DAVID CARRUTHERS: Every day I walk. Looking. Stopping. Recording. From this gentle ritual I filter the landscape and the complex dualities surrounding us. The resulting art works have become digital decodings of a personal analogue perspective, they employ various time signatures and examine events using a sense of deceleration. These pieces illustrate small breaths taken through a blizzard of events and locations from the previous two years, reaching into a toolbox that helps me to regain balance and therefore remain upright. Luminous, quiet mirrors. To paraphrase Orwell, the appearance of solidity to pure wind. I find exhibiting quite difficult, the equilibrium between public and personal is sometimes hard to reconcile but I realise that in the gallery we get to exchange experience and walk away with fresh connections. Balances and checks.  

David Carruthers is originally from Cumbria where he trained and worked as an engineering draughtsman. In 1980 he visited an exhibition by Lazlo Moholy Nagy, whose thinking prompted a profound change of direction. He subsequently took a BA Fine Art (Sheffield), an MA Fine Art (Chelsea) and was awarded a post-graduate Fellowship at GLOSCAT. 

He is an artist who uses a wide range of media and methods including photography, moving image, sound, sculpture, installation, and augmented reality. His work examines amplification and deceleration in our engagement with landscape and environment. 

website: davidcarruthers.art 
Instagram: @david_carruthers_ _ 

SUSAN FRANCIS: We exist in a constant state of Doublethink, whiplashing back and forward from experience to memory, smashing together the past with the present, creating new worlds from old. Our lived interiors reveal an endless rehash of colours, forms, and materials, with imagery from nature infiltrating our homes in unnatural ways, harvested and cut free from meaningful habitat, where we can control and supress. This body of work emerged over lockdown, inspired by a 1960s book on flower arranging; strange, surreal and futuristic stagings, utopian dioramas where a disembodied hand arranges, controls and reimagines the natural world for a better one perhaps. Our anthropocentric attempts to bring order to chaos are constantly usurped, nevertheless we repeat them, existing in the Doublethink.  

Susan Francis, born in Belfast, currently lives and works in Wiltshire. With a record of national and international exhibitions, she has also undertaken residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Nebraska, USA, and The Center of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko, Poland. With work in private and public collections, including The Arts Council Collection of Northern Ireland, Susan Francis has also won a number of awards including Juliet Gomperts Trust, the British Council and Arts Council England. She has recently completed a Masters degree in Theology, Imagination and Culture which continues to inform her work. 

website: susanfrancis.com 
Instagram/Twitter: @susanefrancis 

DAVID DIXON: ‘all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea.’Arthur Schopenhauer 1818 
Doublethink could be seen as a two-world view of our thought, offering ontologically distinct aspects of engagement. It could also be seen as a two-aspect view of our thought, offering complementary ways of considering an object. This is appropriate with modern theories concerning the reciprocal nature of quantum mechanics. Upon examination, binaries collapse into probabilities, and we find that the world we know is contingent upon our apparatus for sensing it. 

David Dixon is an installation artist, based in South West England, and has been the director of the artist-led organisation Chapel Arts Studios (CAS) since its launch in 2009. He sat on the ACE SW Regional Council from 2017-2020, and is currently on the board of disabled-arts organisation Unlimited. Recent exhibitions include The Laboratory of Dissent at Spudworks in Sway and Inside/Outside at The Winchester Gallery, Winchester School of Art. 

website: daviddixon.co.uk 
Twitter: @chapelartists 

PRUDENCE MALTBY: Orwell suggested that – ‘if you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.’ Feeling very much the author I have in some instances scribbled over areas, evoking layers of chaos and fragmentation; distorting what is real. This necessary mark making veiled in raw piment dust serves to conceal my subject matter and therefore provide a refuge and obligatory punctuation. With a focus on the manifestations of truth when reality has little meaning… I flirt with disguise and cover up; hide and seek. These works are very private and yet there is always the anomaly of wanting them to be seen. Again, and again, they oscillate between exclusion and inclusion, between here and there, then, and now.

Prudence Maltby, born in Sussex, emigrated to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) with her family when she was a small child. She returned to the UK in the 90s having spent 35 years in Africa. Prudence divides her time between drawing, painting and curating exhibitions. She also co-ordinates visual arts projects and most recently delivered a four year, award winning, international project commemorating WW1, which culminated in Montreal, Canada. She has work in private and public collections and over the years has gained several awards from Zimbabwe and England.

website: prudencemaltby.com
Instagram: @prudencemaltby