Meet The Maker – Helen Lang

Helen Lang - Artist and Illustrator

Originally from Devon, Helen now lives and works from a rather lovely SW London studio (from which she can witness squirrel fights in the park) and spends her time developing her decorative lettering styles, combining beautiful colour and clean lines to create a quirky and vibrant style.

LOVE - framed limited edition screenprint - Helen Lang

Her passion for her work is illustrated in everything she designs, creatures and characters burst into life in her colourful and gently humorous designs.

Twit Twoo-er - unframed limited edition print - Helen Lang

Love Song - unframed limited edition print - Helen Lang

 Helen has worked on a number of projects for many high profile organisations and companies in the UK, Europe and beyond including John Lewis, Te Neues and the Tate.

Love - unframed limited edition print - Helen Lang

Her illustrations have also adorned an array of products over her career including t-shirts, porcelain mugs, greeting cards and stationery.

Tree Of Life - unframed limited edition print - Helen Lang

Helen’s beautiful limited edition prints are available from Heart Gallery for a limited period and are perfect gifts which can adorn your home or workplace.

All You Need Is Love - unframed limited edition print - Helen Lang

 

Meet The Maker – Heather Fox

Heather Fox - Jeweller

After a chance encounter with a jewellery evening class Heather was suitably inspired to apply for her degree. Heather graduated from North Wales School of Art and Design with a BA (Hons) Jewellery/Metalwork with a 2:1 in 2008. 

Sumptuous Silver necklace - Heather Fox

 

 

Silver Kitsune was created while at University as part of her professional modules. The modules involved researching how you would set up a business. She took this one stage further and did actually start her business using the Silver Kitsune name with the Personalised Pieces collection. (If you’re wondering where the name Kitsune comes from, it is the Japanese word for fox).

Colour Feast necklace - Heather Fox

Silver ring - Heather Fox

Heart Gallery first showcased Heather’s Colour Feast Collection a few years ago which is inspired from her drawings of nature. Heather then translates the drawn line into silver, with just a subtle Japanese influence and adds in a spot of texture, mixed with a splash of colour to creat a playful collection that is a Colour Feast for the eyes.  The coloured pieces are laser cut powdercoated steel set in white precious metal. 

I Love You More Than The Stars necklace - Heather Fox

Heather’s more recent range, Personalised Pieces, was the basis for her latest new Thoughts and Memories collection. Heather enjoys hand piercing the written word into silver and wants to expand on the personalised pieces collection.

Silver star necklace - Heather Fox

Heather’s taken some favourite poems and sayings and created a real keepsake collection. The collection is only small at the moment but being added to on a weekly basis as new phrases catch her fancy.

Forget Me Not necklace - Heather Fox

This collection also incorporates some mixed media pieces using old black and white photographs that she found in a charity shop in St Ives. Heather likes the fact that she can keep these memories alive, even though the album could have been lost forever.

Statement Necklace - Heather Fox

Meet The Maker – Janice Parker

Janice Parker - Contemporary Artist

Janice is a contemporary artist/maker who combines various materials and techniques to produce three-dimensional imaginary worlds.  She is drawn to the kitsch and quirky – things which make her smile such as automata, robots and flying plaster ducks.

The Princess Bed - Janice Parker

In the past she has used resin, fabric, felt, wood and copper to realise her ideas. However, over the past two years she has concentrated on making work using slip-cast and hand built porcelain to which she has applied her own illustrations in the form of transfers.  Some of these pieces are then further enhanced by the addition of patinated copper and wooden elements. 

Star Gazing - Janice Parker

Janice’s present work has two themes: 

The first concerns houses and the home where she likes to make little porcelain buildings, trees and people and arrange them into villages and communities.  She also makes a “Moving House” range of little men pulling houses on wheels.

Moving House - Janice Parker

Houses - Janice Parker

The second theme involves a world she invented concerning “The Thieves of Time, the Magpies and the Time Machine”.

The Thieves of Time and the Magpies with the Star Machine - Janice Parker

The Thieves of Time control the movement of the stars and the production of “time” – they make the world go around.  

