Sian Appleyard
Sian Appleyard was an established fine art printmaker creating beautiful hand inked images in small editions. Her highly textured collagraph printing plates were created by both cutting away and adding to the surface layer using anything from porridge oats to sand collected while walking on the beach. Richly coloured oil based inks are applied using rollers, cloth and paint brushes allowing for wonderful “happy accidents”. This also means that although prints are similar across a print run, each one is unique in various ways. Her work features scenes and landscapes of the south coasts and the New Forest area. At Chalks we enjoyed many years working with Sian. After her sad passing in 2023, we continue to stock Sian’s work at her request, with proceeds going to Oakhaven Hospice.
Caroline Barnes
Caroline is an established maker working in high fired porcelain from her studio in West Dorset. She produces decorative ceramics, featuring transfer images of botanical and marine life, inspired by the local coast, natural history collections, vintage prints and illustrations. With a background in museums Caroline is fascinated with the presentation and juxtaposition of image and object, with a nod to the Victorian fascination of capturing and preserving objects. Her work sometimes reflects the fragments, fossils and debris she collects from local beaches along the Jurassic Coast. - Caroline explores a more ethical approach to illustrating nature.
Mike Braisher
Mike is a self-taught ceramicist from Lyndhurst in the New Forest. Since taking early retirement from teaching many years ago this has become his main occupation. He enjoys making very large, hand thrown stoneware storage vessels, chargers, bowls and pitchers and jugs with beautiful luxurious glazes. He spends several months each year in New Zealand whenever possible, visiting potters groups and numerous potter friends. He has done many demonstrations around the country and spent time as an Artist in Residence at Driving Creek Railway and Potteries in the Coromandel. He is a Life Member of Southern Ceramic Group and is also an Academician of the South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts.
Lindsay Buck
Lindsay Buck is the artist behind Slumbermonkey Designs and is based in rural North Dorset, where she works from her little garden studio. Originally from Norfolk she moved to Dorset eight years ago and she designs and makes a wide range of work which always incorporates colour, pattern and quirky details. Inspiration comes from the countryside around her, the birds, flowers, animals and plants that can be glimpsed in the garden and beyond. Also evident is a love of the Mid-Century aesthetic. Lindsay’s work aims to make you smile, to brighten your day and instil a sense of childlike curiosity and wonder.
Scott Buckwell
Scott is a woodturner from Ferndown, Dorset. Scott started woodturning as a hobby in 2018. Although he has always enjoyed making “plain” wooden bowls, he soon started to include resin in his creations, to develop unique one-off pieces. Scott’s repertoire includes pens, bowls, platters, sphere desk clocks, vases and lidded ring pots. Most of Scott’s work utilises either wood sourced locally or wood that has been cut and left in hedgerows. He likes to use the kind of wood most “normal” woodturners would throw away or burn, giving his work a quirky yet beautifully finished quality.
Gillian Connor
A walk along the beach is not just a walk along the beach for Gillian Connor. It is a treasure hunt! She never knows what she may find or what it will eventually become. She has worked from her Hampshire studio since 2001 where she is surrounded by piles of driftwood, boxes of plastic, glass, rusty metal, old rope and fishing floats. These are all materials that inspire her to create all kinds of boats and some very strange sea creatures! She does it because she loves it, its eco friendly and makes people smile! Her hand tools become an extension of her imagination and she can spend endless hours looking for that perfect piece of glass or just the right rusty nail. Her work has been in many galleries and exhibitions.
CStar Design
CStar Design is a sister duo based in Winchester. Cathy and Lisa work together to design and create original fusion glass pieces. Through their glass work, they explore the colour vibrancy and translucency that glass offers, incorporating natural lines and forms from within nature. Their Kaleidoscope range reminisces childhood memories of sunny days and the magical images created within a Kaleidoscope. In the same way that a Kaleidoscope forever changes its unique forms and colour patterns, they too have developed a technique for creating this in each of their glass pieces. No two creations will ever have the same colours and shapes. They use a range of glass fusion techniques, creating layers and embellishments within their work.
