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Painter
Tracy Roberts is Brighton born and bred.
Having graduated from the University of the Creative Arts ( through the OCA - Open College of the Arts ) with a BA (Hons) Painting 1st class, starred, she continued her studies with the Turps Banana, correspondence course, based in London.
‘My current practice seems to me a cross between colour field and action - The tension between autonomous flatness and the illusion of depth. There is a duality with acrylic washes and thick impasto oil to create an atmospheric space. Using raw canvas makes the acrylic washes integral to the piece. Marinating is important, key aspect, layering, texture and depth with vigorous application of paint to enhance passages I want to excite. Colour is a main concern, justifying one colour against another or the multiple variations and nuances of one colour.
If I have a hard surface or substrate to paint on, I'm often impulsed to go straight in with oil paint.
Painting is a release of the psyche, exploring the areas between abstraction and representation. Motifs are free flowing, can be semi-autobiographical, themed, individual or in a series. The paintings can be experienced as objects and an experience in their own right.’
Paper Collage & Montage
Louis TF has worked as an artist and designer for the past 20 years, producing work that has varied from digital editorial illustrations for magazines and collage record sleeve artwork, to hand drawn graphics for the fashion industries. Since joining Red Herring Studios in 2018, he has developed his practice and focused on producing collage/montage works for galleries and exhibitions, patiently honing a particular style of surreal, utilising colours, textures and images born out of a large, dusty collections of books and ephemera from c.1870-1970.
Using mediums of collage and montage to expose parallel worlds that exist side by side, Louis highlights the absurd tensions between past and present, analogue and digital culture. Challenging contemporary society’s obsession with perfection, he draws on 20th-century ephemera—photographs, graphics, and advertisements—and collides their tactile imperfections with today’s curated, self-promotional trends.
Acting as an image editor, Louis reworks existing visual narratives to reveal chance encounters and fleeting moments that spark revelation or disruption. His layered compositions create sharp narrative clashes, propelling fragments of the past into the present as deliberate art anachronisms.
He preserves original margins, borders, and credits wherever possible, anchoring each piece to its analogue roots while honouring the integrity of the source material. Through collage and montage, Louis satirizes the paradox of striving to celebrate our authentic analogue selves within an unrelentingly digital world.
Get in touch at louis@louistf.com or visit louistf.com for more examples of Louis’ work and to purchase artworks.
Painter
Christopher McHugh trained as a painter at Bath Academy of Art and Manchester Metropolitan University (later completing MA studies at the University of Sussex).
He has pursued painting as his central practice ever since, while building a portfolio of other art activities including teaching, writing and artist-led projects.
He was a founding member of Manchester Artists' Studio Association (1982), Red Herring (1984 – artists' cooperative establishing studios and galleries in Brighton), Artonic (1990 – temporary public art projects), Video Virus (1992 – AIDS video art collective), and Fabrica (1995 – contemporary art gallery in central Brighton). He was an initial advisor and later a board member of eta (Empowering the Artist).
He is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Chichester and Convenor of Art at the Centre for Community Engagement, University of Sussex.
Sculptor
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There are two interwoven strands to Andy's art, research and teaching interests:
• Art education, visual art practise as research and making
• Transdisciplinarity, collaboration and a dialogic approach
His artistic practice includes sculpture, film, objects, drawing, print in an installation or in situ context. More recently he has collaborated with neuroscientists enquiring about the brain, depression, dyslexia and (dis)location.
Ceramics & Design
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Helen’s work embraces the crossover space between art, craft and design. She makes objects that play with our sense of what is familiar, functional and beautiful. Each piece, or collection of pieces, is a balance between exposing the materiality of clay and glaze and an object’s function or purpose. Helen searches for the material origins of objects and explores how they are presented and perceived in our culture today. Molten and cooled glazes form the surfaces of Helen’s pieces. Glazes fuse chemistry compositions. Surfaces reassemble like aquascapes and horizons, or places where scale and form are less perceptible. This gives way to an exploratory feel, both sensory and mental. Current works explore what a vase form is using slip casting, slab ware hand building techniques and ever evolving glazed surfaces.
