2018

Year 5,000,000,000 AD - Jenny Meehan - Small World Futures

Jenny Meehan, #unsettledgallery No.8

Jenny Meehan

You can find Jenny Meehan's Small World Future at #unsettledgallery No.8, in the garden seating areas behind the Greenwood Theatre on Snowsfields, London Bridge. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

Jenny Meehan grew up in Teddington (Middlesex) and achieved a BA Hons Degree in Literature at Kingston University before studying for a Post Graduate Certificate in Education at Roehampton University. As an artist Meehan takes a process led approach, creating art that is informed by her research activities, her outlook on life, and personal experiences. Her visual art is intimately connected with her writing and poetry, and the relationship between these two strands of her creativity is a lively and interesting one. She is particularly interested in the relationships between creativity, spirituality and health and wellbeing, and uses both Christian contemplative practices and participation in regular psychoanalysis to inform the direction and development of her artistic practice.
http://www.jamartlondon.com/
https://jennymeehan.wordpress.com/

Natalie Low enjoys putting words on paper and believes that everyone has a book of some sort inside them. She lives in Twickenham, UK with her rather charming family. She has published two chapbooks Dementia (2015) and recently School Run (2017).

Sunday, 11 February 2018

Year 2218 - Tracy Boness - #smallworldfutures

Tracy Boness, Weston St, London Bridge, UK

Tracey Boness

You can find Tracy Boness' Small World Future at #unsettledgallery No.1, built on a pebble beach behind some railings at the North end of Weston Street. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

Tracy Boness (b. Canningtown, East London) studied for a BTEC National Diploma in Art & Design at East Ham Community College then a BA Hons Degree Fine Art at West Surrey Institute of Art & Design. She consistently exhibits her work, undertaking commissions and taking part in community based workshops. Painting and drawing are essential to her work practice. Recent black and white drawings take inspiration from 18th Century engravings and botanical drawings of the era. Boness also likes to experiment with new materials, sometimes sewing and layering surfaces to create tactile pieces of work.
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/craftylittlehouse100/

Natalie Low enjoys putting words on paper and believes that everyone has a book of some sort inside them. She lives in Twickenham, UK with her rather charming family. She has published two chapbooks Dementia (2015) and recently School Run (2017).

Saturday, 10 February 2018

Year 2041 - Jill Hedges - Small World Futures

Jill Hedges

You can find Jill Hedges' Small World Future located down a little alleyway called Gibbon's Rent #unsettledgallery No.6. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

Jill Hedges has had a lifelong fascination with the Moon and the stars. She is an artist who naturally uses different materials and alternative art forms to convey her ideas. In 2015 she created A Space Walk map, an imaginative 5 kilometre walk that has conveniently scaled down the solar system to a manageable size. This map was first exhibited at the ‘On the map’ exhibition at the Sunbury Embroidery Gallery, Sunbury-on-Thames. In 2017 she published Christina's Moon, a charming little chapbook that tells a tale of enduring love through the phases of the Moon. Hedges was one of the original artists behind Gallery 202, a contemporary artist led non-profit initiative based in Northamptonshire. Bringing contemporary art to rural and urban communities through exhibitions and artist involvement with the public. She has been a regular contributor to CollectConnect exhibitions since 2011.

Alban Low is involved in many creative projects, these include album artwork, publishing chapbooks, making films, maps, conceptual exhibitions, live performance and good old drawing. He is artist-in-residence at the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education at Kingston University and St George's University of London. Low spends his evenings in the jazz clubs of London where he captures the exhilaration of live performances in his sketchbook. On Wednesday evenings he sketches the performers on the radio show A World in London at Resonance FM. He is about to open an exhibition of these drawings at the Yehudi Menuhin Concert Hall on the 14th February 2018.
http://albanlow.com/

