Blending the digital and fine art worlds, the AWS Gallery Team speaks with artist Lucie Davis (@luciedavis) on her latest ‘Bit Coin’ series. The physical and NFT series can be seen via the Imaginarium Virtual Art Exhibition as well as on the AWS x Voice Storefront.

Read our Q&A with Central Saint Martins Graduate, multi-awarding winning designer as well as artist Lucie Davis to learn more about her artwork:

This is not an exhibition about music. Rather, it is an exhibition about collaboration. It is a show meant to capture what happens when artists – most importantly – women artists come together ascolleagues and collaborators rather than as competition.

- A Note From Zoë Goetzmann, Director & Founder (AWS Gallery)

Work featured:

Collaborative work by Anna Kolosova and Melissa Vipritskaya Topal

2022

Mixed media on canvas

30 x 20 cm

£450

“When I first started out being serious about being an artist… I wanted this idea of creating another world that I could project myself into”

At the core of her practice, Lauren Alexandra is an obsessive day dreamer with an active imagination. The endless possibilities of new worlds lie at the end of her paintbrush.

Lauren is all smiles. Not only can you see her wonderful, joyful smile, but you can hear it in her voice, and read it through her messages.

Photograph by Lauren Alexandra

Flat white on the way ma’am is the last text I receive from Shelley as I’m making my way down the street to meet her at her local coffee fix. She is an artist and a teacher with a passion for people. I’m greeted by her bright smile and an assortment of drawings, paintings and watercolours strewn out on the table moments before my coffee arrives and our conversation takes flight.

“My real fascination is people… you find someone and there’s just a connection and you ask yourself what’s their story?”

— Shelley Levy

Photograph by Nina Paiva

After a hello hug and a quick stop to grab a coffee, Elise and I made our way to Whetstone Stray. Walking over the park’s uneven ground, we started chatting. Canadian born and London based, artist Elise Mendelle takes me on a walk around the park that was once her calm escape during the restrictive moments of lockdown.

With towering trees shrouding the winding paths that follow the river in a loose manner, it’s clear to me why this park was her chosen spot to find air and relief during those months when we all shared and yearned for a simple, common need for escape.

Photograph taken by Nina Paiva

Jennifer Moore is an artist, printmaker as well as an architect, who’s body of work speaks to the best and perhaps most unique qualities of what fine art, digital art, analogous, printmaking photographic practices have to offer.

Over this past year, Moore has exhibited her work in exhibitions in London, England. Most notably, one of her Inhabited Grounds works was included in the Royal Academy Summer Show 2021. In terms of Jennifer’s future professional goals, she continues to split her time between working as an architect and artist, using the idea of location as a way to explore her own observational skills - conveyed through both her personal and professional practices.

Photograph by Nina Paiva

On a brisk November day, Emma Grayson (correspondent for AWS Gallery and #AWSWatch) visited with contemporary artist Amy Musto to talk about her experience working in the art world, her thoughts on her current artistic series, the future of the art world (and the elusive concept of NFT’s).

Coming from a role as a Creative Director with a background in graphic design, Amy is very much in touch with her artistic side. She splits her time between Southampton, New York and Miami, Florida. Her style today is one that has matured from the curious girl maneuvering her way through uncharted adolescence into a more intricate adult life. Spending her life travelling all over the world, it is, without a doubt, her experimental style that evokes different memories from her past.

Photographs provided by Amy Musto

Özlem Thompson was born in Istanbul in 1983. Raised in a multi-cultural family, Özlem holds Ukrainian, Armenian and Turkish roots. Always surrounded by either art or music, Thompson attributes her current artistic approach to the women in her life.

The overlap between art, design and science has fascinated the artist since childhood. In school, she developed a “deep interest in … quantum physics,” which “helped open the doors of [her] imagination.” After obtaining a Master’s Degree in Botany and an Undergraduate Degree in Biology (both completed in Turkey), Thompson moved to London, United Kingdom to pursue her original artistic career and passion.

Photograph provided by Özlem Thompson

Zachary Merle is the mixed media collage artist of AWS Gallery (#AWSWatch) dreams. Using a combination of muted tones with the occasional pop of colour, Merle’s work highlights what it means to be British and a young artist in the here and now. By encouraging himself to live in the moment, rather than with an idea of what he’d hope to accomplish by the end of his creative process, he captures the essence of human sentiment. This alleviates the need to produce a “perfect” final product, so he can create, and his works can simply be. Using acrylic, oils, newspaper clippings and random found objects, his works are primarily image based and involve a hands-on creative process.

Photograph by Joshua Tarn

Energetic and full of life is UK-based illustration artist Maddie Stringer, who recently made her way out of Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. Originally from Manchester, England, Stringer finds inspiration from the people around her. For someone with her whole life to live, she is enormously conscious of her impact on others and strives to do her research to represent her subjects carefully.

Photograph by Genéa Bailey

As the youngest artist to be represented by the renowned commercial gallery, Hauser & Wirth, artist Avery Singer’s works occupy two floors - inviting viewers into an undeniably ‘electric’ and ‘vibrantly-charged’ space. Combining her use and practice of traditional painting techniques, cutting-edge digital technology as well as her interest and fascination with 70’s graffiti artists and contemporary branded imagery such as White Claw and Juul.

BIO TECH: The exhibition Anne Vieux, Audrey Large, And Vickie Vainionpää is the “embodiment of a gorgeous and seductive virtual world” hosted by NYC’s Hole Gallery. Exhibiting from October 14 - November 14, this three-woman show brought together sculpture, painting and video seamlessly. From the tiny, precise ridges in Large’s 3D-printed forms, Vainionpää’s digitally-informed, delicate oils to Vieux’s captivating, abstract paintings and video work, each piece fits together to weave a story of contemporary, technologically-advanced history as it is being written.

Photo courtesy of artist and The Hole (2022)

Capturing a juxtaposition between creativity and the structure of the digital world lies Gretchen Andrew. Born in the United States, and heavily impacted by her childhood on both the East and West Coasts, she now finds herself bouncing around Europe in the adventure of her lifetime. Without any “formal” art training, she cultivated her skills through an early career in the tech industry. By using her past education to shape her practice and goals, she has found a certain routine and, some might even say, stability, in being an artist. Her mind just works in different ways than your typical art school kid.

Photographs provided by artist Gretchen Andrew