Meet 5 new artists: Scarlet Mayer-Payne, Mali Wheeler, Olivia Bartlett and more

Scarlet Mayer-Payne is a recently graduated first class honours Fine-Art student from Aberystwyth University. Recently moved to Leeds at the start of July 2021, she plans to continue exploring the gestural and the geometric. Can these two co-exist harmoniously within a given space? Through the depiction of abstract, fictitious spaces, Scarlet Mayer-Payne's work aims to question and engage with positive and negative space. Space means something different to each individual and affects everyone in different ways. When viewing Mayer-Payne's work, the viewer is encouraged to take a moment and ask themselves: What does space mean to me? She invites you to take a seat and immerse yourself in her work. Allow yourself to travel somewhere different, it may be somewhere new and undiscovered, somewhere old and experienced or simply just somewhere fictitious.

Olivia Bartlett is a Fine Artist whose work consists primarily of abstract painting and ceramics. Olivia’s work is an investigation into the dimensions of mark-making and consists of experiments with colour and thought, to navigate emotional and psychological spaces that evoke our human experience.

Katie Carter: Katie Carter is a Dorset-based oil painter interested in exploring the natural world. Focusing on the materiality of paint, Katie’s paintings are characterised by bold mark-making, vibrant colour and a multiplicity of surface. She uses palette knives to apply paint quickly and boldly, yet loosely. Oil paint can’t quite be controlled, and what results is a mix of both purposeful and accidental marks. Scratch marks and traces of the knife can be seen, and the light reflects on the surface. The optical play between colour and form enables the negative spaces to maintain shapes of their own, and worlds and spaces are created as the viewer finds abstract shapes within abstract shapes. Although Katie’s paintings are abstract, there are suggestions of natural forms. The viewer is encouraged to form their own interpretation and through the ambiguity of the images, Katie makes us look at the world differently, gaining new knowledge to help us better understand the world we live in, or shape it into new realities.

George Robertshaw: "By concentrating on the details of the painted surface, my practice explores the medium of paint through the language of abstraction. With a strong emphasis on colour, my work seeks to interrogate paintings’ conventional materials and processes, and thereby notice how these elements impact what is perceived. Created on a large scale, the paintings produce an immersive experience for the viewer and draw attention to the subtleties of the painted plane. While principal attention is given to the materiality of paint, my practice references a wide variety of historical sources including the approach of American abstraction, absurdist literature, and ancient Egyptian belief systems. The result of this synthesis of ideas are paintings which often evoke in the viewer personal responses and introspective contemplation."

Mali Wheeler: "My practice is based on my favourite hobby: Irish Dancing. I noticed that historically dance is usually only observed by artists figuratively, I wanted to take my work in a different direction. I chose to view dance performance from a dancer’s perspective as opposed to the audience’s, this therefore involves the translation between mind and body. I map steps through tracing the dancers’ movements. I paint physically what a dancer envisages mentally when they step on stage - a whole dance in an instance. Thus, this evokes philosophies of Substance Dualism."

Suspend by Scarlet Mayer-Payne