Lynne Dinmore
Lynne Dinmore is a ceramicist, working from her family home in Broadstone, Dorset. Having studied Ceramics at Poole College, he works equally with Earthenware, Stoneware and Porcelain, building with slip, coils and slabs and decorating with an infusion of oxides and glazes. She has also explored the fun of pit firing and Raku. Her work is diverse, including both functional and decorative pieces plus silver/porcelain jewellery and individually hand-drawn cards with ceramic detail. Many of her pieces make use of local grasses and plants that she presses into the clay. She currently belongs to the group of “local artists” that sell through the National Trust.
Faye Dunwoodie
Faye is a painter from Poole in Dorset. Growing up on a farm in North Devon with unspoilt nature all around really inspired Faye at a young age to capture what she sees and feels through her love of painting. Now living along the amazing Dorset coast, she continues to be inspired with the beautiful landscape and animals within it. Faye uses locally sourced wood, and after deciding what each piece would like painted on it she then works with her acrylic paints to add richness and colour incorporating the natural features of each piece to achieve the result while honouring the wood throughout.
Pete Gilbert
Pete Gilbert has lived a busy life with many career changes including advertising, restaurateur and night club owner, but has always found the time to paint, exploring and developing his own style. His style and approach ranges from the very precise skills needed as an airbrush artist and illustrator to the strong brush strokes and bold colours of his New Forest landscapes. He now makes his living as an artist, painting mainly contemporary landscapes of the New Forest or the Coast from Cornwall to the Scottish Western Isles.
Jan Guest
Jan Guest is an artist and teacher from Chichester who enjoys finding shoreline pieces to fabricate into an idea and creation. Jan explores harbours, cliffs, coastal paths and wrecks eroded by tide and time. A dog walk along the beach after a high storm tide usually provides Plywood, blocks, hulls and mounts. Jan specialises in ceramics; the plastic properties of clay allow her infinite scope to craft stoneware components which find a home amongst beachcombings. Each piece is unique both from its wave worn form and the kiln firing process. The clay elements are shaped, dried, bisque fired to 1000°c, glazed, then stoneware fired to 1240°c.
Trina Hart
Trina Hart is an artist based in Lymington, New Forest. Although not a formally trained artist, Trina has a natural talent for technique and colour and works with a range of mediums. Taking to painting in later life, after a background in publishing and writing, Trina found a love for expressing herself through image and colour. Trina’s work looks to society, politics and spiritual symbolism to gain inspiration and often works with life models. Her mantra is ‘don’t be attached to the outcome’ which allows for more expressive work to come forward in flow. She has exhibited in the local area extensively and continues to develop and expand her work to respond to current events, political movements and cultural interests.
Nicky Hendrie
Nicky is a ceramicist from Guilford in Surrey. She originally learnt basic pottery skills at evening classes and now continues to develop her work in her home studio exploring techniques and new ideas. She is inspired by simple forms, Japanese ceramics and subtle muted colour palettes. Using stoneware clay, her work is mainly thrown on a potters wheel and fired in an electric kiln. She enjoys incorporating other materials into her work including driftwood from beaches on the south west coast, glass and gold lustre. In her current work she uses brush on glazes which give unpredictable results, making each piece unique.
Sarah Higgins
Sarah is a lover of the New Forest and aims to promote sustainable art by recycling nature from our local area. Each Fern is foraged, dried for 8 weeks and then printed onto eco-friendly materials or the beautiful handmade paper that she sources. The paper is made from recycled cotton t-shirts and also contains wildflowers! Her love of ferns stems from the symbolism they hold. Representing new beginnings, resilience & protection.
Emma Hiles
Emma Hiles is a ceramic artist from Laverstoke, Hampshire but grew up in Christchurch Dorset surrounded by the sea and coastline. She has worked in design for nearly 20 years specialising in designing Holograms for brand and currency. 5 years ago she started a pottery class in her local town for a few hours a week and got completely hooked on clay. She finds that clay is an amazing medium for experimentation, and she has loved playing with clays and glazes over the last couple of years. Opening the kiln is always a surprise and a huge lesson in patience and resilience The glass used in the Bombay bowls is from Bombay Gin bottles from the distillery which is based a mile down the road from where she lives.
