Artist Statement

My visual art mode is largely painting, with occasional deviations into graphic design, photography, short films and book and album covers. The ten years I spent living and working in Istanbul 2004-14 influence my work, as does the work I have done in justice reform since 2018. My paintings are generally in acrylic, ink and watercolour, and are sometimes associated with surrealism and neo-impressionism. Faces, bodies and shapes form new relationships via colour juxtapositions and freehand lines. The moment is more important than literal representation, and verisimilitude is sensed by the viewer, not imposed by the artist. My work in painting and poetry tends to be ‘make, then see what I’ve made’ – concept follows production, via the subconscious. My new motto is if ‘it doesn’t look like it could have been made by AI, then it’s successful’.

Sean Bw Parker (MA) is an artist, writer and musician specialising in art, cultural theory and justice reform. After gaining a Masters degree in Fine Art from the University for the Creative Arts in 2003 he lived and recorded in Istanbul for ten years, has published a number of books, albums and articles, performed at or curated festivals, given a TED talk, had paintings displayed at London’s South Bank and other exhibitions, and won awards for his work. He was born in Exeter in 1975 and currently lives on the West Sussex coast.

Curatorial Review

Ricky Gervais (2024) is a very stylised, possibly Cubist-influenced approach to a portrait of Ricky Gervais. The structure of the face has been fragmented and slightly overlapping each other yet still retains the base facial structure. However, what sets it apart from a more Cubist style is that it seems to be more organically shifted rather than a geometric analytical Cubist style. The shifting of the face gives movement and fluidity to the painting rather than distraction.

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Artist Statement

Lewis’s work acts as a conduit between art and science. The supply of information from science fuels the production of visual material, which communicates the knowledge of a scientific endeavour. In short, Lewis’s work focuses on dealing with complex thoughts, ideas and facts within nature and science. Some explore those in which we seem to be overshadowed and overpowered in comparison by the vast distances, size or quantities. Others investigate moments of extreme power, creation and rebirth on a molecular scale or on a scale comparable to that of the universe. Questioning our relationships, place and role within the universe, environment and natural spaces.

The work aims to transport the audience away billions of light years to witness these cataclysmic events happening in the depths of the cosmos. To do this, the work employs an approach of attempting to visualise these cosmic phenomena through the use of inverted Indian ink drawings followed by some editing processes to produce the final digital work. The super high contrast between the void of space and the energy in the whites attempts to visually communicate the amount of power released in these events through the glowing jets of the GRBs. The work encapsulates the moment this enormous amount of energy is released during the star’s supernova and the resulting GRB firing into the night. The negative space lights up the darkest parts of the work to communicate once again that these jets have the equivalent output of energy that our sun will produce over its entire 10 billion lifespan in a single second.

Curatorial Review

GRB V and VII is an explosion of energy that occupies the vast space of the composition violently with the power of the explosion while also offering a reminder of what was once a massive star and engagement with this power. Before being turned into digital works- these were inverted Indian ink drawings before they were refined which gives foundation to the work conceptually.

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Interview

Your work explores cosmic phenomena on both molecular and cosmic scales- what drew you to these and how do you think it reflects on humanity’s existence and perhaps our experience?

I’ve always had a natural curiosity for science and the cosmos since I was young. The idea to combine my artistic practice and the exploration of cosmic phenomena was only implemented during my bachelors degree. I feel that our species is incredibly curious and strives to understand our surroundings as much as possible. When it comes to the cosmos, we are incredibly curious and I believe that looking outward gives us a new perspective of ourselves in a few different ways. One of these is the delicate nature of our planet, being the only known planet to harbour intelligent life and the need to protect it as we are not capable of leaving it yet for another home.

You mentioned that you ‘conduit between art and science’ How do you balance science and artistic interpretation together?

