The IW Creative Network has announced the recipients of this year’s bursary awards.
Earlier this year, members of the IW Creative Network were invited to apply for a bursary award of £1,000 each to help develop their creative practice. 2 grants were available and an additional £1,000 bursary was offered to a Brave Island member to be commissioned to create a new, exciting work for this year’s Ventnor Fringe Festival.
The bursaries were awarded to applications that were innovative, well-developed, realistic and deliverable.
The recipients for the 2023 bursaries are Joshua Raffell and Sarah Redrup, and the additional bursary for Brave Island members was awarded to Izzy Kori.
Joshua Raffell
Joshua Raffell is a visual artist and is currently a studio holder at Monkton Arts in Ryde. His work takes ideas, images and headlines from current affairs or historical events, gay erotica, and complex memory of the self. Pushing, pulling, cutting up, rubbing out and stitching layers together. Layering is a significant aspect of his work, materials squished and sewn to create a narrative. The work goes from the self to a wider concept of otherness and often explores mental health and family. Artist,
For Joshua, this bursary will allow time to focus on learning, working with new mediums, participating in an extensive course in mosaics and learning how to cross over with other materials. He is particularly drawn to mosaic as an ancient, ephemeral and kinaesthetic artform.
Joshua has said:
“The uncertainty and definitive shapes mean the process takes control. Experimentation is a constant of my work.”
Later this year we’ll be catching up with Joshua to see how his work has developed as he’ll showcase his new skills through an arts trail, workshop and exhibition.
Sarah Redrup
Sarah Redrup is an illustrator and visual artist with a particular interest in portraiture, digital drawing and mixed media. She is inspired by hidden histories, human connection and the link between people and place. She works using digital methods to draw, with the look and feel of analogue methods. She incorporates scanned paper textures into her work and is beginning to experiment with animation, moving image and writing
For Sarah, this bursary will support an extended period of learning through 121 mentoring sessions, researching publishers and attending online workshops by award-winning illustrators and writers who have published non-fiction picture books. By the end of 2023 and in time for International Women’s Day March 2024, she aims to develop illustrations inspired by x8 true stories of women in Isle of Wight History. She aims to turn these first x8 stories into a draft manuscript to take to publishers
In order to share these fascinating stories more widely, we’ll be catching up with Sarah later this year when she plans to exhibit, either online or in real life, the illustrations planned for her book.
Sarah has said:
“I hope to use this to encourage the public to approach me with more stories so I can continue uncovering hidden histories.”
Alongside this bursary activity Sarah will be launching short YouTube videos and a newsletter/blog as part of her personal project, reflecting on her journey as an artist from graduation in 2022, to now.
Izzy Kori
Izzy Kori is a Fine Art student from the Isle of Wight and in her 2nd year studying at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her practice involves creating figurative sculptures, varying in size and medium as part of worldbuilding – made through the translation and transformation of the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional, often resulting in a blurring of reality and fiction.
This bursary will support Izzy to create a new piece of work for this years Ventnor Fringe Festival and gain 121 mentoring from Lexi Zelda Stevens – Visual Arts Producer for Green Man festival, who grew up in Ventnor.
Izzy has said:
“A large part of my practice involves storytelling and worldbuilding, and so having a location like the Ventnor Fringe is ideal for enhancing that element of my work. I am still a student going into the final year of my degree, and so I believe this is the best time in my creative practice to experiment with something at this scale and have that experience in my hometown.”
This year’s Ventnor Fringe Festival runs from 21st – 30th July 2023.
Brave Island is a free platform delivered by the Ventnor Exchange which helps support young people aged 14-25 on the Isle of Wight wanting to develop their skills in the creative industries. This is the first time the IW Creative Network and Brave Island have collaborated on an opportunity to offer out to Brave Island members, with an aim to create that step into professional creative practice through nurturing and supporting their work.
The IW Creative Network brings together artists, makers and creative professionals wanting to develop their business and creative skills on the IW. It seeks to widen and strengthen the artistic and creative community on the IW and enables creative individuals the skills they need to grow and give them the opportunity to share their knowledge with one another, retain talent and sustain their creative practice on the IW
