Pollen Collective Artists
Kate Lowe - Founder
Following a career in advertising at international agencies including Saatchi and Saatchi and J Walter Thompson, Kate returned to her art education. She developed her practice while studying at Central St Martins, the Royal Academy, the Royal Drawing School and in 2018 she completed an MA at the Chelsea College of Art in London. Kate is a polymath; she works across a variety of media including painting, mixed media, collage and most recently digital films (some of which have been minted as NFTs.) Her work is both current and personal and has explored themes including nostalgia, domesticity and her essential relationship to the natural world.
Kate regularly writes, collaborates, curates and exhibits in London. Her work has been in group shows at galleries including The Royal Academy (Summer Exhibition), The Hayward Gallery Southbank, The Royal College of Art, Ugly Duck, [SPACE], The Mall Galleries and The Gerald Moore Gallery. Kate is passionate about creative communities; she was both artist-in-residence and director at the Recentre Art Residency in west London, and she is a member and Trustee at Kindred Studios. Realising that artists and creatives were increasingly isolated during the Covid Pandemic, she founded the Pollen Collective. Kate divides her time between studio practice, art residencies and fostering strong creative collaborations between artists and communities. Her work is held in private and corporate collections in Canada, Europe, Asia and the United States.
Insta: @kateloweart
Suzanne Clements
Suzanne studied at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art, London (BA Fashion/Textiles) and went on to found the iconic fashion brand Clements Ribeiro. Her clothes are included in museum collections at the V&A, London and The Metropolitan Museum, NYC.
‘Having worked in fashion for many years, I felt the need to break away and embark on a new creative journey, slower and more introspective.
My work is autobiographical and centres around women, often with an element of performance, in settings where the human condition is examined metaphorically. Endurance and resilience in the face of the precarity of life, both emotionally and physically, are always in the forefront of my mind, guiding my practice.
A poetic stance is present; sparks of fantasy combine with underlying emotional tensions, uncovering aesthetic potential in situations of adversity.
There is a pull between figuration and abstraction, representation and materiality. The human body and its limbs are a key vehicle of expression. Distortion, as seen in mirrors, explores fragility and vulnerability.’
Suzanne graduated from City & Guilds London Art School (MA Fine Art) in 2022 and in July 2023 had her first solo show, All I Want is Three Heads, with MAMA gallery.
Insta: @officialsuzanneclements
Holland Cunningham
Holland is a painter working across a variety of media. She has a BA in art history from the University of Virginia and has studied at the Art Students League, the National Academy of Art, and the New York School of the Arts. Holland has been exhibiting with Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York for nearly 20 years and has consistently exhibited in the US and Europe.
Although her preferred medium is oil, she also works across a variety of media including gouache, watercolour, fresco, and even short stop motion animations that are often projected into “rooms” or dollhouses she has created. Many of her animation and dollhouse pieces explore the rich and universal domestic oeuvre. Holland often works in series, which allows her to follow the themes of memory and what remains after the passage of time. Whether it is an ancient fresco in an ash covered palazzo in Pompeii or a moment in time of a family snapshot (often not her own), Cunningham’s work presents the shared resonance of moments in time.
Holland continues to develop her practice through residencies; she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and an artist in residence at the BAU Institute in Puglia. She currently lives and works in New York and London.
voltzclarke.com/artists/hollandcunningham
Insta: @hbcunning
Jo de Banzie
Jo de Banzie is a photographic artist who employs the materiality of ancient and experimental process to explore imagination, memory and place. Her work combines historical research and archive material with oral history and the imagined, to create visual narratives as seen through a female gaze. A process-led approach and the use of conceptually relevant materials, assists her in visualising the unseen, whilst allowing the necessary space for collaboration with chance and serendipity.
Jo has a particular interest in motherhood within the context of war, and using her own family stories as a starting point, her work explores themes of nurture and loss, and is motivated by a belief in the importance of remembering.
Following a long career as a professional photographer working in commercial and documentary portraiture, Jo took time to rethink her practice with further study at the University of the Arts London, graduating with distinction from the London College of Communication’s Photojournalism & Documentary Photography master’s programme. Her work is held in private and museum collections, including the National Art Library Collection at the V&A.
