Cambridge Open Studios in full flow at Art Salon epicentre
We’re in the middle of July and that means just one thing - Cambridge Open Studios is in full flow.
The annual showcase, which runs for the first four weekends of the month, features more than 500 local artists exhibiting in venues across town and beyond.
The artists are working in a huge number of mediums and styles, of all ages and backgrounds, but they all have something unique to offer, as I found out when I went to Thrifts Walk to visit Cambridge Art Salon, a community art workshop space in Chesterton.
Cambridge Art Salon was originally based in Romsey, and was run by Ruthie Collins back in the day.
“We moved here eight years ago, it was an old IT shop,” says Sa’adiah Khan, who ran her Map Project from the old Romsey space and now runs her Sadi Soul Arts business from Thrifts Walk.
“It was a dump,” Sa’adiah continues. “We offered to do it up for a reduced rent, and the owners - they’re Portuguese, they’ve lived in Cambridge for ages - have been great ever since.
“Ruthie was the director at that point, this” - where Sa’adiah has her studio - “was her office. A few years later, when Ruthie was leaving, me and two other directors took it over.”
At the front of the studios three artists - Daisy Tempest, Charlotte de Blois and Carol Fowler - have set up.
Carol, who hails from Elland in West Yorkshire and has been in Cambridge 18 years, explains that her usual perch is actually Unit 13 on Barnwell Business Park - another Cambridge Art Salon hub and home to 14 artists.
“I’ve worked there since 2019,” Carol says. “You have a space and you can do what you want. One artist is working with glass, another in ceramics.”
Daisy has been at the Thrifts Walk Salon since 2017. She spent her childhood in Cornwall and loves nature. Her hand-drawn prints include mixed materials and collage.
Charlotte has been at the studio since April, having moved from Barnwell’s Unit 13 after two years. She works in mixed media including “heavy body acrylics, spray paint, FIMO (clay) for 3D work, wood and more recently putting together elements of metal”.
“I’m a good customer to Neil Mackay,” she laughs. “I love engineering components and linking them together to make organic images.” But her main theme is “plants in the city and how they’re getting crowded out - the trees don’t have anywhere to put down roots”. Charlotte lives on Mill Road, she’s originally from Welwyn Garden City. One of her pieces is a charity fundraiser.
“It’s a bell jar with a refugee child in it,” she explains. “I’m selling it for a three figure sum to raise money for the children of Gaza, probably through MAP (Medical Aid for Palestinians). I’m also working on a mural for Palestine.”
Charlotte has a family connection with Palestine but doesn’t open up about it.
Further on in the Salon is Kathy de Zilwa, a Fulbourn resident of 24 summers.
Her dad is from Sri Lanka, her mum’s Danish. She was a therapist but during Covid the demand for therapy significantly increased - “my workload doubled”.
“Therapists are very vulnerable to burnout,” Kathy continues. “In order to protect myself I decided to do something different. So I did art. I more or less switched, though I still love couples therapy now.”
How did her art journey develop?
“As a therapist my work involves focusing on other people’s feelings. That’s great but there came a point where I had done twice as much work as I would ordinarily have done and it felt like the right time to focus on my feelings, and the way that I chose was to study art.”
She continues: “I didn’t do any art until 2021. I’d always been creative - decorating cakes, and therapy is creative too. I always said I wished I’d done art at school and I decided to go to a summer school in London. I loved it so I did a two-year foundation course - now I’d like to do a Masters!”
Kathy does “expanded photography” and oil pastels. She deploys a technique where she takes a photo, prints the photo on paper, scrunches the paper up, glues it to another photo on paper, “and then rephotographs it and I play with the colours”.
There’s a quite intense piece which looks like some sort of melting glacier and the ice seems on fire. What’s going on there?
“That’s different. I took the two photos, and burned a hole in one, and put the other behind it.”
Where is that?
“It's a place called Disenchantment Bay, in Alaska. I went on a cruise there last year.”
And the ship is in the middle of this melting ice lake?
“Yes, they steer the boat really slowly to not pick up damage, it was amazing.”
So is this some sort of climate change piece?
“This is very much a climate change piece,” replies Kathy, “but I see it much more broadly. It’s all the imbalance in the world - political, social, you name it. All the information we’re endlessly exposed to can lead to vicarious trauma - which is characterised by an increasingly negative outlook, potentially depression and anxiety.”
So it’s a link between the therapy and the art?
“Not really. There is a link between the therapy and the art - it’s me, I’m the common denominator. But I’m an optimist. The planet will be fine, even if it’s not with us - humanity - here. And there’s so much beautiful stuff in the world. So when I do pieces it’s a balance of what is toxic and wrong and out of balance with the world, set against what is beautiful - it’s that balance between what is toxic and what is beautiful.”
Over coffee, I ask Sa’adiah how she’s getting on. I first met her in 2017 when she did a mural near the Milton Road Co-op.
“It’s still there - for the most part,” she says with a smile. In her Thrifts workspace she has an easel, a fold-out table, a drawing table, and she does painting, block printing, linotype, acrylic…. “I’m an intuitive artist, so if I’m working on something and there’s waste products I’ll use that for something - I’m anti-waste. I work mainly in print-making, spray painting and regular painting. I like being experimental.”
Sa’adiah’s art is pro-community involvement, and she has a wider agenda - spiritual, emotional and psychological, even political.
“Being intuitive and curious and playful is part of our nature,” she says, “and I teach how to get it back when it's lost. My ethos is keeping creativity and curiosity alive. I need to work in a holistic way and what I do is more about tooling people up. I come out with my own theories and test them out on myself. My work is a mish-mash of wellbeing, education and creativity - I live on this weird intersection of that.”
This is probably Sa’adiah’s last Thrifts Walk Open Studios - she’s building her own studio at her home not far away.
In another workspace is Alan Bird, whose photography is displayed on what slightly resembles a photographic darkroom. Alan has been at Thrifts for more than six years. He was an environmental planner who worked all over - Africa, China, the Philippines, and lives off Victoria Road. Cambridge has been his base for 36 years.
“I used a film camera up to 2005, initially a Rollei and then an Olympus. I still keep two cameras and enjoy community artwork at Strawberry Fair, and the Mill Road Winter Fair among others. My photos are of different subjects.”
There’s photos of tribespeople, a small ‘Lion of Judah’ carpet from Addis Ababa, buildings, deserts. While I’m studying one of his photos he says: “That was the drought in Somalia in 1975. It was the start of climate change really, you can see that from the data now.”
Alan lets me take photos of him using one of his cameras.
There would be no other setting in which such an incredibly diverse group of people could co-exist and grow as a community - and there’s still two weekends of Cambridge Open Studios to go.
Details on locations and opening times here.