Time Thief - Janice Parker

Using peanuts as bribes, they trap magpies and train them to steal items concerned with timekeeping – watches, clocks, egg-timers, etc – they then extract the tiny bits of time still contained in the mechanisms by putting them into their star machine. 

Bribing a Magpie - Janice Parker

The “ticks and tocks” are then transformed into stars which shoot out into the universe and thus replace the time we humans are frittering away. 

Thieves of Time - Janice Parker

Her inspiration for these two bodies of work came mainly from day-dreaming! The “Time Thieves” series all started from Janice watching some magpies in her garden when she was washing-up. Over a couple of weeks the story in her head just grew and she is still adding to it all the time.

Clockman - Janice Parker

These two ideas have become a bit of an obsession and Janice is attempting to gradually wean herself off them so the other imaginary worlds waiting in the wings can be realised.

Meet The Maker – Mark Smith

Mark Smith - ceramicist

Mark’s work is inspired by coastal life, architecture and the effects the natural environment has on materials, such as wood, metal and stone.

Mark Smith - ceramic houses on driftwood

Mark Smith - close up of ceramic house on driftwood

The main fabric of his work is ceramic with additions of reclaimed timber and metal.

Mark Smith - large ceramic boat on reclaimed timber

His pieces have impressions of found objects discovered on journeys. They are finished in matt colours, which give the impression of sea bleached painted timber, so each piece has it’s own story to tell.

Mark Smith - close up detail picture of ceramic boat

The work is Mark’s own attempt to create decorative objects that reflect on his belief in sustainability. Mark believes that something new can be made from discarded and non funtional materials, so he’s always on the look out, using skips, waste land scrubs and along beaches, for scraps of timber, hunks of old metal, anything that he considers art-through natural errosion.

Mark Smith - Small ceramic boat on reclaimed timber

Mark considers himself a fully fledged member of the wombling society, but in all seriousness his work is ultimately designed and thoroughly thought out to make people smile.

Mark Smith - Large ceramic boat on reclaimed timber

Mark uses a variety of decoration techniques as his ideas continue to flow and move on to create different avenues and new approaches. Ships, boats, and wrecks are the main fabric of the work, made from clay that has the textures of metal and wood objects salvaged, press moulded, and patched together to produce a variety of forms that look as though they have sailed the Seven Seas.

Mark Smith - Small boats on driftwood

When Mark produces a piece it becomes a narrative, the tale of a journey. Objects discovered on the shoreline find themselves becoming part of the story…

Mark Smith preparing to sail the Seven Seas!

Meet The Maker – Kyleigh Orlebar

Kyleight Orlebar - Graphic Designer and Papercut Artist

Kyleigh’s love of typography, an obsession with handcutting intricate shapes with a scalpel, a long career in graphic design and a head full of song lyrics (where maths should be!) has led her on a very creative journey.

Caravan Of Love - Kyleigh

Kyleigh is inspired by great typography, beautiful silhouettes plus the song lyrics or phrases themselves. She is completely inspired by the work of Rob Ryan and Julene Harrison. Wanting to give it a go she decided to give her husband a papercut for Valentines Day using lyrics from their first dance at their wedding (Forever my Friend by Ray LaMontagne) so she sparked up Adobe Illustrator and set about designing her first papercut. Kyleigh found she loved the design process – making sure each letter was clinging onto each other, the lines held together with little flourishes and hearts….and so it began!

Handcut papercut - Kyleigh

Handcut papercut - Kyleigh

Putting it all together in Adobe Illustrator is almost like working out a puzzle, moving words around, making them larger, smaller… adding small strips, details and embellishments to the design to hold it all together once cut.

Time After Time - Kyleigh

Working from her garden studio, she really enjoys the process of handcutting the papercut. The fresh new blades on her favourite scalpels (swivel and fixed), the steaming mug of tea, audiobook, podcast or music on in the background and she starts to cut. Piece by piece the design emerges from the paper with great satisfaction on her part.