Insta: @jodebanziephoto
Julie Derbyshire
Julie’s practice explores themes of fragility and transience through a physical and visual engagement with objects and materials. She uses the constructed photograph as a final distillation of a creative process that encompasses acts of making, manipulation and disruption. Her fabrications, which are often small scale and of a temporary nature, are elevated through the photograph; transient moments of precariousness and suspense are captured within the frame. Julie’s works are defined by a unique combination of beauty and disquiet.
Julie holds an MA Photography (Distinction), London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) and a BA (Hons) Photography (1st Class), University of Westminster. She exhibits regularly in the UK and abroad and her work is held in private collections. She has been a finalist in the Travers Smith Art Awards and the Arte Laguna Prize Venice, and was awarded the Photofusion Prize. In 2018, she was nominated for the Royal Photographic Society One Hundred Heroines Award.
Insta: @juliederbyshire
Christina Dobbs
Christina Dobbs is an American/British painter living in London. Her work is channelled and wrought from her own photographs. The camera acts as her sketchbook; it is a means of observing and fixing the movement of figures engaged in their own activities, often unaware of our gaze.
Through material interventions she edits and obscures subject matter from the original image, giving these everyday events an element of ambiguity. When looking at her paintings, there is a sense that one has stepped into a narrative and that what is being shown is merely one slice of a bigger story. Filmic in their conception, the paintings invite the viewer to speculate what has just happened and what might subsequently follow.
Methods, materials and chance are important components of her process. The layering of acrylic, oil and sometimes wax combine to give a luminous and distanced quality to the surface of the canvas. The contradictions of movement and stillness create a pictorial tension that invites the viewer to linger, enquire and engage.
Christina has an MA Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School. Her work has been widely exhibited in London and is held in private collections in the UK and United States.
Insta: @dobbschristina
Isis Dove-Edwin
Isis made a late entry to a career as an artist. She started out in a different profession, then spent time at home with her four young children. Along the way, she developed a passion for clay, particularly the ceramic language of materiality, process, and form. She is fascinated by its documentary power – everyday life, events and ideas can be captured in clay objects, which can be shared in their time through gift, exchange, or exhibition, as well as into the future as kept or found archaeological objects.
There are two main strands to Isis’ work: a primary practice which documents and explores historical and contemporary social themes that primarily relate to the Black African diaspora, and a creative collaborative practice as 2nd Shift with Leonora Lockhart, researching and responding to the impact of being an artist-mother.
Isis is based in London where she gained a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Ceramic Design at Central St Martins in 2021, before receiving her MA from the Royal College of Art.
Insta: @isisdoveedwin
Rachna Garodia
Rachna Garodia trained at the prestigious National Institute of Design in India and The Royal School of Needlework in London. Her work predominantly involves hand embroidery and weaving. Her visual language continues to evolve, combining echoes of her life in India with the experience of living in London for the past 15 years.
Her commissioned pieces are held in private collections in India, London and America. Rachna’s book ‘Contemporary Weaving in Mixed Media’ published by Batsford was published in 2023..
Rachna Garodia’s work is informed by observing the natural world, constantly changing, yet still. Her tapestries seek to bring the “outside” in, evoking the simple pleasures of a woodland walk, changing seasons or just inspiration from nature around her. The intricately woven textures are akin to viewing a landscape, capturing the atmosphere, tone, and emotion from her daily walks. Material exploration through the bringing together of unexpected textures in a warp has always been the starting point for her work. She juxtaposes cotton, linen, silk, nettle, hemp and wool with found materials like paper, bark, seedpods, twigs. All the weaves are unique and bespoke; each one takes shape slowly in her studio in west London and is later crafted into screens, space dividers and framed textile art.
Insta: @rachnagarodia
Rachel Goodison
Rachel Goodison works across different media, including painting, printing and sculpture. Her practice explores diverse themes including the importance of play in creativity; and the vulnerability of the human body and mind. Art is Rachel’s second career; she trained as a barrister, and worked for London First, an organisation that sought to tackle some of the Capital’s issues including the environment and skills shortage. Rachel completed her Diploma in Portraiture at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in 2017, and was awarded her MA in Fine Art at the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2019 with Distinction. She was awarded a two-year Print Fellowship at the City & Guilds.
