Kate and horse Soul by Chris Webb.
Kate Bellis
Kate Bellis was born in 1969 and spent her childhood on a small farm in Devon. At the age of 17 she decided to leave this isolated rural environment and study photography at Nottingham Trent University, from where she graduated in 1991 with a BA(Hons) degree.
In 1992 she was an award winner at the Observer Young Photojournalist of the Year Competition. This gave her the chance to travel across China and into Tibet. The article that came from this work was published in the Independent on Sunday magazine. For several years, before becoming a mum, Kate travelled widely with her Leica camera, from Ireland to India, Uganda to Kurdistan. These articles and commissions often dealt with people and cultures that were in some way under threat, and with the strong relationship to the land around them.
Kate settled in Derbyshire towards the end of the 1990s and began a series of photo essays with the Derbyshire hill farming community. Following this, ‘Gathering’ was commissioned by VARC (visual Arts in rural communities). A project working alongside the Northumberland Hill Farming families with acclaimed Sculptor Sally Matthews. The exhibitions that came from the Derbyshire work and ‘Gathering’ have toured widely, reaching both rural and urban audiences, nationally and abroad.
Kate has published three books, ‘On The Edge’ (2001) ‘Gathering’ (2005) and HILL (2018) Her images have been published in many national and international newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, The Times, The Independent on Sunday and the American photo Review and Black and White Photography Magazine.
Kate lives with zoologist, Professor Karim Vahed , their young Son Gabriel, and a menagerie of furred and feathered beasts. Their home is a very old stone cottage at the bottom of a steep wooded track on the side of a hill near Wirksworth in the Derbyshire Peak District.
katebellis.com
hillproject.uk
Instagram: @katebellisphoto
Twitter: @KateBellis7
Kate on her Rock place by Chris Webb.
Sally Matthews
Surrounded by animals on the family farm and fascinated by her father’s veterinary and animal anatomy books, Sally Matthews grew up with a strong sense of the importance of the individual animal. Soon after graduation she made Boars for Grizedale Forest. Sally Matthews, amongst other work, has worked in Bialowieza, Poland, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the reintroduction of European bison. Documented hill farming in Tarset , Northumberland and Derbyshire with photographer, Kate Bellis, created a Welsh mountain pony for the Welsh Assembly and Wolves at Arte Sella, Italy. More recently she has made a lynx for a rock outcrop in Norway and made ‘Twa Dogs’ for the Robert Burns Museum, Alloway. Both her drawing and sculpture are made in praise of animals. In as much as an artist can, the work of Sally Matthews allows the animals to speak for themselves.
‘Animals are our evolutionary companions, whether we like it or not, the key to our instinctive truth. The further we move away from them and the nature that sustains them, the more contrived we become.’
sallymatthews.uk
Facebook: Sally Matthews – Animal sculpture
Alex at work, focussing on a field cricket. Photo: Ben Andrews
Alex Hyde: Natural History Photographer
When composing a scene of an insect or spider through my macro lens, I am always struck with a sense of discovery, revealing tiny details of subjects that would be missed by the naked eye. Many of my pictures involve photographing moving subjects smaller than a grain of rice, requiring highly specialised equipment and a fair measure of patience. Nature provides me with an inexhaustible array of fascinating subjects and I am confident that I will never tire of photographing them.
My work is widely published in books, magazines and national newspapers. I have twice been a category winner in the British Wildlife Photography Awards, both with images of invertebrates close to home, one in my garden. I lead photography tours and workshops around the world and greatly enjoy sharing my techniques and passion for nature with others.
