PAINTERS AND POETS I LIKE

Jackie Wills - poet and prose writer

Jackie Wills is a poet. Her work has been described as darkly British, surreal and elegant. While many of her poems are narrative, she is also a poet of ideas, exploring relationships, female experience, memory and place. Her first collection Powder Tower (Arc, 1995) was shortlisted for the 1995 T.S. Eliot prize and on publication of Fever Tree (Arc, 2004) Mslexia magazine selected her as one of the top 10 new women poets of the decade.

Jane Fordham - painter 

For more than 30 years I’ve worked internationally in mosaic, painting, public art, theatre design and live art performance. 

My extensive public and private commissions offer opportunities to collaborate with other artists on elaborate and technically innovative site-specific pieces, which also present exciting challenges to make them work in exacting situations.

Children have grown up skipping on The Birdman of Gloucester Road and climbing on limestone bowls in Tidal on Brighton seafront, which feature in holiday photos taken by tourists from all over the world.

Katie Sollohub - painter

Katie Sollohub is a Sussex based artist who is interested in documenting and recording the places she lives and works in through drawings, paintings, performance, photography and poetry.

Clare Best - poet

I am the author of Treasure Ground  (HappenStance2009), Excisions (Waterloo 2011), Breastless (Pighog 2011), Cell (Frogmore Press 2015) and Springlines (Little Toller Books 2017). My prose memoir The Missing List, described by Andrew O’Hagan as ‘a tapestry of time – brightly coloured, beautifully orchestrated, emotionally pure’ was a finalist in the Mslexia Memoir Competition, 2014/15.

Ian Badcoe - poet

I like to write poetry that challenges the reader's expectations for what the poem is going to be. I like to play with the conventions of genre, narrative and character. I write formal poetry and free verse. I'm very fond of sonnets and sonnet sequences.

Philip Tyler - painter

Phil Tyler is a practising artist who is interested in the relationship between the materiality of painting and it's potential to create illusionary space as well as act as a cypher for grief, loss and the notion of the sublime. His practice involves painting, drawing, printmaking photography, collage, digital image and writing.