My artworks aim to generate an ‘Informative Encounter’ with my audience. Whereby my audience gains new knowledge from the artwork communicating a scientific endeavour. It’s important to remain true to scientific sources but then also add a little interpretation to it which makes the artwork its own. A good example would be most of my cosmos work is not of an actual cosmic phenomena e.g. a black hole. However, it employs similar mechanics in terms of gravity and light to generate the image. The overall aesthetic is created to break down the distance between the audience and an imagined viewpoint emulating what it would be like to view a black hole on the edge of its event horizon. That was the process of creating the ‘Singularity’ series of photographic works.

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Artist Statement

Mia Upton is a weaver and textile artist whose work explores cultural identity, history, and feminism. Drawing from her Scottish ancestry and Hong Kong heritage, she uses textiles to translate memory and storytelling into woven form. During her Master’s at the Royal College of Art, she researched personal and collective histories, blending photography, illustration, and graphic elements through Jacquard weaving. Her work captures overlooked everyday scenes, preserving the textures of lived experience.

Beyond her woven studies of urban life, Upton also works with tartan, continuing her exploration of tradition and modernity. In other pieces, she embraces bold color, pushing the boundaries of textile design with a fresh, contemporary approach. Her ability to merge historical references with modern techniques makes her a dynamic and innovative force in the field.

A young and exciting textile designer, Upton’s work has already gained recognition. At her graduation show, legendary print designer Zandra Rhodes remarked, “I am interested to see how your career progresses.” With a practice that bridges heritage and experimentation, Upton is shaping a distinctive voice in contemporary textile art.

Curatorial Review

Quiet Hours (2024) is a composition of a street scene in Hong Kong which has been transferred from photography to a textile. By transferring the image into textile it becomes an entirely different image entirely as it is no longer a photograph but more of an impression and has been imbued with the softness of the fabric offsetting the hard geometry of the city. Thus it has balanced the more geometric elements of the city against the soft weaving and thus allowing us to explore this memory slowly.

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Interview

The works you’ve presented in this publication are still and contemplative moments—can you share the stories behind the original images that inspired these woven scenes?

The images came from a mix of family photographs, street photography, and pictures I took during my last visit to Hong Kong. I was walking through Central with a friend and their dog, and something about being a visitor allowed me to notice and appreciate the small, everyday moments more deeply. It was the ordinary things—the backs of restaurant workers on break, someone heading home with shopping bags, the worn texture of old signage—that compelled me to take the photos.

There’s also a strong personal thread. My great-grandfather moved to Hong Kong after World War I to work as a diver, and I recently learned that my family has been in the city for nearly a century. My grandfather was a keen photographer, capturing 1950s and ’60s Hong Kong in black and white film. Those images—quiet, observational, full of stillness—inspired me to create my own version of that memory, but in woven form. I wanted to explore how textiles could carry the same emotional weight as a photograph. These moments aren’t grand or posed—they’re honest, contemplative glimpses of a city and a heritage I’m still discovering.

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Artist Statement

My work is deeply influenced by the rich cultural traditions and stories passed down through generations. I find inspiration in the landscape, folklore, people’s stories, and the world around me. These traditions—whether in art, music, or storytelling—carry a sense of timelessness and continuity that I strive to learn from. I’m especially drawn to how cultural heritage is maintained and transformed, subtly evolving with each generation. As a father of two young children of mixed heritage, this has become even more important to me. Watching them grow, I find myself reflecting on what I want to pass on to them.

Each artwork explores the tension between opposing forces—whether it’s the old and new, the spiritual and physical, or the living and the dead. They reflect how traditions are simultaneously preserved and transformed through time. The contrast in each piece serves as a lens through which the viewer can examine how rituals and cultural practices evolve, adapt, and remain relevant, while also maintaining their roots in history and collective memory. These contrasts speak to the fluidity of identity, culture, and tradition, where the past and present are in constant dialogue, challenging perceptions and shaping new understandings.

Curatorial Review

Zente at St. Tola’s Cross (2025) shows a child standing before the Cross. The child is aligned centrally beneath the carved figures on the cross, which establishes a clear line between the past and the present. However, where the cross has been chiselled in stone, the child wears a padded coat and a beanie, which takes the past to the present.

