'From Hong Kong to Wickford' artists

The autumn exhibition at St Andrew's Wickford was 'From Hong Kong to Wickford', a multifaceted pictorial display featuring composer and creator/director of combined-art works and projects Ho Wai-On's lifetime of interaction with UK and Hong Kong based artists/people that have resulted in many creative works. Click here to see a talk Wai-On gave at St Andrew's Wickford about her work.

This post provides additional information and links to some of those who contributed work to this unique exhibition and to some of their work:

Marcus West

Marcus West is a Cardiff based digital artist who utilises CAD software to create abstract artwork. He first began exhibiting his artwork in the early 1970’s at the University College Cardiff and has since gone on to exhibit a range of his projects at institutions across the UK, including London’s Victoria and Albert museum. Historic Tech have an excellent article giving an extensive summary of his career together with many examples of his work. 

Marcus writes: "I first exhibited in the early 1970's at University College Cardiff, as it then was: the exhibition consisted of a collection of geometrical images created with a mainframe computer controlling a plotting device - essentially a ball-point pen moving over the surface of a sheet of paper. 3 of my works dating from this era are in the Digital Art collection in London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

My work from the last decade has been particularly influenced by the artists Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley. Unlike them, however, I create my work with the assistance of a computer, hence my description of my work as “computer-assisted art”. I imagine a form, express it in terms of the mathematical processes appropriate to create such a form, and I write a computer program to utilise these mathematical processes to place millions of carefully-selected points of colour upon a kind of virtual canvas within the computer‘s memory. Thus the images emerge from mathematical and geometrical first principles, entirely within the computer - I don't typically import photographs into the computer for subsequent manipulation. Finally, the images are transferred from this virtual to the tangible world by printing them using archive-quality inks and paper.

Since devising these techniques, working in this way has become something of an obsession, and I have created many families of works, each embodying a core theme which is then expressed in dozens or scores of carefully-crafted variants. Frequently, of course, this process of exploration will give rise to variants that go well beyond my initial imaginings, which is particularly satisfying.

One of my works 'Fibonacci Image with blue cells emerging from an orange background', was among the 25 shortlisted works in the 2015 Lumen Prize, an international competition for Digital Art.

More recently I have started to make more reference to real-world objects and have moved away somewhat from works that derive from pure geometry."

Marcus’ recent projects have been based around geometric images created using FreeCAD, an open-source general-purpose parametric 3D CAD modeller and building information modelling software with finite-element method support. His process is as follows: "I imagine a form, express it in terms of the mathematical processes appropriate to create such a form, and I write a computer programme to utilise these mathematical processes to place millions of carefully selected points of colour upon a kind of virtual canvas within the computer memory."

To go to his secure store where you can buy framed or unframed prints, and some other merchandise (cards, mugs etc) with his artwork on click here.

Juliet Chenery-Robson

Juliet Chenery-Robson is a visual artist and academic researcher with a strong interest in exploring the terrain that juxtaposes the visual arts and medical science. In 2015 she completed an AHRC funded, practice-led Photography PhD that focused on the visual representation of the invisible illness ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis). Adopting a participatory action research methodology, Juliet worked with ME sufferers to create visual and textual portrayals of sufferers’ illness experience. Since completing her PhD she has secured research and development funding, via EngageFMS (Patient & Public Engagement & Involvement), to explore the visualisation of chronic illness as part of an arts and medical science collaboration with Newcastle University’s Medical and Creative Arts departments. 

Background to her ME research: The chronically ill ME sufferer experiences invisibility on four interlinked fronts: physical, social, medical, and political invisibility. The main aim of the project was therefore to create work, in participation with ME sufferers, that could be used as a tool to raise awareness of ME’s invisibility and communicate an understanding of ME to public, art, and medical audiences. By exploring the many layers that constitute ME and by incorporating the personal view of ME sufferers—through a combination of photography, text, audio, SenseCam, family album photographs, and Google Earth images—the research tested different methods of using metaphor to visually represent ME’s invisibility. It has also helped provide ME sufferers with a ‘voice’ by which to communicate the many problems they face as they try to cope with a life that is disabled by ME.

