Yn yr Ardd

“Botanical Glass” is inspired by the forests, mountains, rivers and meadows in the beautiful North Wales countryside. Influenced by the plants and trees and how colours, light and shapes change throughout the seasons. Fusing glass, coloured frits, enamels, painted imagery and using sandblasting to create layers of pattern and depth.

Clair has a love of wildlife and nature which she tries to recreate in her work. Her passion for horse riding and summers spent sailing around the North Wales coast gives her the opportunity to see the wild animals and birds in their natural surroundings.

Lindsey trained as a jeweller and silversmith at Birmingham School of Jewellery. Over fifteen years ago she was asked to lead an art project in a primary school as part of an artist in residence programme. The medium was to be mosaic, and that was when Lindsey became captivated and moved from metalwork to using glass and ceramic tiles. Lindsey’s techniques have grown out of her early gem-setting skills, using small pieces of coloured stained glass, glass tiles and drops and large quantities of mirror tiles to create decorative embellished two-dimensional surfaces. Inspiration for her mosaic designs comes from her interests in East European and historic embroidered textiles, where brightly coloured silks are stitched against dark backgrounds. From this comes her use of brightly coloured glass set within black grout. It creates an additional graphic line around the tiles. Recent work has focused on what Lindsey describes as mosaic floristry, using the garden as her inspiration, with sinuous trailing lines and floral shapes bursting with colour.

Mary was a primary school teacher for 34 years. Since her retirement she has developed her Alternative Photography practice, driven by an innate curiosity and experimentation with the Victorian photographic processes Cyanotype and Lumen prints.

Mary works from her home studio in a small village on the bank of the river Conwy overlooking the Carneddau mountains. Through experimentation Mary has created a technique using expired darkroom papers, cyanotype solution and various household ingredients to produce original one-off pieces of work. She often uses natural plant materials, Victorian illustrations and her own photographs to create her prints.

Miss Marple Makes is the brainchild of Cath Marple Owen. Born in Sheffield in 1966 with an English Dad and Danish Mother, Cath started out on a printmaking degree course in Sheffield and 3 years later moved to Copenhagen where she stayed for the next 18 years or so, after completing her Ceramic Product Design Degree in 2000, she moved to Wales in 2005 with her husband and 3 children. Cath then set up her own business as Miss Marple Makes based in the Ogwen Valley, she makes unique jewellery and decorations in Porcelain, printing into the clay with vintage typesets before firing and glazing, hand painting pieces with vibrant underglaze colours. Cath is greatly influenced both by her Scandinavian roots and 50s/60s graphics.

Fiona is constantly inspired by the beauty of the natural world around her in Bethesda, North Wales in Eryri National Park.

Her work is formed sustainably from the leaves, berries and wild flowers that grow in the mountain hedgegrows, forests and in her own dyers garden. Each piece Fiona dyes is totally unique, the depth of colour and pattern are determined by the plant, whether it is young or mature, and if it is picked in Spring, Summer or Autumn.

Working sustainably in her mountain shepherds hut studio is important to Fiona and she loves the idea that her work is a little piece of Eryri to take home without damaging the environment.

Natalie creates colourful illustrated greetings cards, art prints and jewellery from her home studio in Chichester.

After studying Printed Textiles and Surface Pattern at Leeds Arts University, Natalie worked as a freelance designer licensing designs to Highstreet brands, before launching her own brand in 2015 with the support of The King’s Trust.

Drawing inspiration from nature and vintage florals, each jewellery design begins as a hand-drawn illustration which is digitally printed onto acrylic, this is then laser cut in the UK and hand assembled by Natalie.

NOA is a Cardiff-based jewellery company which was established in 2003 by husband and wife, Noa and Geffen Blok. They have been working together since their time in university assisting each other with fashion and architecture projects.

Noa has enjoyed creating different kinds of jewellery pieces since childhood, whilst Geffen turned his creative attention to jewellery design at a later stage. They now work collaboratively on their jewellery label NOA.

The jewellery designs blend their backgrounds in fashion design and architecture, combining
ceramics, wood, aluminium, brass, silver and stainless steel to create their collections.

Making, drawing and painting are part of Pea, she cannot separate her work from life. When she is intrigued, influenced or dominated by an idea, it flows through her work in a variety of media and techniques; structure, painted imagery, repeated forms, pattern, or symbols so she can be totally immersed in the materials.

Most sculptures are created through maquettes using a variety of media, and drawings and then developed, often in clay through hand building forms, and using found and created moulds. She uses her own combination of clays and often paperclay, which is fired to 1100- 1200, and decorated with oxides/majolica glaze. Pea also often incorporates found and altered mixed media into pieces, and more recently her own photographs as ceramic transfers, and modelled wax.

Pea’s subject matter is often an experimentation with the elements of the human form, considering what physically makes us appear human, and which features of the body are important to our expressions? She also creates structures to represent the internal themes that make us more than physical bodies, memory, thoughts, experience etc.

Justine Holdsworth has been working with willow for over 15 years, transforming simple willow branches into functional and decorative objects.

What began as a personal creative journey quickly evolved into ‘The Workshop’ in Whitley Bay in 2023. It is a space to share the meditative joy of traditional crafting and building a space for people to reconnect with themselves by working with their hands.

The willow Justine uses is sustainably harvested, sorted, and graded by hand. Working with natural materials, Justine honours both the traditional craft techniques and our responsibility to the environment that provides our creative medium.