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Interview

Can you share a specific cultural tradition or story that has had a lasting impact on your practice?

One tradition that’s deeply influenced my work is the Irish practice of seanchaí—the traditional storyteller. The way stories were passed down orally, shaped by the teller’s rhythm and personal tone, taught me that narrative isn’t fixed. That’s fed into how I approach visual storytelling: not as something static, but as something open, evolving, and shaped by whoever’s engaging with it.

I’m fascinated by the storytelling tradition of the Blasket Islands, especially through figures like Peig Sayers, Tomás O’Crohan, and Maurice O’Sullivan. It amazes me that their stories have survived, considering the isolation of the islands and the time they were living in. When I read their stories translated from Irish into English, i’m struck not just by what they say, but how they say it. There’s a rhythm and warmth that feels so familiar and homely. It really contrasts with how many people sound today. Sometimes it’s hard to grasp just how important these storytellers were to their communities, especially now when we have endless entertainment and distractions. Their stories weren’t just for passing the time, they were central to memory, identity, and connection. That sense of depth is something I try to carry with me in my own work.

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Artist Statement

My work explores the emotional tensions hidden within visual structure — a process I call psychodynamic photography. Each image begins as a mobile phone photograph, then is mirrored and digitally altered using only in-device editing tools. My intent is to evoke unconscious perception through patterns of symmetry, inversion, and dissonance.

I am drawn to contrast as both subject and method: light vs. shadow, nature vs. artifice, emotion vs. order. These works use monochrome palettes, visual splitting, and textural opposition to explore how perception can be fractured or fused. I’m interested in how contrast sharpens awareness — not to resolve difference, but to make it vibrate.

These three works explore contrast as both a visual mechanism and a conceptual thread. I am drawn to the interplay between symmetry and disruption, the organic and the digital, light and darkness — not as oppositions to resolve, but as forces that activate perception.

In A Thousand Hands, natural tree branches are mirrored and restructured, creating tension between the organic rhythm of nature and the rigid structure of symmetry. The flanking negative spaces introduce a literal light/dark contrast, but also a deeper play between presence and absence — something familiar pulled into a fractured dimension.

Negative Trance pushes this further by inverting the tonal range, transforming trees into electric-white phantoms against a black void. The contrast here becomes psychological: clarity versus distortion, waking versus dream. The branches appear both real and impossible.

Lost in Transmission uses glitch effects to create a chromatic contrast atop a symmetrical winter landscape. Here, the visual harmony of the mirrored trees is interrupted by digital interference, revealing how modern experience is shaped by the push and pull between reality and signal.

Across all three, contrast is not merely aesthetic — it becomes a way to surface unconscious tensions and emotional layers beneath what the camera captures. Each piece holds an unresolved energy: something between control and chaos, reflection and dissonance.

Curatorial Review

Lost in Transmission (2023) has successfully manipulated a winter landscape into a field which is psychologically charged and espousing a perception of friction. It has been fractured through repetition- its orientation flipped and through chromatic aberration. You simply cannot view this image passively and must become active to understand and explore the work.

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Interview

You describe your process as psychodynamic photography, what inspired you to connect photography with psychology and the unconscious?

For me, all art at some level connects with what is in our mind. Little moments of looking at something and for a moment, you register it as something else.
Playing with that moment was the spark that got me to go down this road.

To what extent do you view your work as psychological portraiture- either of yourself or of more broader emotional states?

For the most part, my artwork is more a reflection of my curiosity of the moment. Something that just didn’t quite look right at first that caught my eye in the tapestry of our world. There have been some pieces I have made when in an emotional state where finding the light seemed impossible, and it is reflected as such in them. However, these are few and far between and I push myself to find flashes of stories in the world. Little moments of narrative from a novel that I feel I opened up halfway through and am trying to make sense of with the detail provided on the page.

