Tackling Big Issues With Small Works

This week marks the first ever Instagram takeover for Brighton (UK) arts charity Creative Future, opening the door to more exciting artist-led pathways of exploration through our digital platforms.

Handing the reins over for the very first time to Brighton -based artist Yvonne J Foster for her series ‘The Artist and The Little Men’ seems a very natural step. Since, we’ve become lifelong students to her ways, including the seamless approach with which she changes hats from creative perfectionist to Ideas Girl.

Yvonne is no stranger to exploring different mediums and regularly establishes themes as parameters to her work, as evidenced with her Ice Cream Artworks, a serialised nod to the nostalgic pastime of consuming ice cream. She captures delicious moments in unflinching, bold colour, in grey scale, and sometimes with flourishes of what should be implied with negative space.

“I purposely restrict in order to exercise an element of control.” Yvonne has said of herself. “It focuses me and gives a welcome break from a self-critical and traumatised brain. It is a very solitary and personal process. I can hide the most precious or raw emotions inside every detail.”

But while her miniature subjects are traditionally nameless, many of her protagonists are icons from the silver screen, such as in ‘Ice Cream Sundae with Norma Jean’ and ‘Ice Cream at Tiffany’s’. Yvonne’s world encapsulates a much wider, and wilder, exploration – of miniature worlds of art, books and tiny boxes, stitched paper landscapes, graphics, scribbles and fragments of stories.

Trained as a designer and silversmith, Yvonne J Foster graduated in 1998 with a BA (Hons) from Sir John Cass, but became disillusioned with her work and switched to a career working with children, later becoming a champion of The Arts, inspiring under-supported artists through programmes and social initiatives, and, importantly, through the sharing her own experiences – WATCH: YVONNE J FOSTER DISCUSS HER OWN PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

In her IG takeover, Yvonne takes Creative Future’s Instagram by the horns, exercising full creative control and using the space to tell a fairy tale all of her own; a mystery offering glimpses into a fictional work space created within her own studio and into the minds eye of her prolific work ethic, her emotional honesty, and inspired approach to distraction. As ever, it sums up how she uses art to express the unique way her brain processes information, to construct her own realities and empower herself in them.

“I play the visual storyteller; creating worlds of escapism, optimism, possibility and longing. When emotional realities are harsh I choose curiosity, creative exploration, freedom, invention, stories and treasures.”

Yvonne J Foster is an Artist, Designer and Storyteller, author of “Inside: An Artist’s Work: Living with Depression”, Saatchi Online exhibitor and Creative Future UK Trustee. To learn more about Yvonne’s work including her exclusive works available through Creative Future visit CF’s Online Shop. Catch up with the latest chapter of ‘The Artist and The Little Men’ on our Instagram.

More info: shop.creativefuture.org.uk

Self Portrait by Yvonne J Foster

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