This winter the Main Gallery at Phoenix Art Space is being used for a residency programme, offering artists April Yasamee, Letizia Lopreiato, Edina Husanovic and Nina Garstang the opportunity to use the space for the research and development of new work.

Work in progress will be displayed during a series of Open Days at which audiences have an opportunity to meet the artists and discuss their work. Join us in the Main Gallery on 20 & 27 January, 3 & 10 February, from 11.00 – 17.00.

April Yasamee
April uses a range of papers to create 3D sculpture, including found commercial wall papers, photographic prints, drawing and watercolour papers and Japanese papers. She combines these with mixed media, including wire, wood and metals. She works within the paper’s qualities of fragility, instability and pliancy. Sculptures have evolved over a long time, from small cubic structures, precariously balancing on or within wire frames to more recent larger suspended paper sculptures, comprised of a mass of cascading strips. These are installation pieces, dependent on the space they are set in and are affected by the dynamic effects of gravity and ambient conditions, such as moisture. They tend to slowly unravel, so time becomes an element of the sculpture. During the residency at Phoenix Art Space April will develop an installation piece titled ‘Feldenkrais Tunnel’. Feldenkrais is a somatic mindful movement practice, suitable for all that helps mobility, flexibility and wellbeing.
@aprilyasamee
aprilyasamee.wordpress.com

Edina Husanovic
Edina’s work spans multimedia performance and drawing, and it often involves working in community, to inspire creative conversations across difficult subjects such as migration and identity. Her motivation comes from the lived experience of the Bosnian war, exile and asylum in UK, and from the belief in the transformative power of art to create new narratives. She has recently led a research project ‘Migration and Drawing’ at the University of Brighton which aimed to investigate the benefits of drawing for the residents of Brighton who have been strongly impacted by their experience of migration. Work often combines dance with different media such as collaborative drawing. Her practice-based PhD performance ‘Dis-Orient Express’ (2017) deconstructed the politics of the Oriental Other through analysis of belly dance performances in various European locations, along the route of the Orient Express. The durational performance featured collaborative drawing as re-mapping of the orientalist stereotypes that surround this dance and the dancers. She is currently working with an Indian classical dancer and a Ukrainian choir, to explore crossovers between rhythm, drawing and sound, within the wider context of migration and cross-cultural encounters.
@edinahusanovic

Letizia Lopreiato
Letizia is a multilingual visual poet and social documentary film photographer. Letizia’s artistic practice is engaged in reclaiming a different way to tell a story: from empathy to connection, from impairment to empowerment, from grief to love, from confinement to acceptance, social inclusion and engagement with our environment, both at an individual and at a community level. Letizia works with the media of 35mm film expanded photography, poetry, spoken word. The artist embraced film photography, by introducing a multidisciplinary approach to her poetry, three years ago, only a few months after her visual impairment was diagnosed.
@letizia_lety_lopreiato
letizialopreiato.com

Nina Garstang
Nina’s work contemplates the middle ground between what is real and what is not, pushing the view of the objects she looks at to the point where they lose their identity, revealing an altered state of mind, that could be looking to the universe, travelling deep inside the body or both simultaneously. Pondering and exploring the quality and viscosity of paint itself, she holds the current opinions of the tradition of painting in her subconscious while firmly looking at the reflections of the increasingly virtual world where the screen dominates our lives. Through meditation she tries to achieve theta brain wave state where creativity is at its most virial. With this in mind these glass painting works almost become Rorschach cards in their insight.
@ninagarstang
ninajosephinegarstang.com