Featured Artist Tom Milnes

Introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your practice?

I’m Tom Milnes. I’m an artist, curator and Ph.D researcher living and working in Oxford. My work and interests explore our relationship with technological cultures. I make site-specific works which use different cultural responses to technology where artworks actively confuse time frames. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: White Marble,Toronto Urban Film Festival (2015), JHB Archive, Birmingham Open Media (2015) and Aspect, Kingsgate Gallery, London (2014) This year, I was awarded the 3D3 scholarship for research at Falmouth University. I was recently the Sandarbh International Artist-in-Residence and Kingsgate Emerging Artist-in-Residence. I'm the curator and founder of the online platform Digital Artist Residency.

What are you currently working on?

A few different things. Still creating my Ex-Machine works. This is a purely studio based series, which is quite unusual for me. My research is into site-specific practice and a lot of my work tend to lean toward site-specificity. However, I do always include studio based elements in these works. For instance for my upcoming installation of Deep Relaxation at The Morgue, Chelsea College of Art, requires me to hack and alter approxmately 30-40 tape walkmans and install them in the space.

How do you spend your time when you are at the studios?

Normally breaking apart old bit of technology, dismantling them, reassembling them into different forms. I use the studio as a photography space too, so I’m often creating photos or 3D models in some part of the studio. I also have a little office area as all this ‘digital data’ will require collating on various programs like Blender, Photoshop or Maya.

What are your other (work) commitments if any?

I curate an online space called Digital Artist Residency. It is an online platform which provides space for digital artists to create and display new artwork. The initiative aims to provide support for artwork created using digital processes, exploring the boundaries of art and technology. I am also doing a PhD through Falmouth University, so I have commitments with the university too.

How does having a studio at Magdalen road support your work?

Definitely, I find it a really flexible space for my various different practices. I find there is a great support network at the studios too and I enjoy chatting about my work to other artists. Some really interesting shows have come about through the studios too, like Dis Locate at the VW Garage last year.

What are you hoping to achieve over the next year?

Several things really. I have a digital residency coming up though IUOAE which will be taking place in June. I will be curating some shows through DAR with OVADA, Oxford Museum and Wrong Biennale. I also need to write some papers for conferences on my research. This is something I’ve not done before so that will be exciting.

Group Exhibition - Art on The Move at The Jam Factory

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2nd November 2016 - 4th December 2016

Private View: November 6th 2016

6pm - 8pm

All Welcome!

21 Artists from the studios including our associate artists are exhibiting work of varying practices: ceramicists, photographers, installation artists, and painters. 

Betsy Tyler Bell - Studied Fine Art at Brookes University and Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University where printmaking led towards handmade papermaking, which finally became her main medium as a textural painter of landscape. While resident in France from 2000 - 2011 she founded and led an international art association,‘Art In Situ’ organising artist’s residencies and creating a still flourishing network of European artists.

Catalina Renjifo's - An ongoing practice that encompasses experimental sculpture, drawing and photography.  Playing with the conventional roles and meanings of perishable materials to allude to notions of comfort, habits of consumption, waste and identity Catalina's artistic practice weaves between traditionally domestic methods and contemporary art practices.  The sculptural pieces explore themes of intimacy and nostalgia and maintain a connection with the scale, sites and experience of the human body. Catalina's visual work stems from documenting her making process and strives to capture this connection as once objects are separated from the body they become waste once more.

Chris Otley – Produces crisp and meticulous highly detailed works on paper in graphite, often on a large scale, with a focus on natural history. His work is increasingly concerned with the concept of 'rhopography' - the study of the seemingly mundane, humble, minor and trivial. 

Elena Henshaw - Elena’s current seascapes are based at and around Ventnor, Isle of Wight.   She uses driftwood and other types of reclaimed wood to intensify the feeling, presence and connection with nature. When interpreting a seascape, Elena tends to follow her intuition, letting it control the creative process leading the work to its final destination.

Ellen Hausner- Ellen conceives her artworks as explorations of the ephemeral and the unseen. She grew up in Asia, in cultures where both worship and meditation are an integral part of everyday life. This constant sense of the sacred permeates her work. A meditative state of mind is the starting point of creation for the Artist. She lets it through by allowing the colours to present themselves, the images and figures to emerge, the forms to find their way into existence. The image comes through as Ellen permits the materials she uses to direct the piece.

Helen Foster - Starting out in fashion design, studying at the Royal College of Art all Helen ever really wanted to do was draw! Bold black ink worked by brush is her current usual method of choice. When it comes to adding colour she enjoys the immediacy and texture that can be achieved through collage, both digitally and manually.

Some of Helen’s own favourite images are of her fast paced live catwalk sketches. Here she strives to capture a collection in a mere fleeting moment as the models pass by. The Artist loves the buzz of live events and how that energy translates into the drawings.

Helen Ganly - Drawing is Helen’s first love, she feels that black and white images can be very powerful. Helen has recently completed ten drawings, which have formed a frieze along ten windows of the old VW showrooms on the Iffley Road.

The theme has been migration and exile, subjects that she has long been interested in. In 1986 a collaged book Jyoti’s Journey was published by Andre Deutsch, and in 1992 Moving Stories was launched at Pegasus Theatre.

‘ONE LIFE’ seems to encapsulate the fragility of life and the unfolding tragedy of the present situation.

