Main contributors

Mark Burton,
Emma Campbell,
Robert Fitzmaurice,
Carne Griffiths,
Claire Higgott,
Jonny Hughes,
Viveca Koh LRPS,
Lulu Parent,
John Riordan,
David Sampson,
She Makes War,
Ellie Smith
and Laura Ward

Mark Burton

Mark Burton is a painter and photographer from Walthamstow. His long-term, ongoing project is a typography of families from England, Scotland, Wales, Germany, the USA and Zambia.

This work is part of a new series, which explores a sense of geography on an individual and community level.

www.mburtonphoto.com

Emma Campbell

Emma completed her degree in Documentary Photography in Newport nearly a decade ago and is currently working towards an MFA in Photography at University of Ulster, Belfast. Shooting for the BBC, The Times and The Prince's Trust amongst many others, she has also been involved in a number of group shows in London, including Photofusion in Brixton, and in 2006 she won the competition to shoot the first year of the Electric Proms.

Emma has been leading workshops for Belfast Exposed this year and has also started working for Source Photographic Review as well as Belfast's 15 Second Film Festival.

When Emma first moved to London she kept herself busy photographing musicians, parties and music festivals. Later these became a way of getting to photographing fans and revellers for her personal work, stills for television and portraits for press and artists.

Whilst shooting all of this, Emma has delighted in the little intimate moments that happen in preparation, the hopes and aspirations before the 'main event', the anticipation before the party...

www.emmacampbell.co.uk
www.bbc.co.uk/electricproms/2006/livelife/gallery
twitter.com/frecklescorp
www.flickr.com/photos/cybergypsy
www.loveodette.com
www.15secondfilmfestival.com

Robert Fitzmaurice

Robert Fitzmaurice is a painter who grew up in the Midlands. He studied Fine Art at Sunderland and Reading where he has been living and painting since the mid 1980s. In 1988 he was chosen by Adrian Heath as 'Artist of the Day' at Angela Flowers Gallery, London. Earlier this year he had a solo show From Here On In at Corn Exchange, Newbury.

Robert describes his approach to painting as a series of negotiations between image, time, and materials. Figures, boats, chairs and books evolve alongside ambiguous shapes in ways that play with space, form and meaning. This concern, to unite the physical and psychological, is central to his practice: "My paintings emerge from repeated acts of remembering" he has said.

The works in this exhibition are based upon images and words from his own extensive postcard collection. "Sending a postcard is, like the act of painting, a slow form of conveyance, yet once received the item is often cherished forever."

www.robertfitzmaurice.co.uk

Postcard lightbox

Carne Griffiths

Carne was born in Liverpool and spent much of his childhood drawing. He studied Illustration at Maidstone college of Art in 1992 and after graduating with a 1st class BA Hons in 1995 was made a fellow of the college along with colleague Dan Baldwin. Together they curated the 'Shynola' exhibition at Islington's Candid Arts Gallery in 1996.

Carne's early influences include the animated work of the Brothers Quay, the drawings of Andre Masson, Paul Klee and Leondardo Da Vinci, as well as the influence of outsider artists such as Adolf Wolfli, Scottie Wilson, Henry Darger and the drawings of Antonin Artaud.

A move to East London in 1997 saw a change in direction as Carne undertook an apprenticeship as a gold wire embroidery designer with M. Hand & Company under the guidance of draughtsman Ken Miles. A two-year apprenticeship led to a 12-year career, becoming Creative Director and producing elaborate hand-drawn embroidery designs for a range of prestigious clients including HRH the Prince of Wales, The Sultan of Oman, Ralph Lauren, Tom Ford, Asprey, Chanel, Burberry and many of London's Savile Row tailors, as well as producing designs for films The Last King of Scotland, Valkyrie, The Phantom of the Opera and costume embroidery design for the musical Wicked.

In January 2009 Carne produced a collection of automatic drawings for his first solo show entitled 'The Seer' in Leytonstone's 491 Gallery. The drawings, based upon the automatic process, revisited his former influences and were a departure from the formality of embroidery design. This exhibition reignited Carne's passion for art and led to the creation of the 100sqft project in November of 2009, bringing together artists from all backgrounds to show their work alongside established professionals.

Postcard lightboxes

In his first collection of drawings since his departure from the embroidery world, Carne is gathering together the influences from his previous work and developing his unique style of drawing. These postcard lightboxes are drawings which have been sent through the post and then worked on the reverse. They are concerned with the privacy of hiding messages on a postcard despite the fact that they are openly visible whilst being sent.

Carne is currently seeking representation from a gallery, and is looking to immerse himself fully in his artwork in the coming year.

www.carnegriffiths.com
www.100sqft.co.uk

Claire Higgott

Claire’s background is in graphic design but she has had a lifelong interest in textiles and her work has been mostly textile-related for more than a decade. She runs a business making thermofax screens, which are used to print images onto textiles and other surfaces, and she also exhibits her own work nationally and internationally.

The pieces in this exhibition are part of an ongoing series inspired by the bureaucratic overload faced by small businesses. The inspiration for this particular series appear to show no sign of diminishing! Other series and ideas for new work often emerge as a result of exploring imagery from her own photographs or sketches and by experimenting with new processes or techniques for printing and dyeing fabric.

www.thermofaxscreens.co.uk

Jonny Hughes

Jonny first fell in love with photography through a chance meeting with the Austrian founders of the LOMO movement and the discovery of the LCA camera.

By day, Jonny Hughes is Creative Director of a publishing company. By lunchtime he is to be found wandering the visually rich streets of East London taking pictures with an old film camera. Inspired by anonymous art interventions and small acts of civil disobedience, Jonny records details of urban creativity and things that appeal to his eye for graphic design and that make him smile.

