Our Team

Lighting Crew (Wingspan)

Rob Casey

Rob Casey is the co-director of Ammonite, a company specialising in the technical development and support of a diverse range of live entertainment.

His credits as an Associate Lighting Designer include Hugh Jackman (International Tour), Local Hero (Edinburgh), Pericles, wonderland (NT & Paris), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (NT & West End/New York/US/UK Tour), The Light Princess, James I/II/III (NT & Edinburgh International Festival/UK Tour). The Jungle (San Francisco & West End); Chess (London Coliseum); Bat Out of Hell (West End & Germany/US Tour), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Peter and Alice, Privates on Parade and Wolf Hall (West End); The Audience, King Charles III (Sydney/New York/West End); Red Shoes, The Phantom of the Opera, Sleeping Beauty (UK/US Tour); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Barbican/World Tour); Tarzan (Germany); Half a Sixpence, Barnum (Chichester Festival); Red Velvet (Tricycle/New York).

Sound Engineer

Emma Laxton

Theatre credits include: Coriolanus (Sheffield Theatres), A Kind Of People(Royal Court), Emilia (West End), Equus (Associate Sound Designer – West End) Rita, Sue and Bob Too (Uk Tour), Elizabeth(Barbican & Linbury Studio: Royal Opera House, Superhoe (Royal Court), The Writer (Almeida), The Country Wife, Random/Generations, The House They Grew Up In, Forty Years On (Chichester Festival Theatre), Titus Andronicus (RSC & Barbican Centre), Julius Caesar (Sheffield Theatres), The York Realist, Limehouse, The Recruiting Officer(Donmar Warehouse), Blood Wedding, See Me Now (Young Vic), Breaking The Code, All My Sons, A Doll’s House, Three Birds, The Accrington Pals (Royal Exchange), Sweet Charity (Nottingham Playhouse), Ghosts, The Oresteia (Home Theatre, Manchester), Made In Dagenham (Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch/New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich), Boys Will Be Boys (Headlong & Bush Theatre), Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme (Headlong, UK Tour).

Emma was previously Deputy Head of Sound for the Royal Court and Associate Sound Designer for the National Theatre’s production of War Horse.

Emma won an Olivier Award for best Sound Design for the West End production of Emilia

Artist in Residence

Georgie Watson

I observe the ever-changing beauty of the environment around me and express it through a variety of mediums. My initial sketches are made out in the field and the final paintings and prints evolve in the studio.

I have grown up with a passion for water sports and so much of my work reflects this close connection with the wind and sea. Nothing excites me more than the forecast of a storm with powerful south-westerlies hitting our shore.

Artist in Residence

Luke Hannam

Luke Hannam was born in Oxfordshire in 1966 but spent most of his childhood in Derbyshire on the edge of the peak district. His initial training was at Chesterfield College of Art in the early 1980s before moving to Canterbury to study fine art. At Canterbury, he was taught by hugely respected colourist and abstract painter Mali Morris (RA), and Rob Welch, both of whom had an important influence on his work. Morris introduced him to Patrick Heron, Dennis Creffield and Scottish Impressionist Tom Watt. Hannam later became Watts’ apprentice in North Shields shortly before he died in 1989. For Hannam these early years ignited his love of still life painting as a means of exploring colour and composition alongside the hugely important issue of touch and mark-making which have remained important elements of his work through to the present day. Creffield spotted his facility for drawing and encouraged him to make this a central aspect of his work. Hannam continued to paint throughout the 1990s with studios in Newcastle Upon Tyne and later in Camberwell but by this time he had begun to establish himself as a musician and became immersed in writing, recording and touring internationally with the influential and respected band Gramme; Gramme continues to release music and has released a new album called Discolovers. Hannam currently lives with his wife and three children in East Sussex, where he divides his time between painting and music, working from his studio in Rye. Hannam’s work has developed and changed many times over the years but has always been firmly rooted in drawing. He views drawing not simply as a building block but as a dynamic, ever-shifting language of signs that inform his emotional journey and enable him to transform and evolve as an artist.

Artist in Residence

Nick Archer

Nick Archer (born 1963) lives and works in East Sussex, England. He trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London (1996-1999), he won several awards, including 1st at the ‘Hunting Art Prize’, commendation at the ‘BP Portrait Award’ and the Figure Painting Award at the ‘Discerning Eye’.

“DARK SIDE OF DISNEY MEETS NORTHERN LANDSCAPE”

“With their strange layerings of unexpected filmic and art historical references, (dark side of Walt Disney meets northern landscape), Nick Archer’s paintings have always seemed among the more genuinely complex and cultured explorations of the possibilities of landscape painting in an increasingly urbanised and disinherited culture: the more we are removed from it the deeper into our psyche it goes. These powerful new works seem to darken the picture further – David Lynch and ‘Blade Runner’ meet Altdorfer Bosch and Uccello among others, the layering involved in his paint process underlining the veils of estrangement between us and a lost Edenic world. Thus, in his images of children gazing at apparently deserted houses, we sense the loss as a profoundly metaphysical one.”

– Nicholas Usherwood 2017, Galleries Magazine – review of ‘The Journey’ exhibition

Nick has exhibited extensively in the UK and Europe since 1999, including solo exhibitions with Louise Alexander Gallery (Porto Cervo, Italy), Sarah Myerscough Fine Art (London), Long and Ryle (London), Galerie Hug (Paris) and a solo show at Gowen Contemporary (Geneva) in 2014 and 2017.

