Artist Focus - Week 3

23 - 29 January 2021

&Gallery is pleased to introduce Artist Focus Week 3.
The Artist Focus series consists of online viewing rooms of a selection of artworks by the artists of the Gallery in an effort to remain creatively connected and continue to be inspired.
This week, &Gallery is thrilled to present works by Joy Arden, Jana Emburey, Susan Laughton, Andrew Mackenzie, David Mankin, Laura Jane Scott and Jon Thomas

Joy Arden

Joy Arden is a graduate of Nottingham College of Art and a professional member of Visual Art Scotland. She has been a regular exhibitor in group and juried shows including the Royal Scottish Academy, Visual Arts Scotland, the Discerning Eye etc. She works in a variety of media -- oil paint on canvas/board, acrylic paint on paper and printmaking. Her creative process is largely intuitive with gesture, mark-making and building up lively surfaces an integral part of her practice. Whilst abstract in form, the work references the urban and natural environment

Click here for more information about the Artist
Jana Emburey

Jana Emburey was born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1979. She moved to Britain in 1997 and in 2012 she completed her BA Hons in Visual Art in North Glasgow College.

Jana’s work mainly explores the concept of time perception, memory, inter-connectivity and human condition. Her work is informed by the close relationship of everything in nature, reflected and replicated in a multitude of ways.
In the recent months Jana’s work took a different turn. Still investigating the multiple subjects of nature, memory and interconnectivity, this intuitive and spontaneous work is welcoming of accidental marks, finding signs and meanings in the unexpected.

Click here for more information about the Artist
Susan Laughton

Susan Laughton worked in architecture for twelve years before returning to education to study art graduating with a BA Hons in 2002.

Susan’s paintings and drawings evolve from half-remembered glimpses seen from the corner of the eye, fleeting juxtapositions elusive to photography, the dislocated reverie of long car journeys, or from more studied compositions.

The landscape is Susan’s starting point, not as a picturesque or static view, but as a space travelled through and experienced often on the edges of the urban and the rural. It is a source of man made and natural structures, surfaces and colour from which her reductive personal responses develop. Man made structures in particular impose their presence: telegraph poles, fences, power lines, isolated buildings – structures that create tension within space and mark the passage of time and distance.

Click here for more information about the Artist
- Susan Laughton, Lumiere
  View more details
Andrew Mackenzie

Andrew Mackenzie graduated with an MFA from Edinburgh College of Art in 1993.

He is a painter whose work mines a territory between abstraction and representation. His work responds to relationships between landscape and the built environment, focusing often on rivers, reservoirs, tree forms, the edges of fields, car parks and roads, combined with diagrammatic suggestions of manmade structures or open frameworks. These structures are sometimes invented but more often take their starting point from observed buildings or other objects encountered on walks around his home in the Scottish Borders
Click here for more information about the Artist
- Andrew Mackenzie, Field Geometry
  View more details
- Andrew Mackenzie, Frozen Pond 2
  View more details
David Mankin

David Mankin lives and works in the south west of Cornwall. His dynamic and vivid abstracted Cornish landscape paintings have been exhibited in London and Cornwall and he has shown in a number of London art fairs. His paintings are in numerous private and corporate art collections.

David’s abstract paintings not only draw inspiration from the dramatic Cornish coastline; the wild, empty moors; the big skies; but also the raw, physical elements of the landscape including the rocky outcrops; beach boulders; storm debris; winding farm tracks; surging seas and the ancient fields bordered with stone hedges. He enjoys getting out into the landscape and the elements that shape it – wind, sea, rain and man-made. These are the experiences that manifest themselves in his paintings.
Click here for more information about the Artist
- David Mankin, Across the fainting sky
  View more details
Laura Jane Scott

Laura Jane Scott studied at Camberwell College of Arts and Ravensbourne University London. She lives and works in South London.

Laura's desire for formal simplicity through geometric form and striking use of colour has enabled her to produce a body of work where painting explores a model of architectural form and where the colour literally embodies a physical structure. The resulting work is a hybrid of painting and sculpture; a refined visual vocabulary of form and colour.
The elegant simplicity of Laura’s work belies the systematic rigour behind it. Working in series, she explores the idea of ‘possibilities within boundaries’. By taking one geometric shape as the starting point and drawing on principles from minimalist architecture, hard edge abstraction and conceptual art, she takes a basic form and draws out all the possible arrangements that can be made by laying one shape on top of another. Once every iteration has been explored, final compositions are chosen instinctively, based on their feeling of balance and form.
Click here for more information about the Artist
Jon Thomas

Jon Thomas studied 3-dimensional design at Sheffield Hallam University. He lives and work in Swansea, Wales.Jon constructs free standing and wall based three dimensional sculptures using a combination of contemporary and traditional materials from casting with plaster of Paris to thermoforming with industrial materials including acrylic sheet & EPS (polystyrene). John’s latest sculptures are constructed using a spontaneous substractive process of hand cutting dozens of geometrical shapes, stacking, balancing and finally glueing the individual forms to wooden boards before painting them. This recent, freer body of work reaches beyond some of his purer earlier examples, leaning more towards process art than pure minimalism.
Click here for more information about the Artist
- Jon Thomas, Untitled
  View more details
- Jon Thomas, Untitled
  View more details

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.