Media
c
Artefacts, Animation and Adverts
Sally Stevens (home town Presteigne, Powys, but now resident in Brockley) started creative life editing local music videos and festival projects and then moved into gilding, picture framing and artefact restoration ‘over the border’ in Shropshire.
She then gained a BA in Illustration at Brighton. Her next excursion was somewhat more dramatic – three months in Estonia’s main drawn animation studio, a work placement she engineered by herself having arrived in the capital – Tallin – with no specific employment.
Back in the UK she’s turned her hand to a litany of fine projects – as model maker on a Volvic mineral water ad, prop-making and construction for the much-awarded Andy McGregor Studio in the Angel and art direction/set construction for Secret Cinema’s interpretation of the kitchen scene from the film ‘Ghostbusters’.
This involved, apparently, exploding eggs and a vortex fridge, whatever that is. While she was at it she pocketed five grand from the Arts Council, an award for an individual video artist to make a 4-minute long animation.
Since then she’s been working at the National Film and Television School on an MA course in Animation followed by substantial input to theatre company ‘Improbable’s’ 3 month tour which, improbably, started in Ohio, USA and then Liverpool, Leeds and the Barbican.
Further she’s co-directed a music video for the band Lazarus and the Plane Crash.
She’s an artist by instinct, always carrying a sketchbook and ‘people-spotting’ as she goes, accumulating fuel for her animations.
Words certainly can’t really do justice to her various talents, particularly as an illustrator/animator, but checking out her website at www.sallystevens.com and contrasting her ‘take’ on Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ with another piece ‘Flat Earth’ filmed on Brighton seafront really proves her versatility.
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Angela, born in Rome, first started taking pictures in the 70s as a student and photojournalist having studied Fine Art in Italy and, moving to London, she then studied photography and took a three year degree course in Film, Video and Photographic Arts at the Polytechnic of Central London (now part of the University of Westminster).
Rather dauntingly she also completed an MA in Psychoanalytic studies at the University of Kent – all her visual works of the 80s and 90s being informed by psychoanalytic theories.
Based in Deptford since 1984 she regards herself as an artist and lecturer and her work has evolved into areas where digital manipulation adds new conceptual values to the originally captured photographic subject.
For example ‘Winter’s Glitter’ is one of a series of images developed from a childhood fascination with a kaleidoscope. She comments, “This is a personal way of ‘re-staging’ an affecting childhood memory that is both comforting yet oddly unsettling in its obsessive recurrence.”
In the P & B Showcase at ‘Bearspace’ she will be featuring her ‘Man-Made’ project, a personal odyssey through rubbish and rubble, with found objects and ‘lost’ materials recycled to become artworks. Such ‘detritus’, normally, she says “is deemed inappropriate for public display or discussion because it forces us to face what we experience as repulsive.”
The result is a transformative effect that gives a second life to discarded, tossed-aside everyday ‘bits and pieces’, creating, as she puts it “a new landscape.”
A new landscape that is, inevitably, also a bitter reflection on the mess mankind, we all know, is making of the planet.
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