Sophie Polyviou is a photographic artist creating works under the alias Foxtrot Lightning. Now based in London, Sophie is originally from the Mediterranean and forever drawn back to the sea. Informed by a sense of wonder in the natural world her work explores everyday topographies and the relationship between humans and our environment: recording the world we have created, and the one which answers back. Working with medium format film, a deliberately slow process, the camera becomes a tool for meditative & careful observation: a way of obliquely approaching the unknown, or the overly familiar. Photographing intuitively, her practice seeks to capture and share the true strangeness & enduring mystery of our world.

During the process of translating captured images on film and screen back into tangible objects, such as prints or books, images are sparingly altered or interrupted, going through digital and physical manipulation: inverting colours to negative, or using idiosyncratic printers. The process introduces elements of noise, texture, & mutation, so that mechanical errors begin to echo natural patterns.

Sonya qualified in BA (Hons) Ceramics in 1995 at Bristol UWE and later, was asked to take the role of Art Technician and Ceramics Specialist at Clifton High School. After teaching, she decided to focus on her two passions - the healing power of nature and clay. In 2020 Sonya’s pond lily leaf dishes were aired on National TV in the UK, ‘The Great British Menu’ and ‘Love Your Weekend’ hosted by Alan Titchmarsh.

In 2023 Sonya qualified as a Master in Fine Art (Ceramics) at Bath Spa University, answering the question ‘Can Ceramic Vessels Become Activators For Well-Being’. Her research practise found her making vessels within natural crevices in the earth, foraging wild clays, fusing them in layers and creating a visual language through the use of leaf stencils, oxides, slips and sgraffito techniques. This process has manifested an authentic alliance with Mother Nature; in many ways, Sonya has become nature’s translator. In addition, she uses her Reiki Master Teacher qualification to infuse her work with universal life force energy. This enables a harmonising effect so the vessels can be used as conduits for well-being and mindful contemplation as well as emotive pieces of functional ware for the home.

I am a textile artist. Working from my Sussex studio I paint and hand stitch using earth pigments mixed in a homemade soya milk binder that I developed from an ancient Japanese indigo dying recipe specifically to paint ground earth pigments onto natural fibres so that they remain tactile and colourfast.  The protein in the soyabean binds the ochre to the cloth.  Using vintage cloth with worn uneven areas, seams, patches that references maps, the hand stitching is drawing with thread, I follow marks, contours geological features forming texture and undulations like you find on the earth’s surface.  

Field trips are integral to my research, returning to familiar places to witness the effects of changing weather patterns on the environment.   Solitary walking, gathering and recording is fundamental to my creativity, sketchbook observations are an invaluable studio resource. What happens in the Arctic affects us all. Witnessed over several decades my ongoing work endeavours to raise the connection between the Norwegian melting sea ice and the erosion of my local Sussex chalk cliffs from higher tides, I want to make visual the beauty and fragility of these changing coastal horizons.

I create highly tactile and textural woven wall art that is inspired by the land, sea and sky. Using a diverse range of natural yarns and fibers, I weave pieces both large and small, with an aim to capturing the rhythm and flow of the natural world.  My method is entirely intuitive - I rarely draw out or pre-plan a design. Instead, I prefer to lay out the yarns and then just allow my eyes and hands to select materials without thinking too much about what the end result is going to be, and to allow the patterns to form organically on the loom in an abstract manner.  My aim is to evoke a feeling, a vibe, or indeed, a sense of place, through the colour and the tactility of the materials.  I like to use specialist yarns with different textures, such as coiled, bobbled, spiral and felted yarns, as well as pure wool roving and recycled sari silk.  As I only started weaving around a year ago (and I have to fit it around a full-time job), I am still very much on a journey of experimentation and exploration, but I am very excited to see where it takes me!

Felicity Keefe has exhibited in galleries throughout the UK, abroad in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Paris and Singapore, and at all of London’s major Art Fairs. Her contemporary landscape pieces are inspired by her experience of the British landscape as it changes and reacts to seasons, weather and time. She is also inspired by a blending of traditional landscape, literature and personal mythology which form an inner narrative within each series. Her work is distinctive for it's sense of atmosphere, often brooding, but also starkly beautiful. Felicity currently lives and works in Bath.

“My paintings aim to capture the immense power and underlying permanence of the landscape around us. My spiritual connection to the land is hugely important to me, along side the urgent necessity to focus on preserving, evolving and interacting with our eco systems going forward. My work aims to present the environment as something of profound and powerful beauty, a living, breathing being in its own right.”

 “ Bodhi Shola is a transversal artist referencing the intersection between art, nature and spirit to explore sustainable and sensitive evolution. Her practice is ritualistic, devoted to nurturing harmonious relationships among the human and non-human realms, building awareness towards a conscious development of society. Her creation includes photography, creative direction of multi-sensorial experiences, writing and supporting guidance, informed by her experiences in contact with eastern philosophies and practices for healing and longevity, plant medicine and meditation.
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It is through the symbolical and dream infused language of the creative medium that Bodhi Shola approaches the themes of the collective, supporting a vision of animistic consciousness. The oneiric layer is transported into the factual by the means of imagery that documents landscapes for preservation and recreates ceremonial practices honouring the connection to the spirit of Life. The artistic creations and processes adopt products sourced from local and fair-trade artisanal businesses, supporting women employment and equality and the use of organic and compostable materials.”

Milena’s practice incorporates analogue photography, filmmaking and print-making with a focus on themes of perception, on making visible the invisible. Her work engages ever more directly with plants and nature, both as subject and as physical matter interwoven into the very material of the work. Milena considers non-human agents such as plants to be co-creators of the work, finding the frequent unpredictability of the results in such explorations a key part of the adventure.

Milena combines her experimental methods with research-based knowledge, and she was awarded a large Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice award to deepen her understanding of using plant-based and other more eco-friendly, sustainable techniques, the results of which were shared recently at the international conference 'Making Ecocinema: Ecological Politics and Processes of Experimental Cinema' at Aix-Marseille Université in France.

Milena is co-runs the experimental alternative process photographic workshop 'Developing Your Fruit and Veg' at Darkroom London. Milena has been awarded residencies at King's College London, the History Museum in Sarajevo and elsewhere. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, London, and a PhD from University College London.