Events

Kate Milsom was born in London in 1968 and studied Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University, spending her final year at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago on an extended travel award. Graduating in 1992 she moved back to London, where, for a time, she slipped into the world of graphic design and illustration. Kate subsequently moved to mid-Wales, where she now lives and works.

Kate says about her work,
“I began producing elaborate mixed media pieces while on my long stay in Venice, making use of the city-floor ephemera of discarded museum leaflets and postcards. Incorporating ‘scraps’ of the past, sourced from second-hand books and magazines, and the maps I grew up with as the child of an intrepid Geophysicist, I produced a diary of sorts, the alternative reality of a history I invented for myself. I have since developed this way of working, often inspired by current events, creating ‘intricate scenes of social malfunction’, my investigations into ‘the human condition’ through a series of imagined portraits.”

Mary Mabbutt was born in Luton in 1951. She attended Luton School of Art and then Loughborough College of Art & Design. Between 1975 – 1978 she did post-graduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools followed by a Junior Fellowship at Cardiff College of Art from 1978 -1979. She then moved to Cornwall to become a tutor in painting at Falmouth College of Art. Mary has won numerous prizes and awards, most notably the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize in 1995. She has exhibited widely, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and her work is held in numerous public and private collections.

Mary’s paintings emerge from the ordinary world of everyday surroundings, spaces and places in her life. Over the last five years she has emphasized the relationship of colour and the need to balance the immediacy of observed discovery in small-scale work with the demands and complexity of larger paintings.

Mary says about her work:
‘My starting point is always my own experience and a large proportion of my paintings have been made at or of the kitchen table, which is the centre of the home. I have also used the self-portrait as a point of departure in the observed world, a human figure that establishes a particular presence and focus of attention, which I often can’t derive from spaces or objects alone’.