The Heatherley School of Fine Art was founded in 1845 and continues to be one of the few art schools still offering courses and classes based on figurative imagery.
Heatherleys has two full time courses in painting and sculpture and we are delighted that Art East has offered the opportunity for staff and students to show work.
Whilst students are taught principles of observational study they are also encouraged to develop their own creative language and to make the best creative use of the practical techniques they have learnt.
Isabelle de Zoysa
Cumulus 2020 (Alabaster and Perspex £1500)
Isabelle’s work is inspired by the transformations that nature constantly undergoes leading to beautiful but ephemeral images that appear and disappear whilst our attention is elsewhere. In this work she took up the challenge of carving the shape of a billowing cumulus cloud from apiece of stone she had found during the lockdown period. The grooves and ridges of the stone were followed in order to catch light and the piece serves as a reminder of the splendours of the natural world.
Sarah Thorneycroft Smith
Noise Matrix 1 (Mixed Media POA)
A dystopian view of the world we live in, Noise Matrix 1 is an emotional response to the contrasting vibration and energy between urban and natural space and the impact that technology has on our lives today.
George Levantis
Journey to Ghat (POA)
This sculpture derives from a journey to Ghat in the southern part of the Libyan desert. Ghat is on a caravan route and when accompanied by turbaned Tuareg tribesman George was taken to a water pump that had been recently installed. A piece of parched date palm leaf was discovered in the sand and the geometry of the leaf seemed to evoke the shapes of Islamic designs. Combined with the palm leaf is a cast fragment from Chartres Cathedral. The crown and veil is associated with the memory of the Tuareg tribesmen. The chance meeting of medieval Christianity and the Islamic world becomes visible on a shelf of sand.
Tony Mott
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden – after Michelangelo (Mixed media £2700)
This sculpture is the first of a narrative cycle of the journey through life. Each sculpture is a transcription of a painting. The repetition of the cast anatomical models refers to the way that artists have often repeated poses in a figurative composition and also evoke the sense of the moment captured in a complex narrative painting.
Yuri Popov
Bull (i and ii – terracotta £950 each)
Yuri was trained as a gymnast and is fascinated by the way the bull has been symbolised and depicted in European art. The ancient Greeks showed gymnasts and bulls on their ceramics whilst in the twentieth century Picasso used the bull as symbol of virility. These two sculptures were made in the lockdown period and explore the tensile strength of clay.
Sarah James
Resurrection – (Wax for bronze £750)
Sarah trained as a painter at Wimbledon School of Art and often used the encaustic process in her work. She has been inspired by the sense of movement in baroque painted imagery and wax sculptural studies in the Victoria and Albert Museum.