Recent commissions have included works for Aberdeen Standard Life, Chateau Villepreux, a design collaboration with UK fashion designer Olivia Ruben and several media have featured Helen’s work including most recently; Channel 4’s Inside Out Homes, Etc Magazine and Landscape Magazine.
Photographic Artist
British photographic artist Mark Vessey is best-known for exploring and celebrating icons of pop culture. Lovingly curated, the subjects of his images include magazines, books and vinyl records that have had special significance within the popular cultural heritage of the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Ratna Jan Bibi is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice emerges from everyday life, personal experience, and the world around her. Through her work, she explores emotions, memories, and shared human experiences—both her own and those of the communities she engages with. Curiosity, reflection, experimentation, and play lie at the heart of her creative process.
Working across a wide range of materials and approaches, Ratna values the process of making as much as the finished piece. Her work often explores how creative activity can express feelings and experiences that are difficult to articulate, and how different materials can shape meaning, mood, and emotional impact.
Her involvement in Creative Health both informs and is informed by her artistic practice. She is deeply interested in the connections between creativity, health, and wellbeing, and how her professional work, community engagement, and personal art continually enrich one another.
Living with ongoing health conditions has further shaped Ratna’s exploration of the relationship between art, the body, biological systems, and wellbeing. Her work not only communicates personal experience but also creates welcoming spaces for connection, reflection, and understanding of our share human experiences.
As an older artist I enjoy celebrating the defiance of subjects moving through life without costume or caricature. My paintings address shifting identities as perspectives on location, occupation, health, relationships all change.
For the last four years I have been fully occupied in the art education for which I have always yearned. I’m lucky enough to have joined Red Herring immediately upon graduating from the University of Brighton, and as I embarked on East Sussex Turps Banana mentor program.
Like many of the women in my family whose passions were sidelined, as a post-war child, I grew up with the expectation that my future was invested in a professional life, that i needed to earn a good living independently. Creative practices such as drawing and making things were sidelined to evenings, weekends and holidays, but so important that I couldn’t help doing them alongside my work as a mathematics educator, researcher and academic practitioner. Now I am grateful to be building experimentally on lifetime experience. I love that in using my hands something might happen in my head or my heart. Unlocking feelings is for me the best part and I like to feel a surge of joy when marks appear, though it doesn’t always happen.
Emeritus Professor of Education, Victoria University, Melbourne
Fine Artist
Jackie has exhibited and sold her fine artwork in commercial galleries and museums, alongside curating site-specific installations and group exhibitions in artist-led events. Notable shows include the Jerwood Drawing Prize and Threadneedle Prize.
She has twenty years of experience of working in secondary schools and sixth form colleges, teaching Fine Art, Design and Photography, leading a vocational Art & Design curriculum, and supporting students in pastoral, inclusion, and safeguarding roles.
Education
MA Fine Art: Drawing: UAL (University of the Arts London), 2010
Qualified Teacher Status: Art & Design: Age 11-18, 2002
PGCE (Art & Design; Age 11-18): University of Brighton, 2001
BA (Hons) Art & Design (Painting & Photography): Bradford College of Art, 2000, (2:1)
Statement
As an urban dweller the landscape of the city provides a rich source of subject matter for developing my creative ideas. Themes explored in my fine art practice include reflections on how economic and social systems impact relational power dynamics and our connection with the natural world.
For visual research I use photography, video and sketching to gather inspiration, capturing the subjects of commuting crowds, architectural structures, and nocturnal scenes, to develop into paintings. I apply paint to canvas expressively and intuitively, scraping back layers of glaze to explore juxtapositions of geometric angles, voids, and vivid acid colours.
My drawing practice involves working from life or from film footage, using a process of combining figurative gestural marks with diary-like writing to record snippets of overheard conversations and the atmosphere of a place. In my more intimate works I explore autobiographical themes and memories. I work with mixed media, layering fragments of delicate materials such as tracing paper, which lends an ephemeral quality.
My theoretical research has focussed on documentary photography, fine art, and film that seeks to acknowledge lived experiences and empower marginalised perspectives, and my visual practice is informed by studies in Psychogeography, Oral History, and The Everyday. Artist influences include Julie Mehretu, Hongxi Li, Edward Hopper, Leon Kossoff, Gerhard Richter, Grayson Perry, Jeremy Deller, Jo Spence, and Ian Breakwell.