John Brennan - 1st prize winner of the 2015 ArtGemini Prize and Contemporary British Painting Prize 2016 finalist, John Brennan has also been the subject of a profile in The Oxford Times last year, by Sarah Mayhew Craddock. In his own words: "Emotional and contextual contradiction underpins much of my painting. As an artist I’m fascinated by a subtle sensation that I’ve come to recognise and regard as a visual paranoia of sorts. It’s something I experience momentarily, sometimes in everyday life, but crucially when I happen upon a potential source image. It can manifest itself in a wide range of subject matter, the common denominator being a sense of the uncanny or enigmatic." 

Jonathan Moss – Jonathan focuses on capturing frozen moments and exploring a sense of stasis. He is particularly interested in the interplay between the experience and memory of places with a hidden history. The initial stage of his creative process is to make video-walks, the Artist then bases his paintings and prints on the videos – seemingly abstract, but with a basis in the seen world. The goal is that his pieces transcend particular places and become spaces in which to lose oneself. They explore the importance of quiet contemplation in a chaotic world and as forms become reminiscent of Rorschach Inkblots, we enter a dialogue with our subconscious.

Madi Acharya-Baskerville - My work is concerned with the synthesis of unlikely elements. Using song, conversation, patterns from textiles and magazine cuttings, which resonate with me on some level, I have created these mixed media works on wooden panels which broadly reference nature and our impact on our environment.

Samuel Harriman - A British artist based in Oxford. His work consists primarily of light, however, by using painterly processes, he combines the mediums of light installation and painting to intonate the point that the use of light is a form of painting. He uses both white wall gallery spaces and sites such as sheds or residential settings to install his work. 

Jonathan Shapley – Jonathan is concerned with our relationship with public and semi-private spaces and places, and how we are watched, controlled and monitored when we are in these spaces. It also considers the relationships between different kinds of spaces and places, for example what happens at the intersection between urban and rural, between public and private, or between inhabited and uninhabited: what boundaries and barriers do we encounter, and how do we manipulate landscapes and environments, and ultimately its users, to suit us?

Julian Dourado -Making a painting is a living process. As one paints the work takes on a life of its own. It has its own needs and it is in responding to these that Julian finds himself engaging in something beyond himself.Julian always begins with a definite idea, usually based on a landscape, which he feels a strong connection with. Art is about letting go and moving from the particular towards the universal. It is also important to be surprised by one’s art – a finished painting should let you see something that you didn’t imagine at the beginning

Juliet Eccles - A person who wishes to give physical presence to her ideas with whatever materials come to hand. As a conceptual artist, with a desire to communicate and solve problems in the abstract, her approach is to subvert and disrupt a normal dialogue; thereby illuminating an idea and its significance. Whether the subject is housework or the human condition, they are subjects that inspire and drive Juliet, giving her an enduring theme. 

Lucy Baxandall - Lucy’s work springs from the following concerns and ideas:

• · The accumulation of memory through the imagery of geological sedimentation. The role of language in this process.
• · Definitions of home and community, and the influence of landscape on identity.
• · The containment of emotional processes so that they are visible but crystallised or fossilised.
• · Tangible representations of how we gather and filter information.
• · Human attempts to control the uncontrollable.

The media I use are handmade and reclaimed/recycled paper, traditional bookbinding materials, found objects, image transfer, various surface treatments and text.

Paul Fenwick - Moving steadily away from traditional portraiture, Paul has learnt to allow the medium to entirely direct the process of the painting. The image organically emerges from the paint revealing a solid human presence. This kind of image is more accessible and open to subjective and personal interpretation by the viewer than traditional portraiture, and also seems to communicate on a deeper level. The artist sees absolutely no reason to begin work knowing exactly what is going to happen. He wants to be surprised during the creative process and also long after the event.

Sarah House – Sarah’s drawings and paintings draw heavily on patterning found in the natural world, as well as from theoretical frameworks that translate into visual forms. She is also influenced by colour-field approaches that explore the interplay between colour and design in order to create dynamic patterned spaces and surfaces. The artist has developed a keen interest in tessellating shapes since visiting Morocco and is fascinated by geometric patterning and mathematical ideas such as probability, iteration and chaos theory.

Sharon Wyper : Beyond Vision – Sharon’s paintings are concerned with seeking what is 'beyond'. The cosmos beyond the clouds; the molecular world beyond our optical view; the spiritual beyond the physical. In her sky paintings she show stars that would not normally be visible in the daylight. The Artist use star maps for precise locations and times that correspond to the making of a particular piece of work so that the painting is also a record of the painting’s history. For Sharon the sky’s layers are metaphores for revelation and for the constancy of a Divine light that appears through a turbulent world of flux.” 

Tom Milnes- The invention and popularity of certain technologies has created an array of cultures and subcultures reliant upon the technology. The specific interchange between the progress of science and our response and adaptability to our environment provides a wide range of consumer products to be used as components in artworks. By disregarding their original function the actions, uses and representations employed become humorous and playful; the results reminding us of the speed of technological advance, cultural wastage and the fads enjoyed along the way. Milnes works in an archaeological way, understanding technology’s non-linear development as well as mapping peoples engagement and use of emergent media.

Wig Sayell - All of Wig’s photographs have been created using pinhole cameras, which require much longer exposures, and only take one image a day. Therefore, Wig takes care walking around the area to ensure that the best viewpoint is secured for the camera; there is just one chance to get everything right. A key aspect of Wig’s work is a sense of ‘disruption’ within or around the image itself: kept edges of the negative, differences in chemical development, overlay of different images- a physical reminder that the image is merely a representation of a location.

Marie Darkins - Oxford born and bred. Marie’s work has evolved from hand-built, sawdust-fired pots and often incorporated found wood to delicate porcelain pieces and installations of clay or pottery forms that sometimes involved specific groups of people, e.g. Asylum seekers (In Transit) and the homeless.