Artists

Based between East Sussex and Northern France, Sonia Laurent-Evans uses her work to explore her thoughts about architecture, decoration, and cultural identity. Her mixed media wall pieces are made using plaster relief technique. They are minimal in colour yet expressive in form and surface texture.

Each artwork starts life as a relief sculpture carved in clay. This is used to create a mould, into which plaster is poured and left to set. Once the cast is dry and removed from the mould, it is ready to be finished. This process “comes from the soul” describes Laurent-Evans. “I choose to leave my sculptures unpainted, sometimes with just a touch of silver leaf. It is the texture of the surface that makes them sing.”

Sonia Laurent-Evans (b. 1982) lives and works between Folkestone, UK and Lille, France. She has exhibited widely both within the UK and internationally.

Kim Okana is a watercolour artist known for her use of natural pigments and bold mark-making. The ideas for her abstract paintings stem from meticulous observational drawings made of fauna and flora, buildings, and people.

Taking reality as her starting point, Okana seeks to capture the ‘essence of sensorial experience’ in her works. Sights, smells, sounds and tastes are all recorded through drawing and note-taking, which the artist then translates into large-scale paintings. She produces her own paint using pigments foraged on location, making us question where the physical experience ends and the artwork begins.

Born in 1976, Okana grew up in Tokyo and studied in New York before moving to England. She spent 20 years working as a print designer for textiles before launching her art career in 2016. She has exhibited both within the UK and internationally.

Inspired by a diverse array of source material, Joseph Owen’s large-scale acrylic paintings are studies into colour, movement and rhythm. His bold, layered arrangements, reminiscent of Pop Art, offer multiple focal points and keep the eye in constant motion.

His abstracted depictions of everyday scenes have, as he puts it, ‘a rushed and frantic energy’, yet they exude an extraordinarily rich sense of depth and confidence. ‘When I paint, I’m never quite sure what the outcome will be’, says Owen, ‘in that way, the painting becomes a documentation of my process, mistakes and all.”

Joseph Owen (b. 1982) lives and works in Kent, UK. He has exhibited widely within the UK and internationally. He was artist in residence at Row Gallery between 2012-2013.