Polly Hope

Polly Hope was a British artist, designer and author. Hope created artworks in a variety of mediums, including paintings, portraits, sculpture, textiles and ceramics. Examples of her artworks are in the permanent collection of the V&A.

Bryan Robertson wrote that: "Polly Hope works consistently as a figurative artist with a keen appreciation of abstract principles and she likes to move freely from one medium to another, from drawing to painting, from printmaking to photography, from making sculpture to designing and executing murals and other decorative commissions. She excels as an artist in all these disciplines and sometimes likes to blur the edges herself between different techniques ... 

Polly Hope has a strong decorative flair and in recent years she has completed some large-scale schemes: painted murals at the Barbican Centre London, ceramic murals and sculptures for the new Shakespeare's Globe theatre in London, as well as a fountain in Switzerland. The range and variety of her work is part of her strength - she has also recently completed all the drawings for a half-hour animated film and made a perfect sequence of vistas in watercolour of Hong Kong's islands and waterways - but it means that her identity as an artist sometimes eludes conventional assessment. For some years, for instance, she created a long sequence of stuffed soft sculptures, bringing whole aspects of classical sculpture, religious iconography and folk-art to new life with three dimensional stuffed, sewn, appliquèd, coloured and patterned figures: scenes and situations of tremendous wit and poetic verve, one of them neither a scene nor a situation but a richly detailed portrait of a well known English museum director with a love of gardening and cats: the man in his world."

In Wickford we showed Hope's portrait of Wai-On, which can be seen by clicking here.

Benson Wong

Belford Jewellery was first established in 1977 by Leung Kwok Ching and her brother-in-law Benson Wong. Belford started off as a passionate hobby of two art-loving owners commissioning designs for good friends and valued clients. Benson, being the youngest sibling in his family, had a natural talent in design at a very young age and a strong passion for all things beautiful. A fashion designer by training, he first gained exposure to the jewellery industry from spending time at his brother’s diamond wholesale company, and was captivated by the dazzling universe of diamonds and gemstones. He realized the endless possibilities he could create by combining the design skills he garnered during his studies in England with the colourful treasures of nature, thus began his love for jewellery design.

Throughout the years, Belford has endeavoured to unite functional art with quality craftsmanship, and with Benson as the forefront, their design team has won numerous awards for their inspiring jewellery designs, and the company has become an established brand name in the industry.

For 'From Hong Kong to Wickford', Benson provided prints of designs from his work in fashion to his jewellery designs. This included the “cyclic group” symbol he used to create a movable diamond pendant - see here.

Albert Tang

Albert Tang is an actor and model who has also trained in architecture and music. Wai-On writes: "I met Albert Tang during my first year at the Royal Academy of Music, At the time he studied piano privately with Peter Katin. He is multi-talented and we have a lot of common interests. When I had the idea for this multi-media work, 'Metamorphosis', I asked Albert to be the artistic director."

In the exhibition, we displayed Tang's 'Metamorphosis' designs and examples of his art works.

Ruth Cutler

Ruth Cutler has been described as Thanet’s greatest living-here artist. Her Sea Garden project in Ramsgate was crafted from local stones and plants and transformed a piece of wasteland.

We displayed prints of work by Ruth Cutler previously displayed in Wai-On's InterArtes events.

 

The exhibition also included poetry from David Tong, photographs of the Buddha by Kitty Kwan at Leshan Giant Buddha, Dazu Rock Carvings and Longmen Grottoes, photographs of Moon Festival Celebrations in London's China Town by Roy Reed, photographs of Hong Kong birds, photographs of Hong Kong by Clark Ainsworth, images by Wai-On's fellow students from , photographs by Ben Rector and Martin Singleton used in music videos created by Wai-On, and 'Blessed', a music video made on the retirement of a former Team Rector of the Wickford and Runwell Team Ministry using imagery from St Andrew's Wickford.

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Ho Wai-On - Blessed.