We are delighted to announce the 2024/25 cohort for the DLWP x Flatland Studio Development Programme. This year-long programme offers artists based within East Sussex an opportunity to focus on developing and sustaining their practice in readiness for progressing their career within the supportive network of Bexhill’s Beeching Road Studios. We are delighted that this programme moves forward into its second iteration which celebrates our shared ethos as two organisations focussed on emerging artists’ development in the region.

The artists are :

Richard Lockett ( @_richardlockett )

Sarah Gomes Harris ( @sarahgomesharris )

Flo Wright ( @flo_wrightsart )

Vannessa Farinha ( @vanessafarinha_art )

 Alastair Laas ( @laas_artist )

Congratulations to them all.

This opportunity would not be possible without the significant support towards artists from Rother District Council

 

Artist biographies:

Richard Lockett is an artist based in Brighton and London, and studied at the The Slade (2006), Goldsmiths (2014) and The Royal Academy Schools (2019). Richard works across drawing, photography, digital media, video, collage and sound often coming together as installation. Richard’s works attempt to record sensorial experiences in a sculptural and spatial manner. Areas of interest include the arrangement, potentiality and psychology of interior spaces; neurodivergence through recording and mark making; mapping as aesthetic tool for finding different neural connections between subject and objects.

Sarah Gomes Harris / SGH  is a Hastings based animator, artist and campaigner. Her work is often an overt political response to housing, climate or social injustice, playfully engaging the viewer and/or community. The works include interactive animatable sculptures, soft sculptures, puppets or ‘rides’, a board game, a comic or zine, a single sheet newspaper found on a bus. Some works are seen as performative art eg walking round the UK dressed as a house to raise awareness of the housing crisis. All blur lines between cartoon, politics and reality, regularly taken out onto the streets or non-typical artist environments.

Flo Wright is an artist based in East Sussex. She studied Fine art painting at Wimbledon school of art. Her practice examines dynamics in the domestic space. She draws on what objects people surround themselves with to create an image of their lives. Using references from pop culture, the historic, a queer perspective and science fiction. Primarily through paint, she uses storytelling techniques to imagine and rebuild spaces. Which the objects can re-inhabit; and become sentient. In her paintings she examines how these objects can reflect their owners and act as hauntings of the past. And be used in the present to play out alternative realities.

Vanessa Farinha explores the labels and signs we cling to so that we might understand who we are, individually, collectively and between the in-between. She’s never limited to a single medium and is often a little tongue-in-cheek. She has created performance, photography, collage, installation, painting and video work and has exhibited internationally. Vanessa Farinha grew up in North London, studied Fine Art at Goldsmith’s University, London, later becoming a creative producer and is now living in Hastings.

Alastair Laas grew up in the industrial heart of England called the Black Country, where he was exposed to the multifaceted aspects of capitalism. From humble beginnings, he worked in a tattoo parlour, built luxury yachts, cleaned offices, and sold insurance to art collectors, before moving into TV and advertising. His professional experience continues to provide a unique perspective on the intricacies of labor and human value that are fundamental to his vision and approach as an artist.

Posted by Daisy Jerome on Wednesday 10 April 2024