20×20 magazine

Issue Two | Contributors

Michela Bettuzzi was born in Ravenna, Italy, in 1974, and currently lives and works in London. She has published her works, mainly photographic reportages, in local magazines such as Coolissimo and Quindi. She participated in  ‘Al di là dello specchio’, an international photography exhibition, Ravenna (2005). She works with both analogical material and digital technology.  (flickr)

Matt Black studied Illustration at Kingston University specialising in poster and book design. He has numerous ongoing projects with the Arts Collective and Independent Publisher Lazy Gramophone and the London-based band Lyrebird. He is also a winner of Don’t Panic Magazine’s Poster Design Competition. Matt lives with his wife and family near Oxford.   (website)

Jennifer Camilleri began working as an illustrator but found it quite restricting so moved into fine art where she was able to freely express her thoughts. She has been exhibiting in various galleries and shows around London and abroad. She has also undertaken various commissions within public buildings and workshops.   (website)

Christopher Clack was born and lives in South London. He  trained as a painter at Camberwell School of Art and Royal College of Art. He has also worked in print and sculptural media. Since 2003 Christopher has produced all his work digitally. Aside from producing his own work Christopher runs a small business printing large format inkjets for other artists and photographers. He believes that art is now the closest thing we have to religion: art reveals the fundamental processes of religion and religion should be thought of as something like a work of art. For Christopher  religion, like art, is not about propounding doctrines, it’s not about what’s lawful or unlawful but about playfulness and creativity.   (website)

Helen Coburn studied Fine Art at Lancaster University, has recently graduated and returned to Berwick-Upon-Tweed, a small border town in the North East, to live and work as an artist and illustrator. Her work involves collecting and documenting ephemera. She uses images from history, nature, mythology and popular culture to create illustrations with a strong sense of narrative. Images which suggest stories and evoke memories are transfixed using collage techniques.

Stephen Conning graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2000. During this time he cultivated his specific interest in habitat and the internal environment. Since, he has predominantly explored ideas around domestic space, working primarily with video, looking at the sculptural quality of objects and mechanisms in and around the space he occupies. Often working with CCD Micro cameras, Stephen has exhibited in various group and solo shows. He has been awarded a work/live residency at the Acme Fire Station, received an Artsadmin bursary, and hosted a retrospective of his work. In 2007 Stephen had his first solo show, ‘Corners’, and in 2008, eight digital stills from this series featured in Issue One of 20X20 magazine. Stephen has been selected for the ‘At Play 2’ group show at South Hill Park in 2010 where he will be exhibiting video work exploring fast motion and drawing.   (website)

Graham Day was born in 1946 in Central London. He studied at Hornsey College of Art, Bath Academy of Art, and Slade School of Fine Art. His artistic practice has been influenced and inspired by other cultures, arts and craft, especially from the Middle and Far East; his work often refers to other spheres of human knowledge, from literature to mathematics and philosophy. Graham Day’s work can be found in several public collections amongst which The British Library, The British Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London; The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.  (website)

Aquila Dunford Wood is a poet, musician and playwright. She grew up in India and Oxfordshire and has strong affiliation with Bosnia. She is currently working on a collection of poetry based around people’s secrets, called The Confidant and working on her third play, discussing the problems of contemporary art. When Aquila is not writing she can be found standing in people’s bedrooms when they are not there.

Simon Fuller divides his time between Bedford, where he lives, and London. He is a freelance journalist by day and has written for various culture and business publications. This is his first published short story, the idea for which came after he read an essay about propaganda in cinema distracting society. Things fell into place from there!