Rachel has participated in a number of residencies including ReCentre (Thameswharf, London) and The Brompton Chapel. Her work was also part of the acclaimed exhibition ‘What She Didn’t Say’ at Thameside Gallery which showed expanded paintings, sculptures and weavings by four female artists. This show focused on the boundaries and spaces between our inner experience of being and what we are able to express to others. Recently, Rachel’s iconic installation ‘Hatchings’ was selected and exhibited as part of the Wells Contemporary at Wells Cathedral.
Insta: @rachelgoodison1
Sarah Hills
Sarah Hills is a London based painter. Her work references the notion that the places we have lived and experienced in the past exist within us and can impact how we perceive the elusive nature and progress of time. From the archives of memory certain cherished objects, quotidian motifs and borrowed and appropriated images are reimagined in unreliable ways to create charged psychological spaces that suggest unexpected narratives and reflect a disorientating search for meaning.
The founder and Creative Director of Porta Romana, a global interior design company, Sarah has designed collections of lighting and furniture for UK and international clients including a lighting installation to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
She began working on her art full-time in 2019 when she undertook the Heatherley's Portrait Diploma course where she won the Heatherleys Prize and the John Walton Prize. She has recently completed her MA Fine Art at City & Guilds of London and has exhibited at The Mall Galleries, D-Contemporary and The Art Pavilion. Her work is held in private collections in the UK and Europe.
Insta: @spanner_intheworks12
Megan Jentsch
Megan Jentsch was born in Penticton, BC, Canada in 1989. She lives and works between London, UK and Vancouver, Canada. Megan graduated in 2009 from Florence Design Academy in Firenze, Italy with her Diploma of Interior Design, and has also completed extended studies in abstract art at Alberta College of Art and Design. Megan had her first solo exhibition, ‘About-Face’ at WOW in October 2014. In July of 2015, Megan created a custom collection for Holt Renfrew, an innovative luxury retail group. Her second solo exhibition, ‘Consistency in Adversity’ was showcased in an enormous vacant space in a former bank in the heart of Calgary.
Working away from representation has allowed Megan the freedom to explore the tension and complexity in human emotion and behaviour. In a time where division and polarisation are pervasive, she finds interest in exploring common ground through her expressive abstract works.
Megan’s work work is held in private collections including Air Canada, ATB Financial and Le Germaine Hotels. She has completed commission work for La Maison Simons, The Nobles Management, Holt Renfrew and CULT.
Insta: @mecjayy
Monika Kuhne Jorgensen
Mons Jorgensen is a multidisciplinary artist based in London & Athens. Her work is grounded in European myths, legends and fairy tales which she combines with everyday narratives and bigger social subject matter. She sees art as a language with a power to add cultural meaning to our physical world. She hopes her work contributes to this shared virtual, cultural space.
She paints, prints, draws and makes use of props, masks and her own body to create still and moving images. Whilst tapping simultaneously into the tradition of fine art and vernacular iconography, she develops her idiosyncratic visual language. Her ideas are playfully bounced between the different 2D and 3D media and in the process, she makes her thoughts manifest.
Mons received an MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London in 2019. The invitation to join the Pollen Collective came at a crucial time (during Covid lockdown.) The collaboration and support within both the Pollen Collective and the artists’ community at Kindred Studios are an important part of her creative process.
Mons has taken part in group exhibitions in London, Athens and Seoul and her work is held in private collections across Europe.
Insta: @monsjorgensen
Leonora Lockhart
Leonora Lockhart graduated from Central Saint Martins with a first-class degree in Ceramic Design and recently finished her MA Ceramic & Glass at the Royal College of Art in London.
She has always felt that her creative practice and voice have been hindered by domestic responsibility, either imposed by financial limitations, motherhood or societal norms, but also self-imposed from a misplaced sense of obligation. These interuptions have led to a deep sense of unease and discomfort around the domestic space; Leo considers her own experience and those of other women, specifically female artists and makers. Have they faced the same feelings of constraint? Of forfeiture? Of regret? Are the feelings of elation and satisfaction as domestic walls are broken down, echoed elsewhere? Or do some embrace a practice that stems from a kitchen table, rather than the studio or workshop?
Leonora also has a creative collaborative practice (entitled 2nd Shift) with Isis Dove-Edwin in which they research and respond to the impact of being artist-mothers.