Friday, 9 February 2018

Year 2118 - Ann Kopka - Small World Futures

Ann Kopka

Living on the Skin
What if we didn't live on the thin skin of a rocky planet?
Separated from the sucking, endless night of space by nothing more than a few miles of whimsical gases it is of little wonder that human kind lives a clinging, fearful life.
Ann Kopka's Small World Future offers a less tenuous existence.
Safely encased, on the inside, we are protected from the annihilating fear of living on the edge. No longer between infinity and a hard rocky place we could feel contained, held firmly in rather than on. What new mind sets would evolve in such a place? What new societies would emerge if we were free to delve inwards rather than circling forever round and round with only the desperate fantasy of a mad flight outwards into the deadliest unknown as an escape?
Ann's enticing world, like a brain holds folds and layers, spaces within spaces to explore, niches, planes and curves, organ like, body like.
Her world is green not blue, armoured against invasion from cosmic radiation or imagined aliens and lush.

Dean Reddick

Ann Kopka

You can find Ann Kopka's Small World Future on Weston Street at the back of Guy's Hospital #unsettledgallery No.1. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

Ann Kopka studied Fine Art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design and the City Lit. She has studied The Practices and Debates of Modern Art and graduated with a First Class Honours degree from The Open University. She has also studied Museum Curating at Tate Modern. Kopka has exhibited in London, the UK and USA. Her work is held in private collections in France, Spain, UK, Australia and Australia. Her experimental work engages with the research, process and transformation of discarded everyday ephemera and disposable objects of little or no intrinsic value. Through the concept of ‘making something out of nothing’ Kopka seeks to draw attention to the throwaway nature of consumer society and question our perception of its value systems.
http://www.artcontemporary.co.uk/

Dean Reddick is an artist, an art therapist and a lecturer. He uses a range of media and enjoys experimenting with casting processes using plaster, metal and resin to explore the tensions between organic and geometric forms, positive and negative space and the distortions that occur in producing casts. As an artist and art therapist Reddick has a keen interest in the role of art as a cultural phenomenon and as a container for inter-personal meaning. He enjoys working collaboratively and has been a regular exhibitor at Walthamstow's E17 Art Trail as well as exhibiting with CollectConnect. Recently he published Art Therapy in the Early Years: Therapeutic Interventions with Infants, Toddlers and Their Families (pub. 2016, Routledge) alongside co-editor Julia Meyerowitz-Katz.

Thursday, 8 February 2018

Year 2101 - Alban Low - #smallworldfutures

Alban Low, Weston Street, London Bridge, UK (#unsettledgallery No.1)

Small World Futures is a collection of 38 miniature sculptures depicting what life could look like in years to come. Each of these small artworks will be placed in public spaces (#unsettledgallery) around London Bridge. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these worlds here on the website. A writer will also use the world as inspiration to create something new and fresh, their words describing the shape of a new world.

Today we discover the Small World Future of....Alban Low
The year is 2101

Wheeze

It started with The Burning Of The Tower. A new way of being seemed possible. They told us they were sorry. Many of them meant it. They told us, ‘Change Will Happen’.

Our external world had always been Kindness v Money. And Money had always won. Because within each of us the battle is between Need and Desire. And Desire had always won. Night is always stronger than Day. Or was.

After The Burning Of The Tower, for a while we were breathing loud and wheezy, but we were breathing with possibility.

They tried at first to close the gaps, patch up the wounds, cover our mouths, fill the lung-holes with bullshit and Strictly and post-post-truth and my-identity-is-more-important-than-yours and splitting and spitting and hate.

Yet they could never fool us completely. And as we began to learn how to ignore them, we began to rebuild. First, the government went. Then all governments went. Then we set about looking at our darknesses, holding them out to others, holding them *for* others. The cladding was stripped away. We could be who we were, hiding neither our black nor our white.

Soon, we were raw and hurt and joyous and unbound. Many died. A God came, a Saviour. Then another and another. Some fell under their spell. But others - the majority - started to regain their curiosity, their love of truth, their open-aired doubt, their willingness to say, ‘I don’t know.’

Corporations began to slice themselves into small pieces, to turn towards communities, to sink themselves gently back into the people. And the people were happy. Most of them. Or - rather - most people were accepting, more whole, more aware, no longer striving for happiness or avoidant of pain. The new century, we agreed, would be a great one.

