Green & Organic '08 Opening Night Fashion Show! Images by Sam Stockman

Janet Wootton

Janet Wootton is a communicator, both by profession and through her art. Her work has landscape origins and mainly explores the properties, surfaces, tensions & melting points of plastic-based materials and aluminium. The finished work ranges from transparent images of a sensitive but highly coloured quality, to rugged relief paintings of a distinctive constructional and linear nature where horizon lines are significant. There is a recycling approach in much of Janet's work, through the reusing and re-working of plastic bags and aluminium sheet and wood and their conversion into artworks.

David Booth

David Booth was born in Manchester in 1963. He is currently studying Fine Art at Derby University, where his work is receiving high praise. David works in painting , photography, sculpture and installation. In Green & Organic '08, David is exhibiting a large photographic print 'Sciatica', a reflection on a illness he has suffered from, it depicts the spine with 24 recycled chairs. His other piece in the show comes from an installation work 'Dark Water', using recycled plastic & a recycled canvas frame, the plastic gives the impression of the dark depths of water and the beauty in its movement.

Dora Winstone

Dora has been working with and collecting recycled envelopes for the past year in an attempt to create interesting images out of an object that we all discard everyday, trying to illustrate the range of colour, contrasting between the inside and outside of the envelope. She enjoys seeing the initial lines that are the thoughts behind the form, and love working with layers, be it through manipulating paper, paint or composition. Including personal aspects in her work is important, illustrating a friendly face or significant place. Travel has influenced her work a great deal in the past year.

Louise Williams

The subject matter of Louise's work tends to be decorative objects such as plants and flowers, cakes, sweets and jewellery. This current mixed media range combines painting, drawing and machine stitching with collaged materials such as giftwrap, newspapers, magazines, postcards and hand-made papers. The aim is to create colourful, decorative pieces, rich in pattern and texture.

Adrian Shaw

As both a scientist and artist, Adrian uses montage and other mixed media methods to explore the boundaries between technology, the environment and society. He is particularly keen on utilising ‘found’ or discarded objects- the detritus of our post-colonial, global society in his art. Often, he uses assemblages and installation9including painitng, text, printing and light based methods- photography, video in a trans-media approach. He is also, as someone of anglo-indian background interested in investigating identity, memory and diaspora, which he calls ‘universal tourism’. Stylistically he works in a ‘faux naive’ manner. Adrian lives in Nottingham and is currently completing an M.A. in lens-based media.

Carol Savage

Carol is disturbed by the violence, alienation and disconnection in modern society and drawn to the broken, aged and worn-out fragments we leave behind, or views of the world that may be partial or incomplete. For this series of prints she began with drawing small elements of the landscape, layering and manipulating them to create a new whole. These were then the focus of printmaking techniques with a green ethic. Ferric chloride is used to etch rather than the more toxic nitric acid, and biodegradable sunflower oil is used to clean up, rather than white spirit. The chine collee is litter and waste paper fragments.

Tamsin O'Sullivan

Tamsin is a self-taught mixed media artist focussing mainly on paintings, collages and altered art. She mainly works in acrylic with a mixture of vintage and recycled items. She uses a variety of materials including glitter, jewellery, keys, buttons, mirrors, ribbons and lace. She collects her materials from auctions, charity shops and craft stores. She is inspired by anything vintage and retro, tattoo art and pinup art. At the moment she is mainly making small paintings using copies of vintage photos of women from the Edwardian and Victorian eras.

Vincent McGrath

Vincent is a designer maker from Nottinghamshire with over 12 years experience in the stone masonry and granite trade, having graduated with a B.A. Hons degree an Industrial design in 2001. Vincent’s company, 1-Limited edition provides unique, one-off pieces of art from a select choice of high quality recycled materials, emphasising the use of natural resources that will last a lifetime thus providing an environmentally friendly and sustainable product.

1-limited edition website

Eireann Lorsung

Eireann makes prints, drawings, dioramas and paper constructions as a way of understanding the world around her and her relation ship to it and to the people she meets, using repeated symbols to represent these places, people and herself. Understandably, therefore, the work she makes can feel very personal. She tends to work on a small scale (partially because she’s been moving from place to place for the past few years), which lends a feeling of intimacy to the work. The media she is currently working in are etching and gouache/watercolours. She makes prints at the Leicester Print Workshop, and at the moment she is particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of chine collee for her prints.

Cecilia Davies

Cecilia has been exploring ideas of how global warming could impact our lives through an instant freeze. This project was inspired by the work done by the artists of the Cape Farewell project, who are trying to raise the public’s awareness to climate change through different forms of art media. The materials Cecilia has used to create her sculptures are paraffin wax, blue wax dye, various pieces of domestic furniture, and objects used around the home, mostly recycled. Wax is used to represent ice and snow textures: it bends and moves on its own like a frozen environment and it seems to gives her sculptures the sense of fragility. The furniture is used so people could relate to the objects and to create a sense of loss of the things we take for granted.