Insta: @leonara_lockhart
Nazanin Moradi
Nazanin Moradi is an Iranian-born artist living and working in London. She received an MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art (UAL) in 2016. She has exhibited in the UK, Europe, America and the Middle East.
Nazanin’s work is explores the act of re-inventing her origins in the context of contemporary art. She expresses her personal stories through the broader theme of cultural history.
Nazanin’s diverse and iterative practice combines costume making, performance, painting, soft sculpture, and digital collage; her process is defined by constant construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. She moves between three-dimensional textile works and two-dimensional images to create a dialogue between her materials, the studio space, and her body.
Nazanin’s work was selected for MK Calling 2020, an international show showcasing some of the most dynamic work being made in Britain today.
Insta: @naz.art.mrd
Sophie Orde
Sophie studied Art History at University College London and had a long career in film and television working predominantly in Visual Effects, where she was nominated for a BAFTA and won a major industry VES award. During this time, she took periods out of work to study at the Pietrasanta Carving School in Italy as well as Studio 126 and the Art Student’s League in New York. Sophie also worked inside a casting factory in Berlin and apprenticed for sculptor Vivi Mallock. For the last 5 years she has dedicated herself to sculpture and graduated from Heatherley’s School of Art in 2017. She has recently completed a six month residency at ReCentre and participated in two London exhibitions.
Sophie focuses on both the fragility and strength of materials - and uses these inherent qualities to reflect on our human journeys. Her process starts always with the material and her aim is to draw attention to the key features of each object, and reflect back some of our vulnerabilities and strengths through it.
She works in iron, steel, clay and wood, but stone is her first love. It speaks of the mountain from which it came, and gives a long sense of time from well before human history started. Formed first under the oceans, then pushed up into mountains by techtonic plates, Sophie combines this history with the qualities of the material to offer a personal reflection of the environment that surrounds us.
Insta: @sophieorde
Amy Robson
Amy Robson is a British/American artist who creates drawings, paintings and animations that consider the experience of being in a place – interior or exterior, physical or psychological. Her work pushes representational boundaries with disjointed pictorial spaces and uncanny juxtapositions to emphasise contemporary dislocation and collective anxiety. Weird and wonky trees or banal net curtains and ghostlike figures suggest the uncertainty and strangeness of being alive in the modern world.
Born in America, Amy Robson has lived in the UK for over 25 years. She trained at the Royal Drawing School and holds an MFA from Chelsea College (UAL), London. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in the UK, the US and in Europe. She has been selected for residencies with PADA Studios in Portugal, Jentel Artists Residency in Wyoming and DRAW in France. Her writing has been published in Turps Banana magazine and she coordinated and curated ‘Larger Apples & Better Cotton,’ an exhibition of American women artists based in the UK.
Insta: @amy.robson
Angelique Schmitt
Angelique began her career as an artist whose interest was collecting and assembling. These meticulous processes evolved through her early work in ceramics, which involved the assemblage of crafted pieces of porcelain. Her practice pivoted with the creation of Kindred Studios in March 2015, when she invited 175 artists and makers to join her to form a creative community. Kindred is a charitable organisation with a strong focus on supporting the creatives who join the collective through frequent organised interactions with fellow members and opportunities to learn, critique, show work and support their local community. This participation increases creative networks and opportunities for growth both inside and outside of the collective.
Kindred Studios has become Angelique’s art practice; through generosity and innovation, this dynamic collective has become a creative hub in west London. Notable for its biannual Open Studios events which have attracted up to 15,000 visitors in a year, Kindred operates its studios using a ‘meanwhile’ model. The charity re-invigorates disused spaces during fallow periods, which allows rents to remain affordable to a variety of makers. Through Kindred, Angelique has continued to develop her interest in boundaries and connections that bind multitudes.
Insta: @kindredstudioartists
Arabella Sim
Arabella Sim is a painter and draughtsman who works with text, dance, performance and sound. Trained at Central St Martins and the Royal Drawing School, she is a member of the Art Workers Guild and was nominated for the Jerwood Drawing Prize.
Her work revolves around the human condition; she explores our connection to the land and the perpetual cycle of life and death. Seeing the human figure as a metaphor for our emotions, she uses abstraction and figuration to trigger memories, vulnerabilities and the subconscious. Increasingly, Arabella collaborates with other artists, believing in the alchemy created through cross disciplinary practise. Seeing herself as a storyteller, her influences are wide and include an eclectic mix of theatre, poetry, philosophy, music and dance.