And then - in 2101 - came The Second Burning Of The Tower.

Kevin Acott

Alban Low

You can find Alban Low's Small World Future on the concrete barriers where Weston Street meets St Thomas Street (London Bridge) at #unsettledgallery No.1. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

Alban Low is involved in many creative projects, these include album artwork, publishing chapbooks, making films, maps, conceptual exhibitions, live performance and good old drawing. He is artist-in-residence at the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education at Kingston University and St George's University of London. Low spends his evenings in the jazz clubs of London where he captures the exhilaration of live performances in his sketchbook. On Wednesday evenings he sketches the performers on the radio show A World in London at Resonance FM. He is about to open an exhibition of these drawings at the Yehudi Menuhin Concert Hall on the 14th February 2018.

http://albanlow.com/

Kevin Acott

Kevin Acott is a London-based model, cult singer and poet. He divides his creative time between writing, photography and collaborative projects. His stories and poems can be found on the websites Sad Paradise, Londonist, Smoke: A London Peculiar and Ink, Sweat And Tears. In 2017 he dedicated six months to travelling and writing. Starting in North Carolina (USA) he eventually ended his adventures in Limoux, France. Along the way Acott spent a month as writer-in-residence in Qaqortoq (Greenland) where he wrote several short stories. He has released several books with publisher Sampson Low and is currently working toward a one-man show at this year's Crouch End Festival in June 2018.
www.kevinacott.com

Wednesday, 7 February 2018

Year 2164 - Bethany Murray - #smallworldfutures

Bethany Murray, unsettledgallery No.1

Small World Futures is a collection of 38 miniature sculptures depicting what life could look like in years to come. Each of these small artworks will be placed in public spaces (#unsettledgallery) around London Bridge. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these worlds here on the website. A writer will also use the world as inspiration to create something new and fresh, their words describing the shape of a new world.

Today we discover the Small World Future of.... Bethany Murray
The year is 2164...

The Sea Calls to Me like a Lover I Have Yet to Find
There was once a man who fell in love with the sea. So he set out to woo her. But how do you talk to someone who never stops sighing? He hit on the idea of talking to her through seashells, because everybody knows you can hear the voice of the sea that way. So he took one, and placed it to his ear, and though it was all whispers and sighs at first, after a while he came to understand her language and learned to talk back. He told her how he loved her and longed to be immersed in her slippery depths. So she showed him a shell, and he made himself small and slipped in.

Inside his shell, he clung to the rocks in the dark for days, or months, or years maybe, his flesh pink with longing, until the sea came and swept him away. All night they tossed and swam together, and he felt her icy fingers and tongue lolling and licking, the salt water piercing his cracks like tears. And then, in the morning, he clung to his rocks, dark and pinkly limpid, whilst she swept far out again, singing. And so he sits, and so she sighs, and so he waits, for she is a fickle mistress and always moving. And one day, when she is done with him, he will join the many skeletons of her other previous lovers on the seashore, his voice become one with the music of the Sea.

Rebecca Lowe

Bethany Murray

You can find Bethany Murray's Small World Future between two concrete bollards where Weston Street meets St Thomas Street (London Bridge) at #unsettledgallery No.1. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

As an artist Bethany Murray takes seemingly empty space, juxtaposing it with physical matter in an attempt to make the intangible tangible. Through the use of cast space, poetry and found objects she attempt to describe a sense of ‘otherness’. Exploring the distinction between the known and unknown that is directly linked to her research of the ‘sacred’. These mere encounters with material and language sit in the hinterland between that which is considered earthly and the ethereal.
http://bethanymurray-artist.blogspot.co.uk/

Rebecca Lowe

Rebecca Lowe is a Wales-based writer, editor and performance poet. She has been featured on BBC Radio 4's Poetry Workshop, and her work has appeared in anthologies including Bristol Poetry Can, Red Poets, Blackheath Countercultural Review, and Three Drops from a Cauldron, an anthology of poetry based on folklore and myth. She also plays hammered dulcimer and zither, which she sometimes incorporates into her performances.