Emma Le Lohe
Emma’s Mosaic style Artworks are a response to a lifelong love of collecting. She uses the china pieces more as a collage rather than mosaic in the traditional sense and approaches each artwork as she would a painting using the coloured china as a palette. Reclycling and reimagining the broken and discarded pieces of life’s flotsam, she creates a wide range of works, from quirky home decor and jewellery to the more intricate pieces through which she is able to create something physically tangible in which she can unite and express her eclectic tastes, inspirations and wonder of the things she finds and notices around her.
Ruth Leach
Ruth is a jeweller from Petersfield in Hampshire and the designer behind Studio Rua. Ruth creates modern and playful jewellery inspired by ancient adornment and folk traditions. Her jewellery is thoughtfully designed and handmade, using the age old technique of lost wax casting. Each wax design is shaped by hand, leaving subtle traces of fingerprints and tools marks, much like ancient treasure unearthed from archaeological digs. Ruth primarily draws her inspiration from ancient jewellery, British folk traditions and Mother Nature. Her designs unashamedly embrace imperfection, the visibility of the maker is celebrated.
Linda Lovatt
Linda grew up on a smallholding in Shropshire, surrounded by fields full of wild flowers and quizzical animals, which she loved to paint and sketch. She trained as an illustrator and now lives at an old watermill in the Scottish Borders with a large and unruly garden. While digging her garden, she kept finding all these beautiful pieces of pottery, old keys and bottles hidden in the soil like pieces of buried treasure. This together with growing up in a family of engineers inspired her to create a range of copper assemblage and jewellery..
Sarah Maddison
Sarah Maddison is a textile artist, producing unique pictures, jewellery and jewellery boxes, purses and greetings cards. She takes a very fluid approach to her mixed media work, combining painting, free-motion machine embroidery, traditional hand stitching techniques and beading. She is constantly inspired by the ancient landscapes near her home on the Hampshire/Wiltshire border and the spirituality and stories of those who have walked those paths before us. The animals that inhabit those landscapes are often also featured. She loves standing stones, hares and crows and the moon.
Briony Maple
Briony is a Dorset based glass artist creating pieces full of texture, light, and movement. After studying Contemporary Crafts at Falmouth University Briony returned to live and work in Dorset where her work is inspired by her material, its temperamental nature, and endless possibilities as well as her beautiful and iconic surroundings and water. Briony’s work is made using warm glass methods including combinations of fusing, slumping, draping and casting to capture texture and movement in each piece. Her work often includes copper elements to add colour and material contrasts using hand cut foils and copper clay sculptures.
Ed Marriott
Ed is an artist from Swanage who has been exhibiting his artwork in the area from a young age. Ed’s semi abstract style of painting captures towns in Dorset and the Southwest coastline with a graphic approach. He works in acrylics on canvas and uses a limited colour palette outlined with ink using a pipette pen. The selection for this exhibition is a collection depicting Lymington and the surrounding area. Ed is currently showing and exhibiting work in several south coast galleries.
Klara Mehesz
Klara is a painter based in Bournemouth but originating from Budepest. Graduating as a language and art teacher in Hungary, she is a self-taught artist. Drawing and painting has always been a huge part of her life and her contemporary style reflects her attraction to creating abstract and semi abstract landscapes and her love of warm colours and textures. She enjoys working in a variety of media but paints mainly in acrylics.
Jo Middleton
Jo Middleton is a ceramicist who lives and works in rural West Sussex. She graduated from Falmouth College of Arts in contemporary crafts. With a love for nature and working in porcelain she went on to start Wild Hare Ceramics. Drawing inspiration from her time spent in Cornwall, her love for animals and living in the beautiful countryside of the South Downs she creates a range of sculptures and whimsical ceramics. These are carefully hand built using a variety of techniques in porcelain, paperclay and stoneware.