At the core of Arabella’s practice is drawing. Her work is about the physical ‘act’ of making, and through risk and exploration, she pushes the boundaries of expression. Whether through paint, dance, charcoal or text, layers are built up, often erased, but always leaving an imprint and a trace of intention.
Insta @arabellasim_
Marc Standing
Marc Standing’s ethereal and abstract practice is heavily inspired by his personal life experiences, displaying a visual expression of his personal search for identity as well as the complexities felt by mass consciousness. Heavily influenced by both the natural world and his lived societal experiences, his works have the feeling of both mental nodes of thought as well as organic cellular systems in constant flux.
Marc describes his work as “…using a lot of layering with the intention of barraging the viewer with a plethora of pictorial stimulus … storytelling and imagination fuse into a visual mirage of wonderment.”
Born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe, Standing spent his formative years in Southern Africa, studying Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town, where he graduated with honors. Standing then spent over a decade living and working across Australia and Asia, where he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Australia, China, England, the US, Greece, India, Hong Kong, Maldives, and Singapore. He is currently based out of London.
He has participated in several esteemed residencies, such as Amilla Fushi in the Maldives, as well as residencies in the Philippines, Shanghai, and Mexico. He was a finalist for the Sovereign Art Prize and his works can be found in public and private collections around the world, including the Artbank, Australia, The Groucho Club, the Cathay Pacific Collection, the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.
Insta: @marcstanding
Geraldine van Heemstra
Geraldine studied History of Art at Utrecht University (MA), graduating in 1992, followed by a three year Postgraduate Degree in the Conservation of Easel Paintings at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She pursued a career in Conservation in the museum world until 2002 when she focused on her own art practice. Geraldine graduated from City & Guilds of London Art school in 2019 (MA) and was awarded the Norman Ackroyd prize for etching.
Living and working in London provides a sharp contrast to the silent and spacious Scottish Hebrides. Both places stimulate, challenge, and inform Geraldine’s artistic practice. The external forces in nature, either in the city or wilderness, and its unpredictability, are what drive her. She explores the experiential nature of sound and movement in the materiality of her mark-making. Rather than offering an image of a place, Geraldine finds synergy in the moment and movement of her body and the gestural mark-making of her drawings, prints and installations. She welcomes the chance elements of wind and weather to resonate through her process.
“I connect to the natural world through walking. In the process of being immersed in the elements, I open up my senses to the natural world. One of my favourite and inspiring artists, Nan Sheppard, poignantly said: ‘Living all the way through: to touching, tasting, smelling and hearing the world. If you manage this, then you might walk ‘out of the body and into the mountain’, such that you become, briefly, ‘a stone…the soil of the earth’.
Insta: @geraldinehvh
Luke White
Luke White is a British photographer based in London. Technically brilliant and conceptually audacious, his work challenges expected boundaries in its investigation of a wide range of subject-matter, from landscape and portraiture to the human form.
Having had an international childhood growing up in India, Peru, Massachusetts and beyond, Luke White started his career in the late 1990s as an assistant fashion-photographer working in Paris, London and New York. His early work, which captured the booming fashion industries of Europe and North America, was inspired by visionaries such as Mario Testino and Deborah Turbeville.
Already established as a commercial photographer by the early 2000s, White began working on portraiture, interiors and architecture. In 2014 he was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Preparing for these lectures transformed his interest in conceptual work and rekindled a love for the art of photography.
Following an artist's residency at Hammersmith's Re:Centre, White has been working on a series of experimental large-format analogue photographs depicting both the human form and the environment. White's work plays with our contemporary notion of a photograph as the immediate product of a fast process. Whether he has manipulated his images digitally or printed them on an unexpected surface such as ceramic, White's prints are the result of a painstaking and considered process that creates new and engaging resonances.
His recent acclaimed series Solar - created using the solar plate intaglio printing method - was exhibited in London and across the UK in 2020 and 2021.
Luke White's work has been published widely: in international magazines, and in numerous books on architecture and design. His portrait photographs have twice been selected for the prestigious Taylor Wessing Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery.
Insta: @lukewhite.art