Salisbury Oxfam is very pleased to announce our next Oxhibition by two exciting local artists. This exhibition will run from August 21st to 30th September 2009 with a Private View event on the evening of Thursday August 20th.

Deb O’Shaughnessy
Deb O’Shaughnessy studied English Literature at University before training in Probation work. She has spent 20 years working as a Probation Officer in London then Wiltshire, being based in Salisbury for the last 11 years working with offenders on a part-time basis.

She is a self-taught artist whose work has been exhibited at a variety of galleries in Wiltshire and has sold privately across the country. Her art is driven by a love of colours: over the last few years, she has become increasingly interested in colour for its own sake rather than as a means to represent form. She is inspired by the way in which colours can jostle, sit, clash or glow on the canvas, taking on a life and a mood of their own.

Painting primarily with a knife, her work is also characterised by texture, with shapes building up on the surface of the canvas through the process of painting.

As well as larger paintings in oil or acrylic, she makes small collages. These “re-cycle” old paintings on paper by cutting and re-assembling them in a similar way to the 19th century quilt-makers who used scraps and remnants of fabric to make crazy quilts.

Deb O’Shaughnessy paints from her studio in Wiltshire which she shares with two guinea pigs and a collection of wellington boots.

Gill Marriner-Edwards
Gill began her formal art training at 13 when she attended Sutton East School in Surrey. It was a unique and exciting educational experience. Pupils were encouraged to develop their artistic skills with a curriculum that dedicated almost 50% per cent of each school day to the Arts.

At 18,Gill studied Art at Bretton Hall in Yorkshire. She has taught, worked for the Nature Conservancy and been a Careers Adviser. Gill is now a full time artist and occasional sculptor.

Her current works trace the vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines that enclose and silhouette the manmade structures and shapes seen by the dock and harbour side. With echoes of an extremely cold Purbeck Coast at New Year (a ‘real winter‘ in Swanage) the abstracted and etched forms of the work represent the wintery bleakness of the quayside with its’ weathered structures, engineered to hold back the tides, the vertical masts reaching to the sky and the steps down to the sea.