Nic Monks
Nic Monks creates unique, handcrafted jewellery that celebrates individuality and craftsmanship. He uses ethically sourced materials and salvaged and recovered materials to produce pieces of contemporary jewellery that tell a story. He creates collections and unique pieces of jewellery and also works to commission. His current collections focus specifically on using mixed, recovered, materials. The bullion he uses is 100% recycled which he then combines with other salvaged materials. Each piece tells the story of this discarded material whilst elevating it and reminding us of its worth. Nic is a member of the Association for Contemporary Jewellery, Artful Collective, and the Wessex Guild of Craftsmen.
Francheska Pattisson
Francheska is a ceramicist from Winchester. With a passion for both printmaking and working with clay, Francheska combines the two art forms, using printmaking techniques to build up layers of surface decoration, using foraged, pressed leaves. This results in a detailed and textured surface. She works in white earthenware, using both throwing and hand-building. The surface is as equally important as the form; the clay becoming the canvas. Because organic matter is pressed into the clay, often little pieces are left behind which create anomalies, raised textures and marks. She considers this part of the process, a kind of Wabi-Sabi where beauty can be found in the imperfection as nature is caught in the glaze.
Helen Polden
Helen Polden is a mixed media artist living and working in Romsey, Hampshire. She has fond memories of drawing flowers and animals with her Grandmother from a very early age and this love of art and nature has never left her. Exploring colour and light, Helen takes her inspiration from the natural beauty of land and sea, from the Test Valley and the New Forest to the South Coast and the Mediterranean. Her technique involves the layering of tissue, wrapping paper and magazine cuttings to create form and texture. From this she applies inks and acrylics to create woodland, forest and coastal paintings in an illustrative style, quite often with the addition of quirky wildlife.
Nicole Poxon
Nicole is the artist and goldsmith behind Beside The Seaside Creations based in Poole, Dorset. Nicole fuses her passion for jewellery with her love of living beside the sea, creating pieces inspired by the beautiful local coastline. As well as incorporating sea glass handpicked from our shores, she also uses ethically and responsibly sourced gemstones and 100% recycled precious metals. Nicole donates £1 from every sale in support of the Marine Conservation Society, The UK charity working towards a cleaner, better protected and healthier ocean, for all.
Alex Poyner
Alex Poyner is a painter from Emsworth in Hampshire. She grew up around Chichester Harbour with a family of keen sailors and spent a lot of time exploring our beautiful British coastline which inspires her to this day. Alex uses techniques that were shaped at Falmouth Art College and Winchester School of Art, where she trained as a print designer, specialising in screen print.. Her original seascape pieces are created through the family of screen print methods. The foreground: buildings, greenery, sea, buoys and boats, is hand painted first in many layers through the mesh of the screen. This allows her to be expressive while keeping a clean, crisp feel to the colour. She then screen prints the sky in a block colour to further enhance the motion in the rest of the painting. Finally she screen prints her line drawing over the top, to bring the narrative of the painting together. She creates up to 5 original editions of each scene, experimenting with colour, proportion and brush strokes with each edition. This allows her to capture the scene in states of tide, mood and weather and means each original edition is completely different.
Jo Richards
Jo is a jewellery designer that grew up within walking distance of the sea on the Dorset Coast. She now calls the city of Winchester home and enjoys the beautiful countryside, rolling hills and chalk streams that surround her. The sea, water, and natural world often feature in her work. You will also find designs inspired by travels with her family, visits to art galleries and organic architecture. Since 2006 Jo has specialised in working almost exclusively in Silver Clay – a product made from recycled silver. This medium has helped her develop the feminine, romantic, and organic style that she is now recognised for. Jo’s jewellery is not only unique and beautiful, but impeccably made; an enduring piece of wearable art that can be treasured and enjoyed for years to come.
Tia Rolfe
Tia is the goldsmith and jeweller behind Selkie Jewellery. She works from her studio based at Dell Quay on Chichester harbour. Her work is inspired by the ocean & bears sustainability in mind by using recycled precious metals and found objects like seaglass and ghost rope. She uses all traditional goldsmithing techniques including cuttlefish casting to give her work that unique touch. She works in all precious metals and does commission work and repairs of all kinds. Selkie Jewellery also offers jewellery making classes & tuition.