He has featured in museum exhibitions including the National Portrait Gallery (London), the Wandsworth Museum (London). In 201. He had a solo exhibition at the Maison de la Culture (Metz, France) and had a solo show at the Hastings Museum (East Sussex). Nick curated ‘Time, memory and landscape’ a group exhibition at Long and Ryle, highlighting evolution in contemporary landscape painting. In 2019 he had a solo booth presentation of his work at ‘Untitled’ art fair in San Francisco with New York gallery Christine Park gallery.

He has also featured at Dallas Art fair 2019 & 2020, Art Tokyo 2019 and Aspen art fair 2019 with Christine Park gallery. The poured and layering process in his paintings is crucial to his practise. This led toward involvement with the moving image. He animated the process of piling up layers of transparent paint on glass to reveal an artist at work. The resultant animated film ‘Snow’ has been shown internationally.

Nick Archer’s work is held in private, corporate and public collections around the world including the future satellite of the Hermitage Museum (Moscow). He is currently represented by Christine Park gallery in New York, Long and Ryle in London and Gowen Contemporary in Geneva.

Artist in Residence

Francisco Mendes Moreira

Francisco Mendes Moreira (1984) lives and works in Lisbon.  Initially, Moreira’s practice is a way of solving problems which build on an intuitive work process which can be triggered by contemporary culture endorsing both phycological and political aspects.

Working primarily in small scale with oil pastels and sticks on found cardboard food packages which are collaged, his images have an immediacy often shifting between representative elements to abstract patterns.

The different mediums and surfaces, number of themes and even the scale are all circumstantial, in the sense that it is his day-to-day living that determines the studio processes.

The act of analysis has little space in the specific creative process but looking at the artist’s oeuvre one can conclude that Moreiras practice is an ongoing commentary and staging of events related to the human condition.

To view his work, visit https://franciscomendesmoreira.wordpress.com/rye/

Artist in Residence

Keith Coventry

Keith Coventry creates paintings and sculptures which manipulate legacies of Modernism to address conditions of contemporary urban life. His idiosyncratic and personal project to create a form of contemporary history painting encompasses an immense range of reference. These paintings and sculptures pit art history – Malevich, Mondrian and Warhol – International Modernism, Minimalism and Pop Art – against images of heroism and idealism, dissolute decadence and aberrant behaviour.

Coventry has an enduring interest in the dark flipside of idealism: urban decay, social failure, drug abuse, and alienation. Many of the art historical references that he deploys are defined by the Utopian ideals of Modernism, the aim of which was to refashion the world. Coventry plays with these beliefs and shows them to be misplaced, even misconceived, the gulf between belief and reality stimulating a series of troubling undercurrents in his work.

Born in 1982 Samuel Bassett comes from Cornwall, more specifically the town of St Ives steeped in fishing and artistic heritage. His family have been there as fishermen since 1695 and until recently he occupied a studio above his grandfathers former net loft a few minutes walk from the Tate Gallery within the hustle and bustle.

Contemporary stories from his own experience and family lore and snippets or news from the ups and downs of his everyday social life combine with nuanced vulnerability and an expressive and experimental hand to create psychologically layered paintings about the human condition and his/our place within the madness of contemporary life. His sensitive and questioning introspection and emotional flip-flopping mean nothing is too obvious or too pretty in his paintings. Self-portraits merge with real and imagined characters adapted to the story and how he is feeling at the time. The paintings often feel like they are questioning themselves and himself and this questioning and blurring of recollection combined with the artist’s joy of exploring painting for painting’s sake make for images that have longevity and a strongly recognisable yet ever transient voice. A gregarious and engaging character his mind nevertheless seems to be questioning the bigger harder issues and to flit excitedly between concern and celebration.

Dancer

Carmine De Amicis

Carmine De Amicis, works internationally as a choreographer, director and performer in Theatre, Opera and Film. He has received choreographic commissions from Welsh National Opera, ReisOpera – Netherlands, Athens & Epidaurus, På-Tå-Hev (Norwegian Ballet&Opera), Gothic Opera, Rossini Opera Festival, 3Fall Dance Company etc. He is an associate lecturer in dance at the University of Chichester and has performed for Richard Alston, Shobana Jeyasingh, Jose Agudo, Tavaziva, Watkins Dance and Grange Park Opera.

Artist

Lipika Pelham

Lipika Pelham is an author, reporter and documentary filmmaker. In her early twenties, she joined the BBC World Service, working in the newsroom for over a decade and reporting from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. In 2005-13, she lived in Jerusalem, where she learnt Hebrew, made award-winning films and wrote a memoir,The Unlikely Settler. Her most recent bookJerusalem on the Amstel: The Quest for Zion in the Dutch Republic was published in 2019 by Hurst. Pelham’s broader themes explore the ideas of migration, nationhood and performing identity in relationship to place.

Artist

Elisa Schaar

Elisa Schaar is an art historian that specialises in art since the 1960s. Her articles have appeared in publications by the Pinakothek der Moderne and Tel Aviv Art Museum, and in journals, such asArt HistoryandAmerican Art.Among her recent curatorial projects is an exhibition at Cambridge University’s Heong Gallery, titledDo I Have To Draw You a Picture?andFoerg in Venice, a collateral event at the Venice Biennale 2019.