http://www.writerscafe.org/BeckyLowe

http://swanmedia.wix.com/copywriter-cv

https://dizzysheep.livejournal.com/

Tuesday, 6 February 2018

Year 3030 - Francesca Albini - #smallworldfutures

Francesca Albini, #unsettledgallery No.2

Francesca Albini

You can find Francesca Albini's Small World Future at #unsettledgallery No.2, beside a downpipe on Melior Street and next to the Horseshoe Inn. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

Francesca Albini divides her life between literary and artistic endeavours. She is a PhD in Classics, and has worked in publishing for her entire adult life, as a translator, author and editor. She is a self taught artist and photographer. Her work is inspired by folk art, but also by design. Albini is a collector of memories, and uses any medium that allows her to remember and share, express feelings and narrate stories. From line drawings to plastic cameras, from collage to upcycled jewellery and dolls. "My work is playful and dreamy, child-like but also philosophical. I fall in and out of love with many styles and tools, but I'm always me, whatever I do."

Natalie Low enjoys putting words on paper and believes that everyone has a book of some sort inside them. She lives in Twickenham, UK with her rather charming family. She has published two chapbooks Dementia (2015) and recently School Run (2017).

Monday, 5 February 2018

Year 3262 - Melanie Ezra - #smallworldfutures

Melanie Ezra, Magdalen Street, London Bridge, #unsettledgallery 7

Small World Futures is a collection of 38 miniature sculptures depicting what life could look like in years to come. Each of these small artworks will be placed in public spaces (

#unsettledgallery) around London Bridge. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these worlds here on the website. A writer will also use the world as inspiration to create something new and fresh, their words describing the shape of a new world.

Today we discover the Small World Future of.... Melanie Ezra

The year is 3262

We piece together the past with these artefacts. Belonging to a world thousands of years ago. Or so we believe.
Found in the Lea Valley of the Kings, deep within the Pyramids of Leytonstone, the grand palaces of the ancient kings and queens.
Time has not been kind, preservation is a game of chance. Synthetic bright coloured clothes and golden shoes give us a glimpse of their impeccable taste and beauty.
The first tomb contains the remains of DAVID.
David is a hero, he slays giants, he is a king.
His queen lays embalmed in the second chamber.
Bound and tied, her arms surgically removed to accentuate her Venus.
It is a sign of love to wrap her so tight.
Next to her, sheets of papyrus. Cosmopolitan words that talk of Beauty, Sacred Ecstasy and Sexual Pleasure. She is perfect.
Pinned to her strapped body is a sign.
It reads....I used to be Posh Spice.
She was a Goddess.
Or so we believe.

Alban Low

Melanie Ezra

You can find Melanie Ezra's Small World Future located at the bottom of a brick indentation on Magdalen Street, London Bridge at #unsettledgallery No.7. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

Melanie Ezra is a Wales-based fine artist who works using her own original photographs to create beautiful and intricate collages. She often works in series, providing visual responses to external stimuli such as literature, science, and music. She considers herself a specialist in the deconstruction of time and the extension of the moment. Recent works have evolved her practice to include three dimensional mixed media art forms based on dolls, mannequins, and the human form. The theme is always deconstruction and reconstruction, whether this is through a photograph or through her mixed-media works. Ezra openly describes herself as a ‘renegade arts experimentalist’ and is happy dabbling in anything that pushes her work to the limit and broadens her own potential.

https://melanieezra.com/

Alban Low is involved in many creative projects, these include album artwork, publishing chapbooks, making films, maps, conceptual exhibitions, live performance and good old drawing. He is artist-in-residence at the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education at Kingston University and St George's University of London. Low spends his evenings in the jazz clubs of London where he captures the exhilaration of live performances in his sketchbook. On Wednesday evenings he sketches the performers on the radio show A World in London at Resonance FM. He is about to open an exhibition of these drawings at the Yehudi Menuhin Concert Hall on the 14th February 2018.

http://albanlow.com/