The WildArt Group is an environmental art group of 3 artists - Penny Murchison, Louisa Love and Janet Wells-Cutler - holding public workshops, events, exhibitions and projects across East Kent, which aim to encourage and enhance creative comunity engagement with the natural environment. These take place in a variety of sites across the area, such as woodlands, beaches and gardens, galleries, cafes and community centres...
Biography
The WildArt Group was founded through a voluntary student residency project with Kent Wildlife Trust on the Wildart Trail in Blean woodlands, February 2012. This project used entirely natural and to-hand materials to create site-specific and ephemeral land art installations, earthworks and interventions within the woodland environment. Through collaboration and experimentation, new ways of working and thinking were uncovered and traditional or established ideas, relationships and aesthetics within both the site and the artists’ practices were challenged.
As a result, the group continued to develop these ways of working by inviting the public into their activity through participatory events, workshops and exhibitions in wild sites across Kent. These have included 3 New Fish at the Fishslab Gallery Whitstable, a 3-day Beach Art on the Street event in Tankerton for the Whitstable Biennale/Satellite Festival 2012, and holding seasonal ‘WildArt’ workshops at the Garden Gate community garden in Cliftonville, Margate. Alongside finishing their undergraduate degrees in Fine Art at UCA Canterbury (in 2013), The WildArt Group have also continued their creative collaboration with Kent Wildlife Trust through various workshops and events.
About the artists
Penny, Louisa and Janet studied together on the BA Fine Art course at UCA Canterbury, graduating in June 2013, and are continuing to develop their individual practices alongside working together as The WildArt Group. Each of their practices offer differing interests, mediums and approaches to art-making, including painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, text and poetry - all of which they share and develop within their public events.
PENNY MURCHISON works as an Environmental artist; her work responds the the urge to re-connect with nature and the natural environment.
LOUISA LOVE is a multidisciplinary artist working predominantly with combinations of sculptural installation and text, to explore a concern with the shifting relationships between objects and individuals within various production and display sites. She is interested in looking at the artwork and artistic practice as something never complete or fixed, but always changeable and in progress.
JANET WELLS-CUTLER...
