Gill Hackett and Melissa Yates

 In the Flow brings together two exceptional artists working in different media, who share an intuitive approach to their creative endeavours.

 Gill Hackett is a maker of papier mâché vessels, who lives and works in Horsley Gloucestershire. Her inspiration comes from both her own garden and further afield, including from visits to places in Britain, Europe, the Far East and Australia. For her the textures and colours in nature are the starting point for creating decorative and useful pieces using a traditional process that involves recycling a particular grade of newsprint.

 As well as being beautifully unique they are surprisingly diverse in size, shape, colour and texture and are often mistaken for ceramic, stone and even metal vessels. When interviewed recently the artist confessed that she enjoyed seeing people’s reactions on discovering that they are created from papier mâché.

 Wiltshire based artist Melissa Yates graduated from UWIC University in 2004 with a First Class (Hons) degree in Fine Art. Keen to share her love of art and inspire others, she worked as a secondary school art teacher for over a decade. Melissa is now focusing on her own creativity and on nurturing her relationship with the environment through her abstract painting. A sense of emotion and energy is evoked as she works intuitively across the canvas, guided by the rhythm of the music she is listening to. Colours, patterns, textures and details emerge through layers of spontaneous and deliberate mark-making, until a point of harmony is reached.

“For me, painting is an act of sensory self-expression which allows me to enter the playful space of meditative presence. When I am ‘in the flow’ time dissolves and a deep sense of connection is felt”.