This winter the Main Gallery at Phoenix Art Space will be used for a residency programme, offering four artists the opportunity to use the space for the research and development of new work. It will provide artists with the time and space to experiment with new concepts and materials, and encourage the exchange of ideas between one another. Work in progress will be displayed during an Open Day at which audiences have an opportunity to meet the artists and discuss their work.

Open Day: Friday 14 February, 11.00 – 17.00
Please note: The Main Gallery will be closed to visitors outside of the Open Day.

ARTIST STATEMENTS

Romy Cooper

Romy Cooper is a visual artist that uses vulnerability drawn from personal experience and sociological knowledge to explore the intersectionality of the female body. In their practice, the female body is presented as a vessel that holds and receives trauma and oppression, examining how this vessel exists in a capitalist-driven, digitally addicted society. Romy observes how the female body is often reduced to fleeting micro-trends, leading to a pervasive sense of obsolescence and discardment in contemporary culture.

Autobiographical self-portraiture is central to their work, allowing Romy to delve into personal experiences of obsolescence and trauma. This approach fosters a deeper level of vulnerability without imposing these themes on another subject. By intertwining self-portraiture with physical and digital distortions, their work reflects how socialization throughout life warps perceptions of the female body.

Romy’s practice spans various mediums, including photography, printmaking, and casting, exploring the concepts of imprinting and touch through a feminist lens. Techniques such as body painting imprints and photographic processes like Anthotypes reference the historical exploitation of the female body in art, echoing the narratives of artists like Yves Klein. Additionally, Romy employs long-exposure self-portrait photography, collage, and body casting to create distorted representations of the female body and to investigate ideas of constraint and distortion.

Informed by their interest in sociology, Romy acknowledges that individual experiences of trauma and oppression are often shared due to societal intersectionality. This understanding reinforces their commitment to vulnerability and openness in their creative practice, fostering a sense of connection and resonance with their audience.

Website: romycooper.myportfolio.com

Instagram: @romy.cooper

 

Sara Hibbert  

Sara Hibbert is an artist working with photography and moving-image. Her current research focuses on the interweaving of the ‘dream-image’ with the photographic process, exploring overlaps of memory, landscape, movement and place. Her work has previously explored the role of image-making within collective spaces, frequently returning to the consideration of the image itself, and its shifting, sometimes transitory nature within these spaces.

Previous commissions and residencies include IN THIS PLACE… (2023), by Corridor Projects and Gingko Projects in collaboration with Dyson Gymnastics Club. As photographer in residence, Sara worked with the coaches and gymnasts to develop a new photographic series, as part of a wider community-focussed arts programme. In 2017-22, she worked with dance organisation Luminelle on an evolving body of work, considering how the image-making process, through sequencing and sharing, could help communicate individual and collective ideas around visibility, artistry and authorship.

Sara is currently based in Brighton, working on both personal and collaborative projects.

Website: sarahibbert.co.uk
Instagram: @sarahibbert

 

Lucy Williams

Lucy Williams is a Brighton-based artist who explores woven forms using foraged, found, and grown materials. Fascinated by the diverse properties and potentials of natural materials, her practice is experimental and process-driven, reflecting a deeply personal connection with the landscape and the intricate, intimate qualities of plants.

The materials Lucy works with are often highly local, sourced from her garden, allotment, local streets, and nearby parks and woodlands. She approaches foraging and harvesting with respect and reciprocity, ensuring her methods avoid exploitation.

Lucy combines traditional skills with unconventional methods to create work that is both contemporary and timeless. She is particularly interested in pushing woven forms beyond their domestic and utilitarian roots, reimagining them as expressive art forms. Her pieces are often unique and sometimes ephemeral, shaped by the specific natural characteristics of the materials, including when and where they were gathered.

Lucy’s work is deeply rooted in an ancestral relationship with weaving, a practice that spans all cultures and times. Drawing connections to myth and folklore, she sees weaving as a universal art form that transcends borders, barriers, and cultural divides. Her creative process is also deeply therapeutic on multiple levels.

With a background in geography, conservation, and landscape architecture, Lucy has spent the past decade extending this knowledge into a rewarding artistic practice.

She also has significant experience in public art, having designed major works in Brighton, including the Open Market Arches, Veolia Hollingdean Dragonflies, and the Brighton Palace Pier lights. Additionally, she designed the Tate Modern Community Garden.

Website: totallylucid.com

Instagram: @totallylucid

 

Ella Husbands

Ella Husbands is a Brighton-based artist whose work explores notions of disrupted perception, in particular altered, distorted and fragmented perception induced by illness. Her recent body of work has developed alongside her continued recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS/ME). The contraction of CFS resulted in her own sensory perceptions being altered; where movement through the world produced perceptual instabilities, and a feeling of sensory overload.

She often creates large scale video installations that aim to draw the viewer into an environment that expresses altered sensory perception. She uses light, colour and movement to disorientate the viewer and allow them to think about their relationship between their own senses and their environment. Her work often combines large scale geometric sculptures, with layered, dizzying video projections, of both abstract and familiar imagery, to draw the viewer into this altered world.

Her work often displays a hyper-real representation of our surroundings, reflecting elements of urban and natural environments through a disrupted lens.

She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2017 and has since exhibited extensively throughout the UK. She was runner up in the Hix Award 2017, a finalist in the Signatur Art prize 2018, shortlisted for the Zealous Emerge Art Prize 2018, and a recipient of the Fourbythree programme by Huxley Parlour Gallery in 2022

Website: ellahusbands.com
Instagram: @ella.husbands