For this exhibition he'll be showing a selection from his lunchtime wanderings.

Jonny has lived all over the place but now calls south London home where he lives with his partner and two kids.

www.lomography.com/homes/jonny2hughes
www.flickr.com/jonny2love/

Viveca Koh

Viveca Koh LRPS

Viveca Koh LRPS is an entirely self-taught photographer, with a strong eye for overlooked details and a special fascination with photographing abandoned buildings, especially asylums. She enhances many of her images by overlaying textures or combining individual shots in Photoshop. Many of these textures have been shot in abandoned buildings, where peeling paint, scratched metal, decaying wood and general dampness prevail, but she also likes to use handwritten text, vintage documents and other scanned elements to add a new dimension to her work.

In 2010 she was awarded a Licentiateship Distinction by the Royal Photographic Society for ten photographs based on the theme of birth to death in the asylum. Her work Smash Me and Laugh in My Face from this series was included in the 2010 exhibition So Show Me, curated by The Print Space, and also features in the self-published book Lost Asylum Sonnets, a poetic collaboration with Catherine Lupton. Her photograph Beauty Ensnared will appear in The Royal Photographic Society International Projected Image Exhibition later this year.

She currently lives in London.

www.vivecakohphotography.com

Lulu Parent

Lulu Parent is originally from Belgium but now lives and works in London. She recently graduated from Central St Martin's with a BA in Fine Art. She works in various mediums, focusing on the conceptual aspect of research before generating the ideas into artworks. Throughout the years she has worked to create an atmosphere through her art rather than a specific piece. Often centred around themes of childhood, colour and repetition, she experiments with the audience's reaction to the spaces she creates. She works with installation, painting, photography, sound and film, developing the medium to suit the concept. She enjoys questioning the audience and revealing glimpses of the world through her eyes.

Through the Looking Lens started out as a grid consisting of 288 photos arranged in a colour-coded spectrum. The piece was essentially a photo grid representing her daily visuals, that which fall into her melting-pot of influences. For Send Me a Postcard Darling, Lulu has reduced the grid to a smaller format and resized the photos to postcard size. The grid consists of a series of photographs she has taken of things that attracted her eye in the streets. Mostly urban art and doorways, she has captured through her shots, the world that she sees. She believes that each individual has a very personal way of seeing things, each person would therefore have his/her own completely different grid. "The things i shoot are simply the things I see..." she explains.

Her photos are then carefully wrapped around blocks of wood to create a mini artwork that works well on its own or in a small series. The title Through the Looking Lens is a reference to Alice in Wonderland, another childhood memory she wants to impose on the viewer. Even her photographs have a childlike quality about them. Lulu is revealing to us her world the way she sees it everyday.

www.luluparent.co.uk

John Riordan

John is an illustrator, comic artist and thirty-something pop culture kid.

He wrote the comic strip William Blake, Taxi Driver for Time Out London and has produced work for clients including the BBC, The Guardian, The Idler and Nature.

His current get-rich-slowly scheme is Hitsville UK, a comic about a fictional record company, co-written with Dan Cox. John will be exhibiting promo postcards from Hitsville's eclectic roster of acts.

www.johnriordan.co.uk
johnnyfighters.blogspot.com

David Sampson

David was born in London and lived in Italy for around 15 years before returning to the UK in 1997. He is self-taught and worked as a stills / location / set photographer in Italy in the late 80s and early 90s. Since coming back here he has earned his living mainly as a heating engineer but with a continuing passion for photography. Recently he has worked on a project on mines in Sardinia with his wife Magda. His present work revolves around street photography, everyday life and various ongoing projects which can be found on his website.

dpsampson.zenfolio.com
www.flickr.com/photos/viramati

She Makes War

She Makes War is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist, filmmaker, photographer, writer and professional geek Laura Kidd. Obsessed by stolen moments, waking dreams and making the mundane beautiful, her contribution features moments from her far flung travels and shots from her 365 Photo Diary.

www.shemakeswar.com

Ellie Smith

Postcards from Hackney – things to write home about

Ellie is an illustrator based in Hackney, East London. After graduating from Leeds Metropolitan University in 2004, her style has developed to encompass different processes and subject matter. Working in the greeting card industry gave her style a digital and more commercial appearance. This is now progressing into handmade techniques, which better represent what the work is about.

The style of Ellie's illustrations is loose, freehand (always beginning with a pen drawing) and contemporary, and is born out of a love of traditions, simplicity and recognisable imagery. She can often be found drawing iconic kitchen gadgets, machines and food, and has more recently become obsessed with drawing animals.

Ellie's work has featured in Bonafide and Shellsuit Zombie magazines and on the cover of Will Climate Change Your Life? She has sold prints, cards and t-shirts at Backyard Market in Shoreditch, as well as taking on commissions for bespoke stationery items, such as corporate greeting cards and invitations.

www.ellie-draws.co.uk

Laura Ward

Laura Ward is a photographer based in South London. After teaching herself photography aged 15 she spent her youth travelling through and residing in numerous cities in England and Germany. This, along with a love for photographs in record sleeves, forms the basis of her nostalgic style. Laura's work is aesthetically pleasing and dream-like, and as melancholic as it is charming.

The series of photographs she is showing at Send Me A Postcard, Darling are all double exposures taken in the last 12 months on a variety of different cameras and films.

Laura has recently worked on collaborative photography project, Unthought, with Belgian photographer Stefan Vanthuyne. Her book, Appear When I sleep, was self-published in 2008.