Meet the Artists From Leicester
Let’s explore the fantastic artists who made our first installation in Leicester possible. Working with 10 local talents spanning a wide range of styles and mediums, Street Stories Leicester celebrates the innovative achievements of pioneering people from across the city. Each artist provided their own creative piece of work and story, delving deep into a range of powerful themes such as human rights, the environment, consumerism and identity.
Tim Fowler
Tim Fowler is a Leicester-based artist working out of StudionAme, an artist studio/collective in Leicester’s Cultural Quarter. His thought-provoking piece on Alice Hawkins, Leicester’s most famous suffragette, left a long-lasting impression on the high street. Alice was one of the iconic faces of the suffragette movement who was famously imprisoned alongside Slyvia Pankhurst.
Tim creates exuberant portraiture paintings using acrylic, enamel oil, spray paint, ink, oil stick and marker pens to create partially recognisable images distorted with strong colour and abstract elements. His main interest is the colours and their balance and placement, rather than the subject.
Danielle Vaughan
From her artist’s studio in Leicester, Danielle describes her craft as being a low key archaeologist and budding detective deriving inspiration from people and their stories. By repurposing others’ discarded materials, primarily magazines and ephemeral objects, Danielle’s collage-based portraits build layers of narrative to portray as accurately as possible each sitter with their perceived image and beyond their persona. Her portraits attempt to peel back the layers of frontage and façade in a world that increasingly resembles the stage setting of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Danielle created a stunning collage piece on Joe Orton, one of Britain’s most ground-breaking writers and playwrights who grew up in Leicester on the Saffron Lane estate. Her work always makes you look at the layers of everything around you and to think more deeply on the creative in front of you.
Joe Nixon and Ami-Lou Harrison
Joe Nixon is the co-founder and Creative Director of Arch Creative, the Leicester-based design and advertising agency behind the Street Stories project. Joe was inspired to write a story for his young niece and nephews, who were finding it difficult to understand why they were trapped at home during lockdown. The book entertained them and gave them hope for a better world after the crisis. Ami-Lou Harrison has created the beautifully joyful illustrations which perfectly capture the uplifting message of positivity. From beavers and badgers to rabbits and hares, Ami has illustrated a wide range of woodland creatures who mischievously play together in the empty streets and school playground.
The Fearless Fox & Daring Deer is a rhyming children’s picture book which was published by the NHS with all proceeds supporting the health service.
archcreative.co.uk amilouharrison.co.uk fearlessfox.com
Lucy Stevens
Lucy creates multimedia artworks from her studio in Leicester. She takes inspiration from the colour palette and sounds of the natural world to celebrate the value and beauty of nature. Her work uses field recording and instinctive mark-making techniques using paint, pastel, spray paint, photography and digital illustration onto paper to produce striking portraits of birds and their songs. Using her skillset and creative talents led to the creation of her piece on Sir David Attenborough who grew up in Leicester, focusing on the endangered birds on the Red List which he used to find exploring local fields and streams across Leicestershire.
Phil Hackett
Phil Hackett is another of our multimedia artists from Leicester. His inspiration is the natural world, architecture, the human body and the electromagnetic spectrum. His art is process driven, so choices made during the making and what they represent are an important part of his finished work. He uses negative space, redaction and intervention to disorientate perspective and question the originality and ownership of an image using paint, ink, print, projection, film, photography and sculpture to produce stunning vistas.
Christina Wigmore
Christina’s design process involves building layers of imagery created by projecting light sources through everyday objects which are then woven together and digitally manipulated to create mixed media textile pieces and prints. Chris adopts a DIY/punk attitude to exploring what can be created from what you have to hand, reusing materials and finding alternative ways to print, weave and construct textiles. Inspiration comes from what’s happening in society and the unexpected and absurd in life, art, performance and film. Her work also explores emotional attachment to textiles and objects, the psychology of nostalgia and the sense of wellbeing experienced from reconnecting with objects and fashion from the past.
This made her artwork perfect to cover the rich history found within Leicester around the textiles and fashion world, with the famous slogan ‘Leicester clothes the world’.
Sarah Kirby
Artist Sarah Kirby moved to Leicester in 1993. Her linocuts are created between her home studio and the Leicester Print Workshop in the Cultural Quarter. Her inspiration comes from the world around her: the allotments, the garden and of course the ever-changing city. Over the last 15 years, she has created a series of linocuts of significant, interesting and beautiful Leicester buildings. This series is ongoing and ever growing, informed by a culture of pedestrianism. Sarah’s work is driven by observing, experiencing and interacting with the city environment while walking about in daily life. Pieces focus on the wide variety of architectural styles found across Leicester city centre.
George Sfougaras
George works internationally with a network of artists but has ties to Leicester. He uses symbols and metaphors to create visual narratives. Using archival research, photography and first-hand observation, his art explores the subtle and overt ways that people’s lives and identities are affected by national context and history, myths, and points in time. His work exists at the intersection of art, politics, geography and culture with the outcomes expressed in 2D, 3D, printed media and film.