Elizabeth Gordon is an artist living and working in Milton Keynes. She has exhibited at The Baltic in Newcastle, The Old Truman Brewery in London, The Viewfinder Photography Gallery in Greenwich, and at the Westbury Farm Studios in Milton Keynes. Her photographic work is an exploration of the imagination and the ‘real’:  Elizabeth creates pieces of ‘photoperformance’, where her performance background and photographic foreground come together in staged images and storytelling.  She is also a collector and tries to make sense of the world she inhabits by instinctively categorising and indexing objects, moments and people. Elizabeth brings together the familiar yet unique into photographic collections that fascinate and somehow comfort her.    (website)

The interdisciplinary nature of Craig Griffin’s work combines interests in architecture, calligraphy, graphics, illustration, digital and fine arts within the framework of ‘the sublime’; a quasi-religious experience of the limitless immensity in nature and abstraction. He focuses on architecture and figures, behind which complicated abstract forms visualise themes such as ruin, neglect, and the fragmentation of memory. He works on paper, using acrylics and mixed media sometimes threaded through a series of digital and printmaking processes. His aim is capturing a sense of the obscure, isolation, feeling of melancholy and human powerlessness against the ominous forces of nature and the fleeting environment of the present.   (website)

Philip John Jones is an artist from Wales, based in London. He studied Fine Art in the former and Art History and in the latter. He works in the medium of photography, and his present practice deals with ideas of repeated representation, appropriation and value.

Frances Kiernan was born in Marylebone, London, in 1946 and is a printmaker, photographer, book artist and designer. Frances originally trained as a typographer and designer at Ealing School of Art and worked for many years as a typographer and art director/editor in advertising and publishing before returning to art school for an MA in Fine Art at the Wimbledon School of Art (2002-2004). She exhibits in and around London and is an associate lecturer at The University of the Arts. Frances runs workshops in making book structures for schools and adult education centres, and works regularly with poet Jenny Lewis on haiku and bookmaking workshops. Currently she is developing a project with Jenny for a potential residency in India to collaborate with poet Sudeep Sen. She also produces handcrafted book cards for the V&A Museum Shop.  (website)

Atalya Laufer was born in a kibbutz in Israel in 1979. She completed her Fine Art studies in London, her BA at Central Saint Martins and her PGdep in drawing at the Prince’s Drawing School. Atalya currently lives and works in Berlin. She has showed her work in solo and group exhibtions in London and in various locations in Germany. Her work is held in British collections such as The University of the Arts, the HRH The Prince of Wales and Central St Martins, as well as in a number of private collections worldwide. Her illustrations have been published in Undercurrent magazine and stimulus respond. Her current project is ‘Project, potentially no one sees it’.  (website)

Mercedes Lawry has been publishing poetry for over 30 years in magazines such as Poetry, Nimrod, Folio, Crab Creek Review. She has a chapbook, ‘There are Crows in My Blood’ published by Pudding Press and has also published stories and poems for children. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, she has lived in Seattle since 1978 and she is currently Director of Communications at the Museum of History & Industry.

Adam Lee was born in London in 1981. He has been living in Liverpool from the late Nineties, where he studied Photography at the Liverpool Community College. He has travelled extensively through South East Asia and South America. His interest focuses on photojournalism, and he had pictures published in the Observer, Independent on Sunday and Mail on Sunday. He also won prizes for Architectural and Wildlife photography.  (website)

Reena Makwana is an illustrator, working and living in the outskirts of London. The majority of her work involves the themes of superstition and folklore surrounding past and modern life, the observation of emotional and embarrassing disturbances and general human behaviour. Her finished pieces consist of embroideries, drawings and handmade objects.  (website)

Carlos Manns is an architect, painter and illustrator. Born in Chile, he moved to Europe in 2004 and he has worked in Holland, France and Germany. He has been living in England since 2007, working as an architect and taking part in different courses, like ‘Painting with Photography’ at City Lit, the Gerhard Richter Workshop at National Portrait Gallery, and the Printing course at Morley College. His Illustrations and paintings are mainly focused on the creation of characters and atmospheres, hyperrealism and deformed characters mixed with locations and backgrounds that could be part of the scene of a movie or abandoned places. He has exhibited at the Zeitzone Gallery, Berlin, and Bar Gallery Le Jemmapes, Paris.  (website)

