Aunty Social at the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair 2023

We’re heading to the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair at Victoria Baths in Manchester from 19-22 October 2023 to tell craft lovers about our new shop and to showcase some fabulous Fylde Coast artists.

Meet the Artists

There’s a wealth of creative talent on the Fylde Coast and we’re proud to introduce you to three artists who take inspiration from our remarkable environment.

Helen Mary Rodger

Jeweller

Website: www.helenmaryrodger.com

Instagram: @helen.m.rodger

Helen was born in Sheffield at the heart of creative industries, raised by designers, artists and craftspeople. Trained as a designer for theatre, she made props for West End shows and TV, before forging a career in Higher Education as a champion of the creative use of digital technologies in learning.

Now settled on the Fylde Coast, Helen has returned to her crafts roots as a jeweller, indulging her formative love of 20th Century decorative arts, of clean lines, simple geometry, and elegant curves, but with a theatrical flair. Magpie-like, she is drawn to iridescent, often bright and unusual plastics, glass and stone. You’ll often find her down on the shore hunting for stand-out pebbles, or in the charity shops scooping up mid-century glassware.

She sets stones and glass in ways that accentuate inherent beauty. Enhancing form by adding height and employing sympathetic lines. Harnessing light through translucent stone and glass. And introducing movement for a tactile experience and visual interest. Helen’s jewellery is bold, elegant and highly wearable.

Brendan Shaw

Printmaker & Fine Artist

Website: www.bshawprint.com

Instagram: @OutOrrNawt

Born, raised and trained in Blackpool, Brendan developed an interest in art early on, honing his skills in various mediums, including photography, 3D design, and printmaking at Blackpool School of Arts before embarking on a journey of experimentation and exploration, constantly seeking new ways to push the limits of traditional printmaking.

For Brendan, art is a way of life. Creating art provides a therapeutic outlet to cope with the challenges of the world. Each piece he creates is a solution to a problem, an expression of his thoughts and emotions.

By incorporating modern technology into his work, such as digital printing and laser cutting, whilst still maintaining the traditional techniques Brendan pushes his work to stand out amongst the crowd and presents a fresh view on printmaking. His work is heavily influenced by his background in photography, and he will often use photographic elements in his prints. His art is characterized by bold colours, intricate designs, and a sense of movement that draws the viewer in.

Botanical Portraits is a set of handmade multilayer screen prints that seek to explore and underscore the often-overlooked beauty inherent in nature. By employing simple shapes and colour palettes, deliberately chosen to maximize their graphical impact, Brendan aims to draw the viewer’s attention to the unnoticed details in our everyday environment. Mimicking the photographic lens, his work is an attempt to refocus our gaze on the intricacies of the botanical world, prompting a reconsideration of the mundane, and fostering a deeper appreciation for the natural world that surrounds us.

Michael Cassidy

Ceramist & Fine Artist

Website: www.studio-dot.co.uk

Instagram: @st_dio.dot

Michael was born in Blackpool and has always harboured a lifelong connection to his hometown. He studied Fine Art at Chelsea Art College (UAL) but couldn’t ignore the call of the seaside and returned to Blackpool to join the vibrant, burgeoning art community of his hometown.

Mike’s artwork explores the possibility that, contained somewhere in the things that we make, is the process that made them. Walter Benjamin, writing in 1936, referred to this connection between an artwork and the way it was made as an ‘aura.’

This series of ceramic artworks uses direct surface casts of the things that Matter to Mike: nature, the seaside and family. They contain casts taken from barnacles found underneath Blackpool’s famous Victorian North Pier, the hands of people he loves, and the bark from trees found in Stanley Park, Blackpool’s central park, registered under Historic Parks and Gardens list of areas specific historical interest. They aren’t copies as Plato might have suggested, but indexes. They are the physical traces left by the thing itself.

An artwork is more than the sum of its parts, and Mike sees the process of taking these indexes and integrating them into vessels as a kind of absurd performance that imbues his work with its ‘aura.’