Handcut papercut - Kyleigh

Kyleigh gets very inspired by the actual wording/quote/lyrics. Words are beautiful. They look beautiful. So when she gets a commission for lovely words Kyleigh is a happy bunny. The words influence a design too, stressing an important word by making it larger for example. Her framing is uncomplicated so that the words can speak for themselves.

Framed handcut papercut - Kyleigh

With a houseful of children (15 and 13 year olds plus 7 month old baby), pets and her wonderful husband there is never a dull moment! Kyleigh has just celebrated her first year of self-employment and is so proud to say it is going from strength to strength with some exciting plans for the future.

Bring Me Sunshine - Kyleigh

You can commission Kyleigh to handcut an original piece of work based on your own favorite song or phrase so do call in to discuss this with us. In 2011 when we hold our third annual Wedding Show we are really hoping that Kyleigh will be introducing her lasercut wedding invitations for you to see. Kyleigh has to quote for having them lasercut for you to your design ideas and they are stunning. The design Kyleigh did below features a couple of swallows as swallows had just arrived on the couple’s land and this was the groom’s suggestion to incorporate into the design somewhere.

Lasercut Wedding Invitations - Kyleigh

Other delightful, bespoke commissions for the Bride and Groom can be for a wedding present to stand out from the crowd with, take a look, this Bride and Groom met on a London Bus:

Framed handcut papercut commission - Kyleigh

Or how about just a simple name/date commission, these work really well too:

Handcut papercut commission - Kyleigh

Framed handcut papercut commission - Kyleigh

Whatever you choose, favourite lyrics, quotes or personal words, you will get years of satisfaction from Kyleigh’s papercut and Heart Gallery is proud to be a part of Kyleigh’s journey.

Meet The Maker – Cathy Miles

Cathy Miles - Metalsmith

Cathy graduated from London Metropolitan University in 2003, after which she moved to Liverpool to take up a two year Craft Council Nextmove residency at Liverpool Hope University. In 2006 she relocated her practice to a more permanent home within Birmingham’s renowned Jewellery Quarter.

The Grubs Head

“I was trapped on the tip of Southend pier with an elderly man called Dave, (an eccentric yet morbid local) when I started to drift in to the eccentric world which my current work revolves in. As Dave went into his personal problems in grave detail, (death of budgie, stomach ailments etc.), in desperation I began to stare at the little ringed plovers and imagine their conversations and complaints. I came to the conclusion that they were just like us with their grumbles and gripes, bad habits, love interests and attention seeking behaviour…”

Common Cold - Cathy Miles

Greenfinch Glowers - Cathy Miles

Cathy draws the world as she sees it through a concoction of found objects and wire creating three-dimensional drawings.

Blue Tits on Cutlery Pot - Cathy Miles

Her sculptures explore narratives of the everyday varying in scale from small intimate pieces to large scale public commissions. 

Stone Curlew - Cathy Miles

Inspiration for this collection now at Heart Gallery came from the Richmond Park parakeets.

An Avian Mob - Cathy Miles

The colonies which invade the park made Cathy think of all the escapee pet parrots and their stories. Whether it be parakeets intimidating the local wildlife or a lost cockatiel reunited with it’s owner all sooty and dirty from an exploratory trip into the real world. Seen in Heart Gallery at the moment are parakeets, cockatiels and budgerigars. They are attached to the wall on perches.

Cockatiel - Cathy Miles

Heart Gallery has long admired Cathy’s work and was given the opportunity at Holmfirth Art Market June 2011 to award her an ‘Outstanding Artist’ certificate and exhibition at Heart Gallery.

Meet The Maker – Helen Noakes

Helen Noakes - Jeweller

Based in Salisbury Helen Noakes is widely recognised for her beautifully executed work in resin and precious metals and is one of Heart Gallery’s favourite jewellers, first showcasing her amazing work with us in 2006. This little post will include lots of Helen’s images but you really must bob in to Heart Gallery to see the ‘real thing’ – she’s got a great new collection with us.