Sam Clift

The traditional adaptability of materials such as carpet and their presence in occupying a space is explored and is a strong contributor towards encapsulating the viewer. Its hybrid stasis for brief moments unwinds a journey of transformation, adapting to environments like an organism whilst developing its own sense of existence within a space. Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly and Jessica stockholder hold a strong link to underpinning the current work.

Laurie Clark

Laurie is a multi-disciplined artist who studied at Manchester Metropolitan University. Whichever medium she is using, pattern and colour always feature heavily in her work. She is currently developing a series of paintings and mixed media pieces infusing vintage wallpaper designs, fabrics and nature. They are influenced by the patterns and colours of the Art Deco period and Arts and Crafts movement, in particular the work of Henry Macintosh and William Morris. Within these paintings she has tried to give a sense of age and history, leaving the impression they are fragments of a time gone by. She uses materials she finds lying around, stamps, old letters, tea bag paper and dress patterns. Each collage is hand sewn and uses a broad variety of materials to give a tactile and unique quality.

Joan Beal

Joan has studied for two hours a week at W.E.A. classes for two years. Last year, aged 72, she suffered a stroke. Her art played an important part in her recovery. She tries to use unusual subjects and materials for her work. The portrait was done using instant coffee. She does not comply with many rules: sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. She doesn’t worry about the failures. She just tries again!

Chris Abbott

A large portion of Chris’s art materials are recycled, bought at flea markets and car boots. One of his main influences has been Robert Irwin and his definition of art as “a continuous examination of our perceptual awareness and a continuous expansion of our eagerness of the world around us.” For Chris this has meant seeing things in a different light. An example of this is ‘childhood memories revisited”. He has attempted to recapture the simplicity of the time and to break through the constraints that time binds us to.

Alan Birchall

Alan Birchall 'Red Lion Pottery' is inspired by some elements of Oriental philosophy especially Zen & Wabi-sabi in relation to ceramics. He likes the concept of finding 'beauty in the impermanent, imperfect and the incomplete, in things modest & humble & in the unconventional'. He is also inspired by geological formations and flora in the surface texture of his ceramic work. His glazes are based on traditional oriental recipes and often incorporate native wood ash. He experiments with the wonderful effects that natural ash and the raw flame can produce in his wood-firing kiln. In the cabinets of Green & Organic, Alan will exhibit pots created using some locally dug red clay as a slip, ash glazes created from locally sourced coppiced and pruned trees or old pallets, and all fired in his carbon neutral wood kiln. Come along to see his really stunning and unique pots in Green & Organic.

Eco decorator - Peter Padun

Decorating is something most of us have undertaken at some time in our lives, often on a regular basis. In our own domestic situations, we generally have a casual approach to the health and safety implications of the materials we are using. Peter Padun, Nottingham based decorator has been working with these eco, natural paints for a while. He was impressed with the quality of natural paints, the health benefits - no smells, no feeling groggy and no headaches! People are surprised and have a keen interest when he mentions that there are natural paints & products available. Their initial skepticism is the cost of natural paints & products, these paints are not as expensive as they think and in certain cases are a lot cheaper than solvent based paints.

Meet Peter and find out more about eco, natural non solvent paints in this year's Green & Organic market!

Trash Blooms

Claire Harris is a Midlands-based textile artist and designer who studied both at Coventry University and then Liverpool John Moores University where she gained a BA(hons) in Fashion. A major componant of her design practice since then has been the use of unconventional materials which are stitch assembled into abstract wearable forms. She has recently launched a new range of eco-kitsch floral fashion accessories known as 'Trash Blooms'which utilise up-cycled fabric waste, rescued garments and vintage trimmings. The resulting pieces are edgy, tongue in cheek and exceptionally wearable. The pieces presented at the Green & Organic market will comprise of a mix of floral corsages, customised pre-owned shoes and bags.

Priscilla Morley

After a period of some research, and attending courses by Valerie Michael, Priscilla realised the adverse environmental implications of the use of chrome and similar materials in modern leather production. She also realised the joy of working with vegetable tanned leathers. It became apparent, that whilst vegetable tanning is seeing something of a renaissance, relatively few people in England work with this type of leather today. Under the banner 'God's Earth', Priscilla designs and makes practical items in leather, fabric & recycled materials. Her workshop has a range of equipment, from hand tools to energy saving, commercial machinery.

See her lovely handbags available in our cabinet exhibition & available through the market on Wed 10th September.

Caroline Saul

Caroline's work is process led, she creates her own new materials using obsolete plastic objects that are throwaway in today's society. She creates the new and exciting from these objects, challenging its' original function and use. She currently works with post-consumer plastic milk bottles to create sheet material by dying and heating. This new material is then transformed into sculptural vessels.

See Caroline's work in the cabinets during Green & Organic.