Sparkletastic Glass
Sparkletastic glass is run by a husband and wife team based in Fordingbridge. Amanda makes dichroic glass cabochons by layering dichroic and bullseye glass and fusing it in her kiln. Some of the more complex pieces are then cut from mosaic glass slabs before they have a final fire polish in the kiln. Amanda and Mark also make many of the silver findings and setting using eco-silver (recycled sterling silver) and traditional silver-smithing techniques.
Vicky Swift
Vicky Swift is the designer and maker based in Stubbington, Hampshire. She uses a combination of vintage cutlery, driftwood, and reclaimed stained glass to hand craft collections of unique eco friendly up-cycled sculptures, including her range of handmade upcycled cutlery birds, fish and dolphins. Sustainability has been at the heart of Vicky’s work for over 20 years.
Hannah Trunwitt
Hannah is the self-taught artist, focusing predominantly on bespoke resin art. Each piece is unique by nature and lovingly crafted from her garden studio in the New Forest. She is drawn to her chosen medium due to its unique fluidity and unpredictability, using this to her advantage when producing pieces depicting rolling wave seascapes and abstract designs using found objects such as wooden trays and dishes as her canvas as well as wall hanging art pieces. Hannah has been striving towards working in a creative industry since a very young age and enjoys the contrast her brings to her meticulous day job.
Harriet Wesley
Harriet Wesley is inspired by the surrounding New Forest, archaeological finds and ancient ceramics. Her work has a textured and organic exterior; the inside is often, by contrast, smooth and glazed, as are the rims of vessels, making them fully functional items. She often creates work that bridges the gap between functionality and sculpture. Her current pieces are hand built stoneware, using a cross between coiling and slab building techniques and are decorated using a mixture of coloured clays and slips, stains, oxides, glazes and metal leaf.
Rosie Wesley
Rosie Wesley is a metalwork and jewellery designer based in the New Forest. With a focus on texture and form, her sculptural works and jewellery are individual, site-responsive pieces to locations in the New Forest and are made using burn-out casting techniques to create replica textures of tree bark or other natural materials. Rosie transforms her pieces into metal objects that you can keep forever and often works on commission pieces which are perfect for remembering loved ones, encapsulating unique experiences or commemorating special moments.
Denise White
Denise runs her mixed media art business "Driftaway " from her garden studio close to the back water of Poole Harbour. The beautiful harbour and wildlife gives wonderful inspiration for her art. Denise's work reflects her love of nature and Dorset's diverse wildlife. She takes many walks collecting interesting natural materials from the coastline that then become part of her art. She is also a big advocate of saving items from landfill and will occasionally combine these items into her work. A favourite medium of Denise's is driftwood which she uses to create rustic decor and wildlife. This can be left in it's natural state or handpainted in acrylic paint to give a more lifelike feel. Her art can be seen in galleries in and around Dorset and Hampshire.
Claire Wiltsher
Claire Wiltsher has lived in the New Forest for over 16 years where she set up her studio in Lyndhurst. Her work captures a moment in time exploring the energy and light of a place using mixed media and Acrylic paint. She has worked as a lecturer in Art and Design at Durham college and later at Henley on Thames college. Claire exhibits with various galleries, having secured solo and group shows. She currently has work with Panter & Hall in Mayfair and Covent Garden. Her paintings have been selected for a number of awards, including Artist of the year 2018. Two paintings are hung in the House of Lords and Claire has work selected for RSWA in June this year at the Mall Galleries.
Sally Winter
Sally is a printmaker living in Dorset and working from her studio in Christchurch. Sally Winter is best known for her vibrant and evocative etchings and collagraphs. Sallys starting point is primarily the landscape. Being immersed in the coastal and rural landscape, the flora, fauna and atmosphere as well as the colour and light of her surroundings provide a powerful stimulus to all her work. Her work exhibited here begins with drawing onto a zinc plate followed by several processes to etch the drawing into the plate and add the colour before passing it through an etching press. A former member of the National Society of Printmakers and the Society of Botanical Artists, Sally’s work has been enthusiastically collected worldwide.