Artist On My Street

Sam William's art practice encourages audiences to explore the world around them through play.

Sam sees her work as a form of quiet activism, and play as a radical act. She believes firmly in the ability of art to affect change, translate experiences and transform places. She develops projects out of community engagement and audience participation, exploring creative placemaking that is people driven.

Gayatri Pasricha is a graphic designer. She endeavours to make work that is "playful, but not frivolous; researched, but not complicated; subtle, but not obscure."

For ARTIST ON MY STREET, Gayatri has created a series of graphic art panels inspired by Coventry’s diversity and history. She has been supported by Foleshill Creates to work with local residents, incorporating their self-portraits into her designs. Exploring themes of curiosity, diversity and playfulness she has named this series of work ‘Cov Peeps’.

Janet Tryner is a contemporary artist and printer who makes work about urban environments and ecosystems. She explores places at ground level and looks for traces of other living beings who also live in our towns and cities.

For this work she found lots of autumn foliage and traces of fungal and insect life on the surface of the leaves that she tried to recreate in her leaf prints. She also found pieces of litter, and tree seeds which she made resin casts from onto pins which hold the sculpture together.

On the pavement outside Crow Recycling, she found broken car window glass and this reminded her of the shiny pieces of litter crows are known to take into their nests, so she collected these and made them into more pins for the crows that she made from recycled plastic coffee cup lids.

Janet uses mirroring of forms in her printing as a nod to the effects of environment on our DNA, and also to give a sense of connections between objects that have fallen on the ground.

Madeleine Snowdon is a West Midlands based interdisciplinary artist working through a variety of mediums, including painting, digital media, photography and writing. Her work is interested in the memory of space, in local histories retold through architecture and traces found within urban environments.

This work explores how the community at the SYDNI Centre affects the building that they inhabit and, simultaneously, how the qualities of the building affect the community. Using digital photographic techniques, this work combines photographs from the community, the individuals, the architecture of the Centre and the surrounding area. It forms a collage layered both digitally and through space in its installation. As an integral part of the project, Madeleine also devised an activity for members of the SYDNI Centre, fortifying the images with the visual and written memories of the community.

Caitriona Dunnett is an Irish artist based in the UK. She investigates memory and its subjective, personal and forgotten narratives through early photographic techniques. She is intrigued by the traces people leave behind, the paths they weave through time and the legacies attached to them.

Recent exhibitions included RBSA Photography Prize, RUA RED Winter Open, Coventry Biennial, Spotlight Leamington Spa Gallery and Museum, ESPY Photography Award, Custom House Studios and Gallery, FOTOLIMO Festival and Impressions Biennial.

Dunnett was awarded an Agility Award, Arts Council Ireland, an Analogue Photography Grant, the Richard and Siobhán Coward Foundation, a DYCP Award, Arts Council England, an AN Artist Bursary, a Grain Photography Hub Bursary, a Grants for the Arts Award, Arts Council England and in partnership with Dr Hilary Bishop a Leverhulme Small Research Grant. She was selected for AA2A residency at Coventry University and PhotoIreland's New Irish Works programme.

Dunnett has a BA Hons in Photography from Nottingham Trent University and a MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work was published by PhotoIreland, featured in Black & White Photography Magazine and online with the Irish Times, Atlas Obscura and Photomonitor.

Bibi Ashamiel is a Dutch-born Ukrainian and Uzbek painter. Bibi moved to England in 2006 and from 16 years of age has been studying art. She finalised an undergraduate degree in Fine Art in 2020, and has since then been working as an artist and developing her portfolio.

Colour and mark-making speaks a visual language in Bibi's paintings. With her visual story-telling, she aims to communicate and inspire the viewer. Her messages are about connecting with, understanding and appreciating the world we live in. As well as humanity, Bibi cares about the environment and believes we can heal ourselves and the Earth - even reach a Utopia if we work towards it together, from within our hearts.

The lives and hardships of refugees and migrants are central to Bibi’s work, as are messages of hope, understanding and appreciating the world we live in.

https://cov-art.space/users

https://coventry-artspace.co.uk/projects/artist-development-programme/

Tara is a Coventry based curator and community engaged visual artist, who is inspired by the architecture of her home town, its historical connections and, most importantly, the people who inhabit it.