Helen Noakes Swimmer Ring

Swimmer Bangle - Helen Noakes

Following a chance discovery of a single box of miniature figures and a book on resin Helen quickly developed an obsession with combining the two into her varied and stunning collection. 

Seaside earrings - Helen Noakes

Beside The Seaside Bracelet - Helen Noakes

Now selling across the country and featuring in several books Helen incorporates everything from penguins to nuns to circus performers.   

Penguin Cufflinks - Helen Noakes

Penguin Bangle - Helen Noakes

Penguin earrings - Helen Noakes

The most important aspect though is the element of surprise and humour integral to each piece – a second look is a must.

Monkey ring - Helen Noakes

Mermaid Ring - Helen Noakes

Helen is one of Heart Gallery’s favourite jewellers and we are happy to be showcasing another range from her in this our fifth year.

Swimmer Necklace - Helen Noakes

Meet The Maker – Rachel Foxwell

Rachel Foxwell - Ceramicist

Rachel’s ceramic vessels explore form, pattern and surface texture.

Large flower pots - Rachel Foxwell

She interprets compositions of line and colour that she has captured from within the coastal landscape, as surfaces for aesthetic objects.

Rachel Foxwell 2007

Rachel uses the slab process to enable her to use the clay as canvas onto which she creates patterns and textures with slips and oxides. 

Pair of Dishes - Rachel Foxwell

The movement in each piece is important to her, she alters each individual piece to create relationships between the pieces and highlight the contrast between the surfaces of the interior and exterior. 

Trio of Small Flower Pots - Rachel Foxwell

Rachel aims to make simple yet contemplative vessels which can stand alone or be placed in small groups.

Slab Built earthenware vessels by Rachel Foxwell

Heart Gallery loves Rachel’s vessels and hope you do too.

Meet The Maker – Frankie Tonge

Frankie Tonge - Jeweller

Frankie is a young contemporary designer her driving passion being natural history and related subjects.

Papillion Ring

She is a supporter of conservation and aware of the damage caused by mass production therefore, her processes and choice of materials are carefully considered.

Skull Necklace

If Frankie had not followed her artistic vocation, zoo keeping would have been her chosen career!

Perched Ring

Birds In Flight ring

Frankie’s current focus of work incorporates mixed media using primarily silver and introduces semi precious stones and organic elements. Her multi disciplinary approach enables her to use a diverse mix of materials that work harmoniously with her chosen subject matter.

Oxidised Skull necklace

Loose ideas for a design begin as rough sketches and then, allowing serendipity to take its part on the workbench, Frankie produces original designs.

Onyx&Skull Bracelet

These bespoke pieces cannot be repeated which is ultimately her aim as a designer maker and one of the ethics Heart Gallery wholeheartedly supports.

Wrap Skull Ring

Call in to see these latest pieces from Frankie soon … I’m sure they won’t be with us for long!

Meet The Maker – Fiona Cameron

Fiona Cameron - Jeweller and Enameller

Fiona Cameron trained in jewellery making and design at Edinburgh College of Art and she has been producing jewellery for galleries all over the UK for twelve years.

Fiona Cameron Circle Bracelet 2007

Fiona’s work predominantly features traditional kiln fired enamels. Fiona’s jewellery range that was inspired by the Scottish coastline where she grew up was one of the first ranges Heart Gallery showcased when we opened in 2006.

Fiona Cameron Pod Necklace 2007

Although Fiona still makes jewellery she has recently produced a new range of artwork inspired by the many weird and wonderful collective nouns used in the animal kingdom.

Enamelled birds waiting for a home

It is this work that Heart Gallery wanted to showcase for our Fifth Birthday celebrations.

A Parliament of Owls - Fiona Cameron

Ornithological inspired pictures, from a bosom of bluetits to a flamboyance of flamingoes are all hand cut and enamelled by Fiona, providing original and quirky pieces of art for your home. 

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy - Fiona Cameron

Heart Gallery adores these and hopes you do to.

A Brood of Hens - Fiona Cameron