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Artist Statement

My practice centres around themes of connection to legacy, to memory, and to the often-invisible labour of women. Rooted in the documentation of everyday life, my work pays homage to the quiet resilience, care, and creativity that have historically gone unnoticed or undervalued. I take a multi-media approach that blends textiles, painting, and digital media. Through colour, texture, and shape, I create bold, tactile pieces that honour the silent activism of women’s domestic labour. Stitching, mending, making-do acts of both necessity and love. These gestures, passed down through generations, form a rich, interwoven archive of memory and survival. This work is personal. It connects me to generations of women before me, whose superstitions, stories, and post-war “make do and mend” values have shaped not only my worldview but my creative approach. Through my practice, I seek a sense of belonging — to family, to history, and to a lineage of women who made beauty out of what was available, who documented life in threads and routines.

Love in Idleness

Love in Idleness is a work born out of contrast, between softness and strength, presence and invisibility, enchantment and endurance. It is part of an ongoing practice rooted in connection to women’s labour, particularly within working-class traditions, and the quiet resilience woven through acts of domestic making.

At first glance, the imagery evokes nostalgia and tenderness: floral motifs, delicate lace, hand-stitched details. But at its centre sits a bold, commanding image – a pansy with an all-seeing eye. This central figure disrupts the romanticism, turning the flower into something watchful, protective, and even defiant. It’s this tension, between beauty and confrontation that lies at the heart of the work.

The title itself, Love in Idleness, is a deliberate contradiction. Drawn from the Shakespearean name for the wild pansy, the phrase carries connotations of desire and passivity, of love blooming without effort. Also know as the “heart-ease” flower it has been used in herbal medicine as treatment for a range of conditions from respiratory conditions to skin ailments.

The creation of this piece was anything but idle. It was a labour of love in its truest sense; slow and deliberate. This contrast — between the illusion of effortless beauty and the reality of painstaking labour speaks to a wider truth about the histories I explore in my work. My practice draws on the traditions of women’s textile labour, much of which has been historically overlooked or undervalued. These acts of mending, stitching, decorating have been framed as idle or ornamental, when in fact they are rich with meaning, memory, and narrative. In Love in Idleness, I use these techniques to challenge that misconception. The work is both tender and assertive, sentimental and subversive.

The materials themselves carry contrast too — rough hessian against delicate lace, soft cotton next to precise embroidery threads. There is a push and pull between permanence and fragility, between tradition and reinterpretation. These material tensions reflect the emotional landscape I explore: the contradictions of care, the beauty in endurance, and the strength found in softness.

Curatorial Review

Love in Idleness (2025) reclaims textiles and is a reclamation of domestic textile work. Violet has challenged the romanticised notion of ‘women’s work’ by confronting it, the symbolism in the work and the defiance of it.

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Interview

You described your work as an ‘archive of memory and survival’. How do you see your pieces serving as both personal testimony and collective history?

Although my practice spans a range of mediums, memory is the thread that ties it together. I see each piece as a layered narrative, holding both personal and collective histories. When I choose scrap fabrics or hand-embroidered linens, it’s not just for their visual appeal it’s their stories too – these materials have already lived. They bear marks, wear, and stories of their own. Stitching into them feels like a quiet act of remembrance – not only of my experiences but of those who cared for and preserved these textiles before me. It’s a way of honouring endurance and adding another chapter to their story.

In what ways do you see your practice as a form of activism or resistance?

Textile work, especially the kind traditionally undertaken by women, has long been undervalued and excluded from the realm of ‘high’ art. Yet so much of what we understand about our history is preserved in fabric, as a relatively accessible, widely practiced art form.
By working with domestic textiles and embracing slow, manual processes, I’m resisting capitalist values that prioritise speed, productivity, and disposability. It’s a way of reclaiming time and care as powerful, subversive tools.