For this Artist On My Street Project, Tara is curating the work of local photographer John Whitmore (1977-2021). John was inspired by ever changing environments and how humans impact them, and each other. John favoured a completely analogue photographic process, which he felt helped maintain a very tangible connection between the time and place a photo was captured, and the final print.

This exhibition at Langar Aid in Spon End – highlighting John’s KEEP OUT project, which captured the regeneration of Coventry City Centre during the run up to our City of Culture year – will celebrate John’s work and introduce it to a new audience.

James Robinson is an artist and art teacher who has recently resettled in Coventry after a period of teaching and working in South Korea. Using found objects and building upon a life-long love of East Asian brush and ink technique, his current practice is focused upon painting and sculpting endangered species from around the world.

For Artist On My Street James wants to bring an orangutan into the community! “They are beautiful and intelligent characters and we can’t fail to be charmed by their benign expression and peaceful character.”

James will be basing his sculpture upon photographs he took of a pair that he ‘met’ in an ape rescue centre in the Borneo, both to remind us of our need to act responsibly in our use of toiletries that are produced using Palm Oil [farmed from trees that are planted in the place of the orangutan’s natural habitat which continues to be destroyed so that westerners can use cheap shampoos] and also to bring and celebrate part of our beautiful natural world into our daily experience to admire, discuss and enjoy.’

Frances is a multidisciplinary artist. Her works range from installations, moving images to immersive storytelling, exploring the themes of race, feminist identity and mental health. She likes to shine spotlights on marginalised communities. Through art, whether it’s engagement workshops or thought-provoking pieces, she hopes to create real-world social change and cultivate more empathy.

For Artist On My Street, Frances would like to work with the walk-in centre local community to co-create a new piece for the window display, explore and uncover hidden community stories and celebrate the diversity of this city.

Joy is the driving force of Emily’s practice, and her works aim to inspire a moment of this intangible, ephemeral feeling, to exhilarate and uplift the viewer through ceramics, painting and public art.

Emily hopes to create an installation which is vibrant, playful, and designed to transform the canvas of the window into a magical utopia, to be enjoyed by the community and any passer-by. By adopting an amalgamation of organic forms, and vivid colour inspired by local surroundings, the abstract display will aim to transcend age, class, race and gender, making it accessible and universally joyful to all viewers.

As a child, Olu struggled with her speech, especially pronouncing, and she started drawing to try and express herself. Olu enjoys drawing trees, bodies of water and people.

Prior to December 2020, Olu had avoided drawing faces. In fact, when she drew people, they were faceless. However, as a Christmas present for her brother, she decided to draw him a picture of one of his role models. Since then, she has enjoyed drawing faces. For this project Olugbemi was paired with the Mosaic Hope Centre and has made a lighthouse out of tissue paper and electrical tape to symbolise hope. She has also worked with some of the community at the centre to create art pieces around faith and hope.

Celia Johnson is an artist and lecturer. She trained at Central St Martins (BA) and Cardiff School of Art (MFA Distinction) and lectures at Hereford College of Arts. Her work is mostly site or project specific and she’s part of the walking artists network. Her interests include the embodied experience of place; scavenging; the post-industrial landscape; archives; precarity; loss, and failure.

Celia explores ways in which a painting practice expands to reimagine found and discarded objects. Her work is informed by hauntology, psychogeography, the reactivation of archives, and the intersection of gender and place. The history of the Rex cinema in Coventry informs the work exhibited for Artist On My Street. Working with archives from the Herbert Museum, Celia’s work will explore local history and ideas of flight and display, and she’ll be inviting participants to join her in thinking about these subjects.

Dr Seyedeh Naseriniaki is the Founder of Chrysalis Craft Coventry CIC. She describes herself as citizen of the world striving to make a positive change for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. She has worked with migrant communities for the last seven years using art and different artistic methods for wellbeing. Seyedeh gained her PhD in Architecture and Design from the University of Genoa. She has worked with national and international NGOs and charities, including Fairtrade and MSF UK, Médecins Sans Frontières.

For Artist On My Street, Seyedeh will work with a refugee group and explore the theme of Green Futures. The group will produce pieces of collage using materials that usually go to waste such as plastic bags and newspapers. Mother Earth and protecting our planet is Seyedeh’s prime inspiration and motivation.