About Mona Lisa Arts & Media
MONA LISA Arts & Media was established in 2009 in response to an identified need in the local community of Burnham and surrounding areas. We work with artists delivering arts projects and activities with the public, private, community and voluntary sectors. This work is about creating opportunities for people of all ages and abilities enabling them to participate in high quality arts.
We specialise in work that includes digital media, cross-media, explorative and experimental, painting, drawing, combined media installation, environmental art and text. We deliver high quality creative activities, education and training within the local community and surrounding area working with artists in partnership with community, voluntary, public and private sector organisations. This work is concerned with creating opportunities for community engagement with people of all ages, abilities and social backgrounds. We facilitate projects and residencies by professional artists responding to a local context.
Our Aims are to make the arts accessible to all, enabling people to be creative and imaginative. Instil in them that the arts can be an effective tool to help bring about a sense of well-being in themselves and their communities.
Company Structure: we have three directors and a management group, which includes local residents, all of who have a wealth of skills, knowledge and experience of the public, private, community and voluntary sectors.
Lead Artist: Rhonda Fenwick is responsible for the day-to-day running of the organisation, fundraising, delivering arts projects and activities.
www.rhondafenwick.co.uk
Exhibitions
We have curated a number of exhibitions in the local community and surrounding area. They have included works by professional artists, schools, youth and community groups. Since we established in 2010 we have been involved in and organised exhibitions for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, The Diamond Jubilee, WW1 Commemorations, and currently we are creating works for the 800th anniversary of the Seal of the Magna Carta. We are working with the Transformers Youth Arts Group, and four schools in Burnham, Windsor and Maidenhead. The works will be included in two exhibitions to be held in All Saints Church Windsor and Royal Holloway University in June 2015.
Projects
The arts is a dynamic way of bringing people together to work in collaboration and learn new skills and knowledge.
MONA LISA Arts & Media facilitate art workshops, activities and exhibitions in the community, working with schools, businesses, church groups, youth and community groups. We are currently facilitating the Magna Carta Visual Arts Project and the Memory Book Project.
Transformers Youth Arts Group
Transformers Youth Arts Group meets on Thursday evenings at St Peter's Church, Burnham, and have been together since 2010. The group of young people aged 8 to 15 years work with professional artists as part of the MONA LISA Arts & Media's outreach in the community, in partnership with the church. The group is given the opportunity to create artworks for exhibitions and events that have a particular theme or subject. In the last three years they've had their artworks included in exhibitions for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, the Diamond Jubilee, Blessed are the Peacemakers and WW1 commemorations. This year they are making artworks that will be part of the exhibition at the Royal Holloway University, for the celebrations of the 800th anniversary of the Seal of the Magna Carta.
Artists
Rhonda Fenwick
Rhonda's work is concerned with the creation of a sublime world that manifests in an ephemeral space between an art object and a spectator's experiencing of it; where art works come into being through the 'play' of others. How a work of art may come into 'being' through imagination, and also relates to our connectedness to Nature and how we interact socially with the world around us. Through play and imagination we can create spaces, places and worlds. We can re-connect through our feelings and responses to the sacredness of our lives and our relationships with self, others, objects and the spaces we inhabit.
Claire Rollinson
Claire Rollinson has recently moved back to England after living in Northern Ireland. Her art practice includes the disciplines and expressions of drawing, painting, and printmaking with an element of storytelling running throughout.
Gina Martin
Gina Martin works in wood and natural "found" objects, both in her studio and the environment in site-specific pieces. She also works in 2D and 3D using various materials and techniques.
Andy Holt
Through the challenging circumstances that have presented themselves to Andy over the last two years, he had to make a conscious decision to be a survivor; as Winston Churchill put it, 'If you find yourself going through hell, keep going'. Out of the dreadful trials we face, there seems to come an inner resolve, a deep reflection, a spiritual awakening and an unquenchable desire to be creative. The works he has recently created are an attempt to represent aspects of his personal journey to find peace, aware that it often seems elusive and fragile.
Caroline Coode
Caroline has 5 sons and 8 grandchildren and works from her home in Newcastle upon Tyne. She is an artist and gardener with a passion for growing organic fruit and vegetables. As a Quaker she regards their Peace testimony as an important influence in how each of us tries to live our life on a daily basis. In a world so much at war, it is difficult to know how to make a difference. Art cannot, alas, provide food, shelter or medical aid. However, it can and does, nurture, heal our souls and feed our spiritual hunger. My two pieces of work in the exhibition, 'In the Beginning' is my response to the awe I feel about creation itself and 'Behold a New Earth' is an expression of my joy and faith in the eternal cycle of death and rebirth in this wonderful world.
Mary Cook-Cosh
Mary Cook-Cosh is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. The content her work is weighed in exploring aesthetics pertaining to teenagers, teenage life and imaginary landscapes of flora and fauna that creatures and beings often inhabit. Film is inevitably an inspiration and the dialectics of dark drama staged with colourful aesthetics is a tension Mary finds fun to explore. For the World War I Commemorations exhibition in conjunction with Mona Lisa Arts & Media in partnership with St Peter's Church and in collaboration with the Royal British Legion, Mary has created a series of ink and graphite drawings works specially made in honour of young people that lived during the period of World War I. We see young brothers pictured together perhaps before they each set off to war, a propaganda poster picturing young English youth within the circumference of English allies, a "Dazzle Ship", which many young soldiers contributed the fabrication of, in addition to images of a teen getting a routine eye exam or a set of children in the midst of a brief moment.