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Artist Statement

My practice explores the tension between presence and absence, softness and control. Using acrylics, natural textures, and industrial fragments, I work with silhouettes, shadows, and fractured forms — visual metaphors for memory, inner conflict, and emotional containment. In this series for Contrast! Issue 4, I investigate how opposites coexist within one body: warmth and detachment, silence and pressure, organic material and structural constraint. For me, contrast is not just a formal element — it is the language of being split and still whole.

My works explores contrast through material, form, and emotional presence. I use acrylic in combination with natural sand collected from the coast to create textured surfaces that hold both silence and resistance. For me, contrast is a quiet strength — something that reveals itself not only in what is seen, but in what is felt through texture.

My works explore the theme of contrast on multiple levels — material, emotional, and spatial. I use silhouettes, minimal forms, and open space to convey quiet presence and inner tension. Each shape is intentionally incomplete — suggesting something fragile, unresolved, or in transition. By combining acrylic with natural sand collected from the coast, I create textured surfaces where softness meets resistance.

For me, contrast is not always loud or dramatic. It reveals itself in subtle shifts — between stillness and movement, presence and absence, visibility and silence. It is a language of duality, held gently within the surface.

Curatorial Review

The Listener (2025) brings us directly towards a silhouette of a face which has been cleanly carved from the left side of the composition. The silhouette does not have any individuality as it has been stripped of any emotion, expression or appearance and does not speak. It listens which turns the silence of the silhouette into an active participant in the work- the edges of this silhouette are sharp and clear while its identity is anonymous.

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Interview

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Artist Statement

I use pastel and colored pencils to draw what moves me most — the deep connection between people, animals, and nature.

My style is based on hyperrealism, but I’m not just trying to copy what I see. I try to show what’s underneath — the feeling in a lion’s eyes, the freedom of a bird in flight, the calm beauty of autumn, or a quiet moment between two people.

Nature and everyday life inspire me. I hope my work makes people feel something — whether it’s strength, love, or just a sense of wonder. I want my art to remind others to slow down and notice the small things we often miss.

Recently, I started sharing my work internationally. My art will be shown at The Holy Art Gallery in New York (Fall 2025) and will appear in Create! Magazine and the YICCA International Contest in Europe. I’ve also exhibited in Dubai, Georgia, and Turkey, and received awards in Iran — including First Place in the National Student Art Competition and in provincial colored pencil contests in 2016 and 2018.

These experiences keep me motivated to explore emotions through drawings of wildlife, nature, and human relationships. I’m always learning, improving, and finding new ways to tell stories through my art. To me, art is a way to connect — a quiet conversation between what we see and what we feel.

My artworks show different kinds of contrast. In the tiger painting, there is a strong contrast between the orange tiger and the green water. It shows power and beauty in nature. In the portrait of the child with the grandfather, I wanted to show the contrast between young and old, soft and strong, and feelings of care. The still life with the bottles shows contrast in textures—glass, wood, and metal—and also light and shadow. I always try to show feelings and stories through these contrasts in my work.

Curatorial Review

The King Beneath the Surface (2018) presents a tiger moving through the water in a quite and solitary setting. The painting has mastered the scene extremely well and thus allows us to observe the tiger at ease and relaxed. Below the tiger is its own reflection in the water which, despite being distorted by the waves of the water, showcases equal power to the tiger suggesting what lies beneath isn’t loud or visible at the first appearance but holds its own weight.

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Artist Statement

Photography is a visual articulation of a thought or perception and the resulting image is a personal declaration of visual significance. I share with you the places I have been and the things I have seen. The photographs are my story. If you had been where I was you might have seen things differently; I am pleased to show you my impressions and grateful for your interest.

Curatorial Review

Light in the Blue Hour (2024) is a spectacular photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge at night. The atmosphere within the photograph is strong while also showing restraint – the stone towers of the bridge are positioned within the photograph to look as though they are towering and standing and imposing over city and bridge. The American flag, above, is flying gently above it while the light highlights it quietly and pours out of the towers arches guiding the viewer towards the tower.

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