"I trained in London in the early 90s but lost touch with making work in the midst of starting a career in teaching, raising a family and moving to Scotland. In 2015, inspired by others who made art without inhibition, I gave myself permission to have a year of ‘making rubbish’ and focusing on ‘quantity, not quality’. This was the permission I needed to reconnect with making art and subsequently making ‘NHS portraits for heroes’, the coyly provocative ‘Caledonian Buddha’ and a range of land and seascapes.
Through painting, I can express inner turmoil and the world as I see it. Scaffolded on sweeping, sumptuously painted suggested landscapes, brooding skies and waiting bodies of waters invite the viewer to contemplation. Portraits contain a depth of emotion and narrative. My work has a contained tension and a brooding anticipation. echoed in the dissonance between elements of my visual language. My current project, the ‘Defiant’ Women series is a series of portraits. Steeped in the classical tradition of oil painting, women subjects, central, strong and defiant, hold and defy the gaze of the viewer, looking beyond barriers to their ultimate goals. Painting has always been a way for me to calm my wandering thoughts and provide a channel for undefined emotions. Not making is an act of self-torture."

“I am a multi-disciplinary artist, my work primarily explores queer culture through textiles and soft sculpture - making different aspects of LGBT+ culture accessible through the use of comforting and tactile materials such as felt. Much of my work has included collaboration as a way to promote expression and wellness in often underrepresented groups, such as a quilting project where different people were invited to create panels in response to ideas of queer joy.

I find wellness to be a central idea within my work, particularly while working with fabric and stitching, as I consider the creative process to be a unique way to express feelings and emotions. I’m also particularly interested in the history of quilting as way to bring people together while expressing different perspectives.”

"Painting is a cathartic process. Colours and movement can bring me sensory joy. With the use of unventional tools such as glass shards, cutlery or even direct application, I am able to convey emotion in my work. It mainly examines the connection between physicality of the material along with themes of mental health. It leaves the viewer wondering what they see in the painting. Being heavily influenced by early abstract expressionism, movement of the human form and nature, I can experiment with materials, whilst having no fixed image as an end result. This means I tend to call my work "expressive accidents"."

Calra graduated with a BA honours in Fine Art The University of East London in 2014.

Veronica is an Italian tattoo artist, currently resident at Plus48 Tattoos on Leith Walk.

She graduated with a a bachelor's and Master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, then moved to Scotland in 2018 thanks to an Erasmus+ scholarship and started working as studio assistant at Edinburgh Printmakers.

Her work has always been related to nature, dreams and subconscious and the many aspects of life and death, beauty and decay.

There are no boundaries in the use of tools and techniques, but she finds freedom by drawing on skin and painting on canvas. Each technique gives a different way to express creative thoughts and allows to changing perspective and perception of things.

"Since graduating I’ve worked in pretty much every customer service job there is, and it’s been a slow and difficult journey to even break into unpaid gigs. Now, I’ve worked on films, in theatres, and I fill in the big gaps in-between making bespoke stuff for shows and events, like nuns’ habits, and teeth… don’t ask I don’t know why… I’m currently learning the ropes of the industry, although, working freelance is less like go ape, and more like finding a bunch of ropes left lying around on the ground and trying to weave them into a ladder with the ghosts of your former tutors yelling “I SHOWED YOU A YOUTUBE TUTORIAL ON KNOTS 5 YEARS AGO! WHY DON’T YOU KNOW HOW TO DO THIS?!”. Aside from the pandemic anchoring all our dreams to the ocean floor, my biggest problem, in terms of work (lets save the BIGGEST problems for therapy shall we) comes from not believing in myself. Now this sounds like a cute way of stroking my own ego – oh if we all just believed in ourselves, we would succeed! Right? No wrong. It’s not cute, it’s the biggest time waster you can have. ...If I have learnt anything from the constriction of my mental illness, it's that it's very important you break things, just so you know that its possible to fix them."

"I was always passionate about art (and was good at it!) Unfortunately being an artist was not a career choice back when I was growing up, so I became an architect. After years of working in architectural practices, I have finally found my way back to art, and now create and teach art (almost) full time.

My creative process is quite experimental, mainly based on loose watercolour underpainting, which is then refined by applying different mediums. Currently I am into coloured pencils and oil pastels for my finishing touches.

Admiring and creating art was probably the only constant in my life since childhood, and I am not sure how I would survive some of the life challenges and the Covid lockdown without it."

"My name is Ellis Murphy and I am a young trans artist based in Edinburgh! I am heavily inspired by my own thoughts, as well as myself. I am Autistic and Dyslexic meaning communication and expressing myself with words can be difficult, however I have found a way to do this through art! I like to use any materials I can find, to create something new and more ‘me’, and I feel a great sense of achievement when I’m able to create an artwork out of things others wouldn’t. When I start a piece, I don’t tend to dwell on it and I do what I feel in the moment, as I feel that expresses my true self more. Art helps me get my thoughts out, which I may not be able to communicate in a traditional way."