Photo: CFK
The Lakeside Centre on Southmere Lake has lived many lives as a bar, restaurant, nightclub, community centre and location for TV and film. The building now houses a nursery, cafe and artists studios operated by Bow Arts Trust.
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Lakeside Art Shop was set up in 2023 when a collective of artists and makers based at the Lakeside Centre in Thamesmead were trying to solve the question of 'How can we promote our work and celebrate our creative activities in Thamesmead?'.
Lakeside Art Shop sells affordable, high quality and original artworks and craft pieces for domestic environments.
Often handmade, limited edition and always contemporary, Lakeside Art Shop is now run by a collective of artists living and working alongside each other in the Lakeside Centre and nearby flats. We want to make art and craft that can live in the homes of our local community as well as those far beyond!
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Chloe Cooper is an artist, educator, zine maker and passionate paper marbler. She marbles paper to make zines about knee pain, wearing glasses during a pandemic and drinking wine whilst working from home. She collaborates with composer and vibraphonist Jackie Walduck as Vibin n Marblin to make audiovisual performances where Chloe’s marbling responds to Jackie’s music and vice versa, resulting in immersive video projections and mesmeric vibraphone soundscapes. When she's not marbling, Chloe makes risograph-printed Tunnel Tourists zines with fellow Thamesmead artist Nicky Sutton. So far these have chronicled the sheer excitement of living near Abbey Wood station when the Elizabeth line opened and living in Thamesmead during the coronation of a guy who’s really not a fan of concrete.
Website: www.chloecooper.co.uk
Instagram: @chloecooooooper @vibinandmarblin @tunneltourists
Photo: Alberto Romano
Amanda has worked in photography for more than two decades. Her own practice has weaved through editorial, and commercial to more artistic and documentary styles over that time. Much of Amanda’s work is centred around people, and their interactions with the world around them. She is currently working on a long-term project called 4 x 4 x 4, which is a social documentary project exploring the proposition that every little thing has its place, and that ourselves and our actions are interconnected.
She writes a blog which comes out roughly once a month. Amanda’s work is exhibited regularly both in the UK and abroad, and her images (and words) have been printed in numerous publications including the Portrait of Britain 2020 book, and fLIP magazine which is a publication created by London Independent Photography. She was editor of fLIP for two and a half years.
In 2022 Amanda was awarded a grant from Thamesmead Community Fund which enabled her to create her project ‘Getting To Know You’ which was made into an exhibition and publication. The project was based around many of the artists who are based at The Lakeside Centre.
'I am a London based artist working within sculpture, installation, drawing and performance. I am especially interested in organic materials where I feel kinship to artists like Joseph Beuys and Tadeusz Kantor.
I am also interested in curation and how a dramatic structure can be applied to an exhibition, seeing exhibition as an opus. I continuously research composition and see it as an internal grammar or a logic of a piece, with its large and small scale rhythms, words, phrases, verses, poems.
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Intimacy and contact are key in my work, they manifest through processes of contemplation - a passive way of understanding, being open and attentive, a way to cross the boundaries of the senses.'
Photo: Naroa Perez
Photo: Paulina Korobkiewicz
Sonia explores and works in many different mediums (painting, film, sculpture) with the emphasis on performance.
she believes that every production develops its own unique language, but all her performances are united in their expressive physicality. Often informed by personal experiences, her works are explorations of human behaviour, political theatre, life and death, patterns and sensibilities.
when she creates visual art objects, she is most interested in their performative qualities.
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Website: www.sroshalart.com
My practice consists of fixing elephant sculptures, plaques made of plaster or ceramic, posters and murals in opportune places, guerrilla style, around London and other cities in the UK and abroad.
The aim is to help open the discussion about what constitutes a ‘person’, given that most animals on this planet are merely ‘things’, from which we derive consumable products, and as such have few legal rights, if any.
The tall, skinny, stylised elephant form derives from carving a chunk of found aerated concrete in 1995; and the form has developed through carving individual elephants, to rammed earth in a glass fibre formwork, to casting pigmented concrete in a rubber mould (the bulk of the street elephants), to the recent adaptation of hemp and lime as a medium. This last is much lighter and a much more environmentally benign material and shows a lot of promise.
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I have expanded this in the past year to push the boundaries of the theory of the information based holographic physical matter reality we appear to inhabit. This takes the form of sculptures called ‘Pure Love Transducers’, which translate the energy from the environment and re-emit it as a frequency of pure love to their surroundings, and it takes the form of an installation/ performance piece called ‘The Empathy Revolution Love machine’, first exhibited in Miami in 2022. Additional versions of this installation have been made for the UK. The purpose is to use words and ritual in order that participants are able to remove fear and trauma programming from themselves, and it seems to be very effective.
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When she isn’t making Tunnel Tourists zines with Chloe, Nicky puts her neurodiversity into photographic, multi-media mess-making and other, less productive studio practice. She is also an art therapist, a workshop facilitator, found fun in green woodworking, and is fairly alright at being a small-time fundraiser, occasionally working on projects for Thamesmead and Lesnes Abbey & Woods.
J D Swann is an ornithological investigator who has searched for the ultimate Thamesmead bird in Stephen Turner’s Exbury Egg at the Lakeside Centre and in Thamesmead Library (2019), also Food For Feathered Friends with Miyuki Kasahara at Cygnet Square in February 2022. He created the series Thamesmead's Best Beaks and Thamesmead Wild Chorus on RTM (Radio Thamesmead) 2020-22 and conducted Thamesmead Wonder Walks six nature walks from August 21 to March 22 supported by a Making Space for Nature Fund Grant and Three Walks for Three River, supported by Three Rivers in summer 2022.
J D Swann appears courtesy of Calum F Kerr - www.vimeo.com/calumfkerr
Jamie Zubairi completed Art Foundation at Leicester DMU but switched to acting training at LAMDA. During his 25 year career as an actor, he maintained a painting and photography practice. He has written and performed in 3 plays, all of which have a strong live-painting element. He continues to work in a mix of media and styles, but especially charcoal drawing and Chinese brush, which he learned as a child in his native Malaysia. He also runs Thamesmead Life Drawing
