This exhibition is by a group of six artists who have come together through their engagement with the Turps Correspondence Course. The course is a long-distance art programme for painters and sculptors who want to further their practices through critical dialogue with peers and mentors. Turps courses are open to artists from across the globe.
CD Lewis
CD Lewis identifies as biracial and was named in the 1970s as “the first Black woman to join a professional dance company in England, as a principal dancer, choreographer with London Contemporary Dance Theatre. Currently a painting student at Turps Art School, London (2022-24) her former art education includes St.Martin’s School of Art along with other art colleges and
institutions.
She lives and works from her studio in Dartmoor National Park.
“I abstract the figure, found images, text and objects from the real world, to create something that takes on a life of its own in the canvas world. My studio practice is to take these resources and extend their expressive potential by abstracting them through drawing using oil paint, watercolour, ink and charcoal.”
Diana Terry
Diana Terry’s work is about place and process. It’s about how where you live gets under your skin and how returning to craft processes and through the rhythms of making, we can achieve a greater understanding of who we are. She has continued her practice of closely observed rocks sculpted by quarrying or nature. Also New Light have selected her painting Beach Cave and a sculpture, King and Queen, for the inaugural exhibition open in The Biscuit Factory in Newcastle in June. Recently Terry has work about hearing loss acquired by the Wellcome Collection in London.
Following on from this, an exhibition about Tinnitus has been initiated at The University of Manchester in the Jean McFarlane building. Terry was awarded an Arts Council England project grant and used it to record the disused quarries around Saddleworth. She has work in private and public collections in UK, USA and New Zealand.
www.diana-terry.com
www.instagram.com/diana.terry.777
Jane Fairhurst
Jane Fairhurst is a UK based artist working from her studio at Cross Street Arts, Wigan established by her 25 years ago. She has been engaged with Turps Correspondence Course from 2022-24.
Using oil paint on canvas, panel and board Jane Fairhurst reveals the seemingly infinite potential of abandoned materials, the plastics, metals and ceramics, she gathers from her local fields and footpaths. Making use of these discards, scarred and ruined, she constructs small assemblages later transmuting them into paintings.
Layers of paint are built up, then scraped and gouged, rubbed then repainted with brush, rag and palette knife mimicking the corrupted assembled detritus. Melding humour and pathos, cartoon-like figures, dysfunctional mechanoids imagined landscapes and odd structures emerge.
Growing up in the fifties without TV, though not wholly removed from it, snatches of memory remain like lost worlds re-surfacing. These remnants are often the focus of her paintings.
www.instagram.com/jane_fairhurst_art
Jane Walker
Jane Walker paints outside as well as making 2-D art in her studio. She trained at Sheffield Hallam University, finishing in 1987, and has continued working as an artist since then. Her work is landscape, and usually about cities. The paintings she makes outside are a response to being in a particular place. The work she makes in the studio is more of an abstract distillation.
Jane’s recent exhibitions have included a solo show at Redcar Contemporary Art Gallery in 2024, and a solo show at D31 Gallery, Doncaster in 2023. Her work was selected for the Cooper Open, at the Cooper Gallery Barnsley, 2023 and the Calderdale Open, Smith Art Gallery, Brighouse, 2023.
Jo Fleming Smith
Jo Fleming Smith, from the Northeast coast of England, is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Derbyshire. She graduated with BA (Hons) Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University and MA (Hons) Contemporary Art Practice from Edinburgh College of Art. She has recently completed her second year on Turps Correspondence Course.
She has taken part in exhibitions across the UK in solo and group shows, including the award-winning Hidden Door Festival in Edinburgh 2023. Her work is held in private collections.
Gender, identity and environment are ongoing themes in her work. Her practice investigates
her interconnectedness to the landscape where she meditatively explores her state of being
within and as part of this ecology.
www.joflemingsmith.co.uk
www.instagram.com/jo.fleming.smith
Deborah Ann Graham
Deborah Ann Graham is a painter based in Bollington, Cheshire. Her painting style has developed and grown over the decades, now finding an approach that offers her the freedom to produce works that are gestural and abstract yet evocative of the chosen subject. Her current works are landscape based, painting references often coming from walks, passage through an environment and her engagement with it, the painting is then acted out as another walk, a moving adventure on the surface of the canvas that exists in its own moments in time and space.
Originally from Cumbria, where she attended the Cumbria Collage of Art and Design before graduating with a BA (hon) Degree in Fine Art from Trent Polytechnic in 1987. Recently enjoying a year of further study on the Turps Art School correspondence course. Studying MA in Fine Art at MMU from September 2024.
www.deborahanngraham.co.uk
www.instagram.com/debzagraham
Exhibition open 13/10/24 – 10/11/24, open to the public each Sunday between 2pm and 4pm and during other performances (see Event Calendar). Entrance is free and pieces are available to buy with a small commission to the Arts Centre (subject to availibility).
