Fungus Press Residency: ‘COMMONALITY’

Corinne (They/Them)

I’m a disabled self-portrait artist and proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community. My photographic depictions are created within the same 2 by 1.5-meter space, my bed. This year marks my fifth year of spending almost every day confined here. My work is a form of therapy to ease my ongoing struggles with severe mental illness. From bed, I’ve undertaken remote residences with The New Art Gallery Walsall, QUAD Derby, Talking Birds Coventry, and Level Centre Derbyshire. I’m a member of The New Art Gallery Walsall’s ‘Collections Community Panel’ who co-produced the exhibition ‘Here & Queer’. Currently I’m producing new work in response to the gallery’s ‘Garman Ryan’ collection exploring ‘Period poverty’. Michelle Baharier Michelle Baharier studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule. She has won several awards including the Julian Sullivan award. Her artistic practice is strongly influenced by her everyday experience of disability, addressing barriers and prejudices about dyslexia. Baharier explores her inner conflicts, showcasing vulnerability, extremes of self-love, hope and unease, and her emotional states. Her oeuvre includes videos, sound, installation, performance, poetry, colourful expressive paintings, and portraits, using storytelling, and hybrid digital collages. Her work is in a number of public and private collections including ‘The Walkie Talkies’ supported by Arts Council England, housed at The London Transport Museum, it is the first piece of disability history they acquired. In Summer 2022, Baharier had a residency at the ‘House of Annetta’, supported by Assemble. michellebaharier.co.uk Nicola Field Nicola Field is an artist-researcher and writer concerned with the politics and poetics of family trauma and its effects on bodies and minds. She makes drawings, paintings, prints, ceramic sculptures, and videos, often incorporating visual text, which range from fast-drawn sketches in her journal, through in-depth process work and essays, to finished artefacts. Her 2-D pieces use a mix of media and materials including graphite, ink, watercolour and oil pastel, and range from monochrome to a vibrancy saturated with the thrilling colours of earth, sea, sky, fire, sun and sand. Through digitalising her work, she shapes narrative sequences and explores impact and volume with scale and re-sizing. Transgenerational and family trauma are often hidden and denied because of the crucial role the institution of the family plays in capitalist society. Nicola Field is driven to disrupt the normalisation of family trauma. She is creating a visual language which can lay bare its brutality, alienation, pathos, complexity and drama, with humour, tenderness, protest and political integrity. Although her work may unsettle, she hopes, through recognition and resonance, to show that family trauma is not about individual stories and identities, but a shared, social experience which is emotional and embodied. Her influences include Cornelia Parker, Charlotte Salomon, Franz Kafka and David Storey. Made sometimes fast, sometimes slowly, bringing together messiness and chaos with painstaking representation and expression, Nicola Field’s work embraces the fragmentation, repetition, and broken syntax of trauma narratives. She invites the onlooker to find and piece together their own stories and narratives from bodies of work on display. Sarah Lloyd (Carpenter) Sarah is an artist researcher, designer, and the founding director of Fourth Wall Folkestone, an informal Gallery, Open Studio and Research Space. With a specialism in public engagement, her work focuses mainly on the subject of mental health, and she has worked in this field for almost 12 years. Sarah has worked with and continues to work with institutions and organisations such as Bethlem Gallery, Shape Arts, Outside In, Artistic UK, King’s College London (specifically the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience), The Biomedical Research Centre and Maudsley Charity. Over 100 pieces of her work can be found in the Wellcome Collection archive. She has had work published in The Psychologist, The British Medical Journal, and the Lancet Journal of Psychiatry, for whom she was the cover artist in 2018. Sarah’s focus is on play, experimentation, and the joy of the process. She likens her artistic process to cognitive behavioural therapy: deconstructing and reconstructing, revisiting, and recycling images and ideas in an attempt to better understand them, rebuild and reimagine things. Instagram: @SarahCarpenterCreative Instagram: @FourthWallFolkestone FourthWallFolkestone.co.uk Sue Morgan Sue Morgan completed a doctorate in German philosophy and worked in the city as a corporate tax lawyer before being forced to retire in 1998 because of a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. It was during time spent in hospitals that she began working visually and since that time has gained a first-class degree at Camberwell in 2008, was a finalist in the DLAPiperArtAward 2009, and in 2010 had a solo show in Mayfair, represented by Sarah Myerscough Fine Art. Yas Martinez Yas Martinez is a Southeast London based artist working in a range of materials, including ink, clay, and charcoal. She is largely self-taught as an artist, which has helped her develop a freedom of expression, undiluted by academic expectation. Yas uses her lived experiences of her mental health, the human form, and subconscious thoughts to create her work, which she sees as summaries to the intense feelings she experiences. She shows her work regularly and in 2020 received the Bethlem Gallery Founders Award for emerging artists. yasmartinez.com