MEGAN FILSELL

DISCIPLINE: FINE ART & TEXTILES

PERSONAL STATEMENT:
My current practice is a response to my own experience of feeling alienated and uncomfortable growing up undiagnosed autistic. Through sickly colours and repetitive marks, I am searching for ways to represent a deeply complex feeling. By combining science and fiction I am creating a contrast between outward perspectives from professionals with my own inward emotional experiences.

In between my drawing and painting practice I experiment with textiles. The sensory experience of crochet interconnects with the heightened experience of my daily life. For me crochet brings a sense of play to my practice, a place to vent and process whilst doing something comfortably repetitive. Bringing a hidden disability into something 3D and tangible feels validating for my practice as well helping to strengthen the imagery in my paintings. Colour and materials are important when painting as I need to consider my own sensory needs and sensitivities to certain surfaces, textures and sounds for example. I have found watercolour to be perfect, I can achieve bright colours, which can be built up gradually, and I also like how the paint applies to the surface of paper.

My colours are often influenced by the music I am listening to as I am very rarely painting without it, the way that I process information means I tend to group different things together, such as a certain sound will be paired with a matching colour, this comes in handy when creating my art. For me to be able to fully embrace the way my brain works when painting further highlights the restraints that are forced upon me in other aspects of my life.

My practice aims to confront my own discomfort living with autism as well as my response to other peoples. Depicting struggle, isolation and confusion to reach a place of understanding for myself.

IMAGES/VIDEOS / PORTFOLIOS:
To be added soon

CONTACT DETAILS and LINKS:

Instagram: meganfilsell.art

Email: filsellmegan@gmail.com

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LUCY GRANT

DISCIPLINE: FINE ART

PERSONAL STATEMENT:
Lucy Grant’s artistic practice has a strong grounding in appreciating the awe in the world that goes unnoticed, predominantly through paintings. This means a lot of their art is inspired by various aspects of nature. Lucy does this by attempting to abstract forms into an ambiguous state; being recognisable as forms in nature and also representing the emotional feeling whilst experiencing nature. This is achieved by focusing on the process of painting: the materiality of the medium, the force between the wall and the brush, layering, dots and gravitational dripping, as means to highlight the complexity of life itself.

The world is infinitely interesting; nature is important because it provides a calmness and stillness that modern life is often lacking. Similar to childlike wonder, Grant interprets colour enthusiastically, emphasising the hues they witness. They paint like they’re seeing the world for the first time. Ultimately their artistic practice focuses on the elements within nature that are the most untouched. Due to humanity’s mass-meddling within landscapes, this means focusing on smaller aspects (such as rocks) within the greater whole. Grant’s interest in rocks has more recently extended to caves - as a contextualisation of these objects within a landscape.

This initial starting point allows Grant to deform and shape the creation of new places through the experimentation of materiality within their paintings, transforming the landscape to one consisting of paint, fabric and negative space. Grant often uses a sticky medium, like wax or oil pastel, on a soft material such as velvet to create a juxtaposition of textures. Similarly, caves are built up over time as mineral deposits from water sources, to eventually harden to their current form. This malleability of a landscape, which is so physically tangible and solid seeming, is what excites them most as an artist. This has further expanded to using paintings as a sculptural form that interacts with the viewer in a similar way a landscape does three-dimensionally.

IMAGES/VIDEOS / PORTFOLIOS:
WEBSITE DIRECT LINK
https://sites.google.com/view/lucygrantdoesart

CONTACT DETAILS:
Instagram: @lucygrantdoesart
Email: lucygrantdoesart@gmail.com

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PENELOPE RUSSELL

DISCIPLINE: MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST

INFORMATION: Penelope Anne Russell is a multidisciplinary artist born in Kent, England, and has been based out of Wiltshire since. In 2023, Russell began her BA Fine Art at the Winchester School of Art (WSA), Southampton University. She completed her degree in 2026, graduating with a First.

While studying at the WSA, she was awarded the Nancy Balfour prize for Sculpture, for her timber sculptures across her discipline and primarily the installation for her final year exhibit. She has participated in several group exhibitions with her peers during her degree, displaying work at the Jubilee Sports Gallery in 2024 and 2025, Southampton University, as well as the Winchester Gallery in 2023.

The artist has since been selected by the post-graduate program Ripe to work in an exclusive artists collective of accomplished graduates selected from Southampton University to present exhibits in the historic God’s House Tower near Southampton’s port. At Ripe, Russell will be working to create collaborative displays from late 2026 through to mid-2027 and will be closely affiliated with A-Space Arts.

Alongside a few of her graduate peers from the WSA, Russell will be exhibiting her work at Safehouse, Peckham, in early September as the collective Tangent.

She continues to be based out of Southampton, though primarily lives and works in Wiltshire, near Frome.

PERSONAL STATEMENT:
I explore the local country around me in my multidisciplinary practice. I uncover extinct customs, aspiring to bring awareness to fragile ecosystems for people and nature.

My lived experiences of rural heritage in England inform my practice, using anecdote to discover intimate places between mortalities. Simultaneous to this, I illustrate visually internal and external histories in relations, considering both the painful and precious to depict uncertain environments to elicit an uncomfortable voyeurism in the viewer.

Much of my practice looks to rural England, exploring earthworks and endangered craft, having recently divulged into passementerie through illustration and sculpture, blowing up minute features nearly invisible in the home, to monstrous shadows lurking in one’s peripherals.

I present items from rural lore integrated into our modern habitats. Ghosts from ancient cultures, whispers of other worlds. From scrap materials I build burial mounds and stiles, trig points and cairns. By manufacturing ancient heritage with modern practices, I bring into question the role of permanence and conservation in the age of mass-manufactured immediacy. I ask the viewer to question the earth they stand on, to listen in careful contemplation for things forgotten, within them and without.

IMAGES/VIDEOS / PORTFOLIOS:

LINK TO PORTFOLIO

CONTACT DETAILS and LINKS:

Email: pennyrussell135@outlook.com

Instagram: @pound_coin_

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