Alex Mirutziu was born in 1981 in Sibiu, Romania. Following his performance ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ in 2004, he went on to further his research at the University of Fine Arts, Cuenca, Spain, where his performance practice caused one of his projects to be prohibited, with strong reactions amongst artists and scholars. In 2007 he joined eight other performers in an experimental master class run by English director John Britton. Shortly after this physically intensive training he toured England with his performance ‘Leave Gordon Brown Alone’, produced in Liverpool, Leeds and Berlin. He was awarded Best Independent Artist at the ‘Optica Video Art Festival’ in Madrid and Paris. This led him to work with Emporio Armani’s Fabio de Felice. He frequently collaborates with Grit Hachmeister, VIP group, Razvan Ion, Liviana Dan, Noa Treister.  (blog)

Helen Nodding graduated from London’s Central St Martins in 2001. Her work has been featured in several publications, most recently in magazines such as Don’t Panic, UK; Mankind Magazine and Craft Magazine, USA; Adbusters, Canada; L’uomo Vogue, Italy; and in the books ‘On Guerrilla Gardening: The why, what and how of cultivating neglected Public Space’, by Richard Reynolds (2008); ‘Craftivity: 40 projects for the DIY Lifestyle’, by Tsia Carson (2007). A set of her illustrations also appeared in a book of short stories by Kiril Bozhinov (2009). She has recently exhibited in the group show ‘Actions: What You Can Do With The City’ at the Canadian Centre of Architecture in Montreal. Her work is inspired by the relationship between nature and the man-made, and takes the form of detailed drawings or site-specific work including miniature worlds in the crumbling architecture of the city, as well as architecture for insects. Other projects include moss graffiti, gravestones for worms, enclosures for weeds and attempts to grow ivy on unsightly buildings. (website)

Giovanna Paternò studied Art History in Florence, graduating and specialising in Museology and Contemporary Art. After moving to London she started writing and translating for British (The Art Newspaper) and Italian art magazines (Giornale dell’Arte), while completing a masters degree in Journalism at Westminster University. She is now a freelance writer and translator, and spends her spare time listening to obscure music and doodling on scrap paper. Giovanna has taken part in various projects such as Chromophilia (interdisciplinary research on colours), Interlude Magazine, and now 20×20 magazine. (blog)

Jasmine Pradissitto’s paintings are a 21st century twist on gestural abstraction. As an ex-physicist (with a passion for the line since childhood) turned fine artist, her pieces are process based; experiments in fabrication in either bitumen or light and plastic. Based in South London, she has been shortlisted for various prizes including the Celeste Painting Prize, and has shown in the UK and internationally. Most recently, she has been working on her light paintings for ‘Precious’ a touring exhibition, and on ‘The Notion of Line’, a two person show with Angela Morris-Winmill at the House Gallery. An investigation on the nature of abstraction in the fabricated line, their collaborative structures evoke a kind of feminine perspective on Jackson Pollock crossed with Issay Miyake.  (website)

Ivana Rados-Zurowski is a Croatian writer currently based in London. She started writing poetry at an early age and gained recognition in her country before moving to England. Winning the highest national prize for young poets in Croatia in 1998 (Ivan Goran Kovacic competition) gave her the opportunity to be published in several prominent Croatian literary magazines. Though originally writing poems in her mother tongue, she now writes exclusively in English, translating previous compositions and producing new ones simultaneously. In recent years, her poems were published in various literary quarterlies and her work has been described as “ethereal” and “sublime”. She has been strongly influenced by EE Cummings, Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca, whose oeuvre helped her in establishing her own unique style. Ivana also writes theatre plays and fiction, including short stories and novels.