As a freelance photographer, I am lucky to work with a vibrant network of other professionals, all passionate about nature: authors, illustrators, poets, sculptors, picture researchers, magazine editors, web designers, ecologists, conservationists and of course other photographers, to name but a few. It is both a privilege and a great responsibility to work with these wonderful people to communicate to the world just how important nature is at a time when, as a species, we need to listen more than ever. Recent commissions include photography for the Back from the Brink project (naturebftb.co.uk), Greenpeace, Moors for the Future and the Peak District National Park Authority.
alexhyde.co.uk
Twitter: @alexhydephoto
Instagram: @alexhydephotography
Alex capturing the underside of porcelain fungus. Photo: Ian Daisley
Collaborating Artists
E. J. Lance
E J Lance is a Derbyshire based drawing Artist whose practice is inspired by museum collections, anatomy and the natural world. Her intricate multi linear ink and paper cut drawings, large scale installations and murals explore the relationships between humanity and the creatures it shares planet Earth with. Her inspirations are drawn from an eclectic mix of reality and fantasy, science fiction, horror and music. Her work has been exhibited around the country including images shown at the Queens Gallery, Buckingham Palace. Her drawings are in the permanent collections of the NHS, Derby Museums & Art Gallery and The National Trust and has featured on product labels and in publications. In 2019 she was selected as the contemporary artist to represent the East Midlands for The Royal Collection’s : ‘Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing national exhibition at Derby Museum & Art Gallery. A core part of her practice is her work as a resident Artist for Air Arts, the Arts Charity for University Hospitals of Derby And Burton NHS Trust who won the Team of the year award in the National Patient Experience Awards in 2020. She is currently working on ‘A Choral Forest’ an installation which will be part of performances and exhibitions at Lichfield and Derby Cathedrals. This year will also see a large scale permanent work which viewers can move in and out of installed at Pickford’s House Museum. Her forthcoming projects include an exploration of Joseph Wright’s use of light on anatomy and a large scale mural inspired by the collections of Hardwick Hall, the initial design which was unveiled by HRH Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester.
www.ejlancedrawing.co.uk
Instagram: @ejlance_drawingartist1
Photo credit: Will Stone
Liane Lang
Liane Lang is a mixed media artist with a focus on the intersection between Sculpture and Photography. Born in Germany, Lang was educated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, took a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London, and an MFA at the Royal Academy Schools, London graduating in 2006. She has exhibited widely both in the UK and internationally, including the Musée de Beaux Arts Calais, PS1 New York, Kunstwerke, Berlin and Kun- stverein Heidelberg. She won the Photofusion Award, the Tooth Travel Award and the Selina Cheneviere Prize. In 2019 she completed a six-month fellowship at Fundacion BilbaoArte in Spain. 2018 has seen a solo show in London at James Freeman Gallery and her work was included in From Life at the Royal Academy of Arts. She presented a solo exhibition at Lian Zhou Foto Festival. In 2019 she exhibited a major installation at Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany as part of Come Back and at the prestigious new James Simon Gallery, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, as part of Nah am Leben. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, such as MoMA, V&A, The Art Institute of Chicago, Arts Council England, Royal Academy of Arts, the Saatchi Collection, Deutsche Bank, Kunstverein Bregenz, Ernst and Young and the Collection of the Kunstamt Spandau, Berlin.
www.lianelang.com
Instagram: @lianelangstudio
Coral Rose
Coral Rose Kindred-Boothby is a musician and maker based in Derbyshire. In 2020 she received an Arts Council DYCP grant focusing on making instruments and learning electronics for audio. Under her alias The Silver Field, she has released 2 LPs of exploratory electronic-folk journeys through dream-like environments.
“Like an imagined dreamscape from a Joan Didion novel” - Mary Anne Hobbs, BBC 6 Music
www.thesilverfield.co.uk
Instagram: @thesilverfield
Photo credit: Dani Tagen
Bernardine Rutter
Bernadine Rutter is a visual artist and works in Printmaking, Sculpture and Photography. Originally from the West Midlands and from early childhood, fascinated by industrial process, by the alchemy of change, by pressure, by heat, by the intervention of human invention.
In printmaking, photography and digital imagery, she plays with exaggerated perspective, textured overlays and text. Sometimes the accidental and sometimes highly staged, enjoying the unexpected transformation a process brings, from the ancient to the digital, the veiled, the accidental, not always knowing the outcome.
Facebook: bernie.rutter.1
Instagram: bernie_rutter
Photo credit: Chris Webb
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