‘UNFROZEN’
MA Art Degree Exhibition
25 June – 12 July 2025
‘UNFROZEN’
Alison Lees, Nicole Antras, Nic Ramsden, Melanie Jordan
In 2020 our MA art projects and final graduate show at UCA Canterbury were frozen by the onset of the Covid pandemic. ‘Unfrozen’ is a fabulous opportunity to show work that would have formed part of our final MA show, alongside pieces that reflect our creative journeys since.
UNFROZEN Installation view Sevenoaks Kaleidoscope Art Gallery 2025
Alison Lees, Nicole Antras, Nic Ramsden, Melanie Jorden
Artists in Conversation
6:30 – 8:30 Wednesday 2 July
Join us at 6:00 for refreshments and to view the show.
Artists in conversation 6:30 – 7:30
Gallery closes at 8
Melanie Jordan
I have a textural, haptic practice with thread-based crafts at its core. Back in 2020 while studying for my MA, I began to focus on maternal ambivalence; the tension between the need to nurture and a feeling of entrapment. My personal perspective is as a mother of an adult with learning difficulties, where the mother-child relationship becomes trapped in a dependent phase. In August 2020, pandemic restrictions meant there was not a degree show, so I installed my final MA work in a barn in my garden.
Since completing my MA I have continued to create art, showing both nationally and internationally, becoming an active member of the arts organisation ArtCan. I have worked on various projects, including community stitching projects, but maternal ambivalence has been a continuing line of enquiry that informs my artwork. I create soft sculptural umbilical scissors that aptly sum up the contradiction between wanting to nurture and feeling trapped by the needs of others. My most recent work reflects on the apron ties, and thoughts of who will hold them in years to come.
Nic Ramsden
The exhibition is an ideal moment to review and reflect our own lives. If we now, are able to look back at the monumental shock of a world reacting to a pandemic in the modern era; it is a change to be affected and a reflection on an individual level. A moment to stop and ask questions. This we did in 2020 but now is an even better time to stop. Just for a moment and ask, who are we, and where are we.
The exhibition coming up, we suspect will raise several thoughts. What has happened since: Gaza, Ukraine, Trump. On an individual level, as an artist I am asking deeper questions about perspective and the self.
The question of neurodiversity is raising itself since COVID, where only now we paused to reflect, who we are, came to the fore.
Those in education will tell you that there is an up tick of ADHD ASD, Autism, Gender, and school allowing students to identify as LGBT+. UnFrozen as a term is meant to explain that we need to reflect, acknowledge, and celebrate what we do without our apology. This is who I am and where I am at.
Ali Lees
The opportunity to exhibit here at the Kaleidoscope Gallery has given me a chance to reflect on how my work has developed since graduating. Generally, I stay quiet, tucked away in my studio and I remember how I also relished that quiet during the Lockdowns. A farmer offered me a cavernous barn in which to exhibit my final pieces. My Graduation with only quiet skies and birds to be my physical witnesses!
During my MA, my work gradually emerged out of the recognition of being in an in-between place for many years. This came out of caring for my ailing and ageing mother and her dying. This particular life threshold served as a Rite of Passage. A beginning and an end. My work has always followed a natural, intuitive, and organic line of enquiry. This ‘stepping between worlds’ continues to echo in my practice.
Something that had previously been more illustrative in my practice changed into something more tangible during the MA. In becoming more sculptural I regained a more direct relationship with the earth rather than making a still image of that relationship.
I make frameworks using willow, with paint and ink-printed, layered paper pieces that have all the tropes of painting. I often use tissue paper which is remarkably resilient but at the same time looks fragile. These physical layers are imbued with metaphor and echo the shedding associated with the grief and bereavement process, as well as transitional spaces that are filled with ambiguity. What has emerged is not about an end result, it is about a process. I explore spacial elements and physical frameworks that invite interaction. I continue to make vessels, which I see as arks of holding, and cocoons, rich with metaphor and symbolism for me. A more figurative element is returning to my work with a physical, umbilical-like connection to the pieces surrounding the grounded sculptural work. I am introducing the weaving of Old Mans Beard, a rambling, thicket making plant whose habit echoes the holding, hidden spaces.
My personal stories reflect the wider, intuitive, earth based, spiritual practice which informs my understanding of the world. My practice also comes out of a long-standing questioning of the human’s relationship to life and our environment at this time of climate breakdown. Therefore, the focus of my practice is collaborating with these natural cycles and seeing and expressing the tensions and resistance inherent at the places of liminality.
Nicole Antras
I am a Fine Artist working in drawing, painting, and printmaking mediums. My work is based on nature, connection, and psychoanalytical themes.
During my MA, my work focused on the Sense of Self, which included exploring aspects of that, such as wounds and scars, both psychological and physical. The three pieces in this “Unfrozen” exhibition depicting a physical wound and subsequently the scars from that are a reflection of the events that may wound us in our early life and shape how we see ourselves, creating our Sense of Self. I also tend to gravitate to depictions of flowers, well known in art as representing the circle of life and death and the flowers included here have been so due to their symbolic meaning.
At this particular time, using the imagery of a Lily, often associated with death, I was interested more in the death of the false impressions that we create and use to hold ourselves back, rather than physical death. The work became about healing and regrowth. More recent pieces over the last year or so have continued with the theme of our early perceptions
and describe a connection with the Inner Child, the core of our being, that gets lost with the gradual disconnection with nature in our current society, causing us to feel incomplete and broken. My intention is to represent the idea that we are not in fact broken, though some would like us to continue to believe that misconception, as well as the fact that events that happen to us and leave a scar shapes the unique individual that we become.
Along with the flowers previously mentioned, I have also been working some figurative depictions of lemons, inspired by my cousin’s lemon trees in the south of France; these depictions of natural objects are intended as a reminder of the beauty of nature and our need to appreciate and remain connected with it.
