Artist biographies and work locations/contact.
Rebecca Birtwhistle graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford in 2002 with a degree in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. While her studio practice focused on Sculpture, Installation and Printmaking, much of her inspiration came from studying the parallels between architectural structure and human anatomy (necessitating regular visits to the University dissecting room): the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, chose one of her pen and ink drawings as their winning entry for the 2002 Vivien Leigh Prize. She has also undertaken private commissions, designed logos and book illustrations and produced images for a wide range of projects including a production of Alan Ayckbourn’s “Season’s Greetings”. In January 2002, she provided a series of pen and ink images for the touring Anne Frank Exhibition “A History for Today” shown in Worcester Cathedral; images which have been used to produce large display panels since shown on the Exhibition’s National Tour. Worcester is a resonant image in her illustrations for both Links for a Lifetime (ISBN 0-9539889-4-5) and Jubilee Wedding (ISBN 0-9539889-5-3),and architectural subjects remain her primary source of inspiration; realised, when full-time teaching commitments allow, in mixed media studies, pencil drawings and original prints and paintings. She can be contacted via http://www.birtiesofworcester.com/ or directly on rebeccabirtwhistle@hotmail.com.
Cristina Burke-Trees graduated in Art & Design at the College of Art in Berne, Switzerland, following which she worked as a member of the design team in a large department store before travelling widely in Ecuador and Peru and later in India, Ceylon, Thailand and S E Asia. Informed and inspired by those experiences she returned to Berne as a freelance designer for stores, galleries and trade exhibitions, learning along the way the practical business of exhibition planning, installation and display. She excels as a net worker and, in the UK, has been a member of a hospital arts committee and worked with the Exeter Museum & Art Gallery on its World Culture and Ancient Egyptian displays. She sees herself very much as a solution finder, trouble shooter and creative ‘realisateur’ of aspirations whether working with a museum, a gallery like the University of Plymouth’s Cube 3 or trade exhibition like Imagineering. Those skills and interests manifest themselves in her creation in 2005 of Art Terracina, a waterside gallery on the Quay at Exeter. This enables her to satisfy a desire to bring businesses and public organizations together with artists. The Gallery has become a venue for conferences and activities which help people make connections: for example, between art and science by way of her involvement in Exeter University’s Genomics project. Since 2005 she has mounted a range of challenging and innovative exhibitions bringing to Exeter artists like Gail Sagman, Dick Bixby, Peter Gillies, Russell Frampton, Tom & Jon Adams, Steve Thorpe & Paul Ramsay and Raya Herzig among others. She can be contacted at http://www.artteracina.co.uk/ .
Nicola Hollick graduated from the University of Plymouth in 2004 with a first class honours in Design and Illustration. She works primarily with patterns, shapes and textures occurring within natural environments as well as found objects. Her starting point for the Hiawatha’s Swedish Wedding illustrations (ISBN 0-9539889-6-1) was the ancient pictograms of Native American Indians (which had also fascinated the poet Longfellow). She found their raw simplicity, yet beautiful depictions of ceremonies, beliefs and visions, instantly appealing and fitting for her stylistic approach to the poem. Beginning from her own digital imagery of seaweed (from the Cornish Coast) she worked with the patterns, shapes and textures alongside hand drawn details to produce images of a more descriptive, delicate and perhaps residual or grainy nature. Coincidentally, visits to remote parts of Sweden and Norway were hugely inspirational and continue to affect the way she works today: hence the fusion between the Native American Indian aspects of the poem and the Swedish. More of her work can be seen on her website http://www.nicolahollick.com/ where she can be contacted regarding her work and future commissions.
Robert Joyce was born in Yorkshire and studied Art and Creative Writing in Leeds, London and Exeter (where he now lives). He works predominately as a painter but also with written material and visual images, sometimes combining both in illuminating dramas and video presentations. Examples are a film journey around his bathroom to the commentary of a voyage down the Nile. Another, a recent collaboration with Gordon Read, is a video account of a walk around the underside of Exeter to a running poetic commentary with the title A Walk in Exeter: Doodles of a Wandering Man. His solo exhibitions have been mounted in London and Poland as well as in the West Country where he often exhibits in collaboration with other artists. He is well known as a chronicler of such exhibitions – again a fusing of art and text – while he is a sought after reviewer of some of the more mind searing publications of ‘alternative’ writers. His illustrations for Gifts in Store (ISBN 0-9539889-2-9) took as their starting point some of the imagery used by large department stores to advertise their wedding services. He is the founding editor of the Poke-Eye Press and latterly the Woodward Press and aspects of his work entitled Artworks and Writing can be seen on http://robertjoyce.org.uk.
Gordon Read has had a lifetime’s interest in poetry which for the most part has been expressed in what he describes as occasional verse (vers d’occasion),which is what the poem pastiches here represent. Hiawatha’s Swedish Wedding developed following his presence at a family wedding in Sweden where native participants maintained literary and creative contributions throughout while British guests behaved like Trappist monks. For the blessing occasion back in England, therefore, he prepared a possible contribution. That piece led to a commission for Gifts in Store by which time a tradition had been established and Links for a Lifetime and Jubilee Wedding followed. He is also the author of two poetry collections: one deriving from a study of Holocaust survivor poets entitled A Watch in the Night and the other, Painted Ladies, a Look into a World of Daughters, is a series of pen pictures and anecdotes focusing on daughters of all ages in diverse roles across many countries. In 2005 he completed a commission for an epic poem, The Way of War in the Search for Peace, which focuses on the endurance and sacrifice of the 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment when defending the weakest point of Wellington’s line at the epoch changing Battle of Waterloo. He can be contacted at gordon.read.55@gmail.com.