TRISH BROWN

Trish was a founder member of the group

The inherent qualities of the oil paint, linen canvas and birch board are essential physical elements of my working practice. As I methodically build up the surfaces I see my paintings as combining with, and developing from, these beautiful materials and their unpredictable properties.

My work is about the way we see contrasts of light and shadow at different moments in time. Our perception of what we see, or think we see, alters according to our mood, circumstance, situation and memories. The unanticipated nuances and volatilities of the oil paint itself might also reflect the unrelenting contradictions and harmonies of every day. I received my MA from Nottingham Trent University in 2014 after graduating from The University of Nottingham with a Fine Art BA in 2012. My main areas of work are oil painting, life drawing and sculpture.

I have exhibited at The Royal Academy, Harley Gallery, Parallax: Kensington Art Fair, Nottingham Castle, Djangoly Gallery, Friar Lane Gallery, Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, Tarpey Gallery, Lady Bay Arts Festival, Lace Market Gallery, Atkins Gallery, LCB Depot Gallery. 

Martyn somerville

Wood is alive even after being cut from the tree. It talks back to you, sometimes loudly and obnoxiously, disagreeing with everything you had in mind for it. Working with hand tools, I have to listen. I use locally reclaimed wood, taken from damaged or managed trees. To me, it’s important to know the story and people involved. I love the grain, the endless variety of pattern, the sliced life history of long-lived beings. It's frozen sunlight.

In another life, I designed video games. I feel it creeping back in, alongside other things that died away five years ago; drawing, printmaking, music, paint and colour. I have ideas for interactive carvings, performance, moving sculpture, and stuff combining electronics, sound, animation and wood.

JANeT GILBERT

Janet Gilbert is an artist working with textiles - she exhibited with Cover-Uncover in September 2021 and has since joined the group permanently.

​​I am a fine artist who uses the aesthetics of form and abstraction to express meaning. Of late I have worked expressing human qualities such as strength and vulnerability. I am attracted to changing places and the human narrative behind them.

I use a range of media including collage, painting, photography, printing and 3D plaster work. I am interested in the evolution of an idea through the use of different media.

The In8 group acts as a support, gives me motivation and a platform to exhibit my work. It is an opportunity to share information, explore meaning and spread our belief in the value of art.

A Meditation on Counterpoint

"All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music", wrote Walter Pater.
OK, but how might music reveal itself in art, as in counterpoint, for example?

When a Bach concerto winds through time, do its melodies weave a fairisle pattern on the score, on the memory?
Music is transitory, fleeting, elusive, leaving only an after-image on the brain.

Visual art attempts to fix an idea, a pattern, an image, though each viewer can post that maverick meaning away beyond bounds. Punctus contra punctum - note against note: it sounds jarring, aggressive, but is more usually a collaboration; melodies accompanying one another; one higher, then changing places.

Stella Warren

Stella is an artist and printmaker with a background in literature who composed a 'meditation' for our "Counterpoint" exhibition.

Paula McCann

Paula is an artist and bookmaker who displayed a variety of her artists' books and paper sculptures in our 2017 exhibition, 'Background',
​at Friar Lane, Nottingham.

Viv Heyes

Viv, a sculptor, showed three of her varied sculptural works in the 'Background' exhibition.