Artists at The Yard Studios Winchester

My current practice focuses on contemporary Japanese water-based woodblock printing, known as mokuhanga. This medium beautifully balances traditional techniques with artistic expression. I am drawn to the use of natural materials, allowing me to create with a conscious appreciation for the environment. Carving the wood is a slow and tactile process, which appeals to my sculptural sensibility. I balance my practice with reflective walks along the River Itchen. These seasonal observations inspire my experimentation, which I express through delicate, transparent layers of water-based pigments on handmade washi paper. 

Alongside woodblock printmaking, I work in the medium of sculpture, exploring contained spaces in geometric forms. Combined with sound, my sculptures invite kinaesthetic and multi-sensory engagement. Since qualifying as an Art Psychotherapist, my practice has continued with an enquiry into contained spaces, working with Teatro Lambe Lambe, a miniature form of puppet theatre.

I grew up in rural Wiltshire and Hampshire, my love of nature certainly influenced my early work. The artists that have been my major inspirations range from Turner, with his wonderful use of light, to Peter Doig and Cecily Brown who have been my contemporary influences. Doig, using photography as a starting point, and allowing his imagination to run riot in his use of paint. With Brown, it is purely her use of paint; the fluidity of her brushwork has such movement.

I’m interested in what things do rather than what they are, this project draws on New Materialist thinking, feminist writing practices, photographic documentation, drawing and dance scores to create a practice of ‘sitting in’ or an archaeology of the present which responds to the material of the body, materiality of the site and affective relations between the two, as well as the writings of Kathleen Stewart to create a language thick with intimate resonances of everyday details near and far.

Lorraine Morris is a fine art printer/photographer whose practice combines the disciplines of drawing, painting and photography to explore landscapes which capture and retain the trace of human activity. Photography, which literally means 'light drawing' is an immensely important element in the process of exploring memory. It is their material quality combined with the captured image, that makes photographs amongst our most treasured possessions as well as vessels of personal and collective memory. The images created attempt to investigate the relationships between time, space and place. Lorraine graduated from Winchester School of Art in 2008. She has work in private collections in the UK and in the permanent collection of The University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. Her work has been exhibited in Winchester, Southampton and The Forest of Dean and in London at APT Gallery in Deptford.

'In wildness is the preservation of the world'
-Thoreau

A reverence for nature, and a meditation on it, is what my work is all about. Colour to me is often more important than form. Each colour viscerally conveying an emotion or sensation. How often we feel deep peace when experiencing the sublime turquoise of the sea or are perked up by a vast blue morning sky.
How much nature needs our reverence at this moment in our history.

Junko O’Neill is a fine art painter who primarily works in traditional Japanese paints made from natural mineral pigments. Inspired by the Japanese spacial and temporal concept of ‘Ma’, her paintings, which range from figurative to abstract forms, embody space with a sense of time-passing and a charged atmosphere, underlined by a sense of calm. 
She gained her MA and BA from Winchester School of Art.  Born in Tokyo, she now lives and works in Winchester, Hampshire.

Robert Truscott is a sculptor producing sensitive figurative work mostly in bronze and plaster. His ‘Defeat’ sculpture was the winner of the prestigious Threadneedle Prize Visitor Choice award 2012.  You may like his Facebook page on this “Defeat at Stalingrad” piece. After graduating from Winchester School of Art, a strong feeling for Russian culture lead him to St Petersburg’s Repin Academy, where he continued postgraduate study. His work emphasises links with 19th century culture, and  20th century conflicts. He feels that the human figure remains the ultimate means of artistic expression, communicating in a direct unequivocal manner humanity's eternal struggle. The pathos of conflict, lies central to his work. This fascination with military history – the ordeal of the soldier – bound up in his specific national uniform becomes an increasingly marginalised art genre. His inspiration is often drawn from the music of Beethoven, Bruckner and Wagner. Their work articulates mankind’s yearning for a humanised society based on traditional values in harmony with nature.