Francesca Ricci has been living in London since 1998, after graduating in Stage Design at the Academy of Art in Florence. She has been working in different jobs in the arts (and non) for several years, at the same time being involved in independent projects: collaborating with theatre companies in fringe shows, writing on art and cinema for magazines and publishing a collection of short stories in Italian in 2003. In 2005 she co-founded the independent art magazine Interlude, which published four issues, and is now co-editor of 20×20 magazine.  (blog)

Paul Rooney was born in Liverpool in 1967, and trained at Edinburgh College of Art. From 1997 to 2000, Paul’s practice focused on the music of the ‘Rooney’ CD’s and performances. Rooney took part in John Peel’s Festive Fifty in 1998, and in a ‘Peel session’ in 1999. He now primarily works with text, sound and video, focusing on the ‘voices’ of semi-fictional individuals, and using or referencing narrative forms such as short stories, songs, audio guides, and sermons. Paul has had residencies at Dundee Contemporary Arts, University of Dundee VRC; Proyecto Batiscafo, Cuba; Tate Liverpool (MOMART Fellowship); and was the ACE Oxford-Melbourne Artist Fellow for 2004. He has shown in group projects at Tate Britain, London; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; the Shanghai Biennial; Tate Liverpool; and in British Art Show 6 (2005-2006). He had solo shows at Matt’s Gallery, London, and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2008). Other recent projects include a 12” red vinyl record broadcast on Radio Lancashire, Radio 1 and BBC 6 Music; a video for Film and Video Umbrella touring to 14 cities around Europe; and a short story published by Serpent’s Tail. Paul was the winner of the second Northern Art Prize in 2008.

Oddball writer, performer, and designer Paul Salamone blends sex, comedy, science fiction, and nostalgia for the American suburbs in a multimedia style all of his own. When not contributing stories and poems to small publications or taking on freelance design gigs, Paul hosts the monthly ‘Comedy in SIN’ English comedy show in Berlin and is a cast member of the Laugh Olympics improv comedy troupe.  (website)

Gemma Sharpe has a background in Literature and Art History, and is a writer based in London. Currently undertaking an MFA in Art Writing at Goldsmiths University, her practice is informed by an ongoing collaboration with performance artists Lundahl&Seitl. She has contributed to Map Magazine, Supercream, Untitled Magazine and Afterall, and has presented talks at Weld, Stockholm (with Lundahl&Seitl), and at the ICA, London, on the work of Tino Sehgal. Her current work is concerned with dialogic research and writing practices, Feminist philosophy and art theory. Her research is influenced by an ongoing engagement with the fiction and non-fiction of Virginia Woolf.

Terese Storey finished her BA in Fine Art at Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland (New Zealand) in 2004, and has worked and exhibited in various media: moving image, paint, drawing and word. She has been floating around Europe for the past three years, and recently has been happily capturing her daydreams onto paper in a series of diaristic drawings/collages. ‘Lágrimas’ is part of this series. Terese currently has some works in the exhibition ‘VI Circuito de Jovenes Artistas 2009’ in Madrid, Spain.  (blog)

Mario Sughi was born in Cesena in 1961 and is an illustrator, cartoonist and historian. Living and working in Dublin, he is a member of the ‘Associazione Illustratori’ and the author of ‘nerosunero’. At the end of the Seventies, he worked as a humorist in Rome for the Italian satirical magazines Il Male and Zut. Mario moved to Dublin in the late Eighties where he studied Medieval History, and in 1995 was awarded a PhD by Trinity College Dublin. His illustrations and cartoons, satirical in humour and minimalist in style, featured in international exhibition catalogues, magazines and art galleries. Lürzer’s Archive included Mario Sughi in the compilation ‘200 best illustrators worldwide 2009’.   (website)

Krzysztof Szmigielski was born in 1980 in Western Poland where he studied Marketing and Management at the University of Szczecin. He moved to Krakow in 2000 to undertake training in Polish television and joined the Crackfilm Agency, where he supervised a number of event productions and executed product placement projects at Warsaw Film Studios. He moved to the UK in 2003 and worked with the East London Art Centre Stratford Circus. He took a BA in Photography and Visual Communication at the Fine Art Academy in Poznan and has an MA in Photography from The London College of Communication, where he graduated in 2008 and was given the Sproxton Photography Award.  (website)

Matt Thomas studied film and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He works in the arenas of fashion, beauty, art and media as a publicist and freelance journalist, and contributes to style and arts titles including Boutique 1, Cent and Man About Town. He is currently writing a collection of short stories and lives in Twickenham.