Maker of the month / Mixed Media

Clary Salandy was born in Trinidad but has lived and worked in the UK since she was 16, being one of the founders of Mahogany Carnival Arts for Notting Hill in 1990. She is now one of the UK’s leading carnival designers, and has worked on major events such as the Queen’s Golden Jubilee procession and the opening ceremony for the Special Olympics in Leicester in 2009. Carnival is clearly a passion for her, both because of its Caribbean history and its life-enhancing democratic appeal and she says, ‘Carnival is a visual, dynamic, larger-than-life way of working.’

Jo Coles is a Brighton-based artist who works both on large scale community arts projects and tiny, meticulously constructed scenes, like mini stage sets. A love of making and an ability to work with any material, particularly found objects, links these two seemingly very different strands of her practice.

Canadian artist Ian Kirkpatrick re-works traditional ceramic forms to make contemporary artworks. His current preoccupation is Ancient Greek vases, and he uses their familiar monochromatic style to decorate cardboard sculptures worked with an intriguing mix of ancient and modern images. He says, ‘I like looking for the commonalities of things in the past and seeing how they relate to things in the present.’

Ian McKay worked in a range of fields including ceramics, metalwork and furniture-making, before making automata, and these various experiences explain his technical skill and obvious pleasure in working with different materials. He is proud to be labelled a toymaker and his approach to his work is refreshingly unpretentious: he says his beautifully constructed, frequently quirky and always eye-catching automata are ‘just something I make’.

David Rhys Jones sees himself as a detached observer of the modern metropolis. He makes work in a range of media, but is best known for his ceramic sculptures transfer printed with evocative photographic images taken during journeys through particular landscapes. They may include architectural details, anonymous figures or graphic material like signage and house numbers, and they all convey a strong sense of place and historic atmosphere.

Lucy Fergus uses industrial silicone off-cuts to make artworks and products ranging from large-scale installations, lighting and furniture to jewellery and key rings. She says, ‘I do a bit of everything. I’m not a jeweller, or a textile designer or a product designer so I call myself an artist/maker as making is central to my practice.’

Thomas Forsyth is an artist with an impressive ability to think outside the box. Many of his pieces are imaginative re-workings of traditional forms to which he gives new functions and meanings, some incorporating reclaimed or re-cycled elements. Recent pieces include a chess set with extra, moveable squares, wooden spinning tops that are spun with a pencil so creating artworks in the process, and a chest of drawers which is in fact a series of secret compartments and a coffee table.

London-based artist Shane Waltener is a man of many interests who works in a variety of fields including basketry, sculpture, textiles, sugarcraft and guerrilla gardening. But what unites these diverse threads, is a passionate interest in making: ‘Making is really essential to what I do and a lot of my work is about celebrating the process of making’, he says.

Lizzie Lee is a maker with a mission. She is passionate about re-cycling and makes one-off bags and lampshades using a material she’s developed out of melted-down plastic milk bottles. She’s also keen to spread the re-cycling message to others and runs workshops designed to teach people how to make new things from old materials: ‘It’s a part of the process of changing the way people live and teaching them new skills’, she says.

Su Blackwell makes intricate, narrative paper sculptures out of old books. Her delicate forms are cut from the pages and seem to grow out of the body of the book to create a miniature fantasy world in paper. It’s all part of Blackwell’s interest in the cyclical nature of life, taking found objects and giving them new life by turning them into art objects.

Hampshire-based sculptor Flora Gare makes delicate suspended structures which explore ideas about transience, memory and the passing of time. She works using a variety of materials – fibre optics, nylon threads, copper wire, resins, acetates – and has recently started incorporating old family photographs into her work. ‘I want to create the illusion of a solid volume in space, but to define the form using unexpectedly insubstantial, light-weight materials’, she says.

Christopher Jenkins, who places himself half-way between craftsman and fine artist, makes quirky, humanoid sculptures out of other people's rubbish. As well as being witty and original artworks in their own right, his ingenious sci-fi looking figures make an important statement about today's consumer society and the amount of waste we produce. 'I take what other people consider junk and give it a new value,' he says.

Mixed media designer Mandeep Dhiman creates exuberant, decorative pieces out of a range of found materials, ‘the plasticy the better’, she says. They range from knitted body adornments to large-scale sculptures bursting with colour - a love of colour being a legacy of her Indian heritage. ‘I love my work because of its decoration, intricacy and over-the-top nature,’ she says.

Eleanor Glover is a complex character. As well as working in graphics and book design, she has spent time as a Community Development Officer in Sri Lanka, has run a home support group for the elderly in Bristol and taught dance and art. She now spends more time on her calligraphy and sculptures, but her previous varied experiences have given her a strong understanding of human nature and feed directly into her work, a powerful - often dark - mix of humour, pathos and the macabre skilfully moulded into an emotionally charged whole.
Visit Eleanor's website