Shinichi Sawada
(b. 1982)

Born in 1982, Shinichi Sawada has attended Nakayoshi Fukushikai, a social welfare organisation for disabled individuals, since the year 2000, where he divides his time working in the sculpture hut up in the mountains and in the institution’s bakery. It is only feasible to work on the ceramics during the spring and summer months due to severe winter weather conditions affecting the ceramics in the open-sided hut.

Sawada is a prolific artist taking around four days to complete each ceramic piece. When Sawada works, he demonstrates such confidence and assuredness that it seems he has already envisioned how his final pieces will look. With his delicate fingers, he applies each ‘thorn/spike’ onto the main body of the piece without showing any kind of hesitation and always works in silence. These ‘thorns/spikes’ have evolved over time, becoming denser and more rounded. Sawada often has them laid out in straight orderly lines across the pieces too.

These piece are fired in hand-made wood fired ovens. They are fired constantly for three days and three nights and the oven then takes a week to cool down before they are removed. This is why the pieces have different colours across them dependent upon where they were placed in the oven.

Being autistic with little communication means that his works and their ‘thorns’ remain a mystery to us. There are however around fifteen-twenty different motifs that he looks to replicate each time but, saying this, each finished product is totally unique. He often uses one to influence to look of another he is creating. Since 2017 he has been joined in the ceramics hut by Akio Kontani and his work has taken on a different look, with less ‘thorns’ across the body of the pieces.

Sawada’s work is now in several collections around the world including the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and the abcd collection in Paris, as well as in several contemporary artists' collections. It was featured in Massimilioni Gioni’s Encyclopedic Palace at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and in a special booth curated by artist Javier Tellez titled The Doors of Perception at Frieze Art Fair in New York in 2019. In 2021 Sawada had a solo show at Venus over Manhattan in New York.

Sawada has a solo show opening at James Cohan Gallery in New York on 4 March 2023, for one month. 

Features in an article in Raw Vision 102

Sawada in the New York Times 

Kate Bradbury
(b. 1961)

Kate Bradbury (b.1961) based in London, is a prolific creator of a diverse range of artworks. From detailed ink scribblings over a metre in length to sculptural twirling dervishes made from found objects, her style of work is ever changing. Since 2003, the motivation for her creative endeavours comes from a variety of sources, but is particularly drawn from objects she finds. She gathers endless supplies of discarded industrial and household waste that she places in relevant boxes around her home, where they stay until the opportune moment arises. 

Bradbury’s work goes through phases, sometimes focusing on figures and characters and sometimes on more abstract forms. Nevertheless each piece tells a story plucked from her imagination. Having no formal art training, Bradbury learns through trial and error, experimentation and by observations of how others work. Intuitively working day and night, Bradbury creates her pieces losing all sense of time, getting lost in the details of her drawings or sculptures. 

Since showing her work in self-organised solo shows at Stoke Newington library and then in group shows organised by the effervescent Sue Kreitzman, Kate Bradbury was introduced to Jennifer Gilbert who has championed her work ever since. Several private collectors now own Bradbury’s work across the UK and her work featured and sold in the Royal Academy of Art’s Summer Show in 2016 and 2021.

Cara Macwilliam
(b.1972)

Cara Macwilliam (b.1972) is a self-taught, disabled visual artist. She started being creative in 2018 during a severe relapse, stating that art allows her to travel in ways she no longer can, due to being mainly homebound. There is flow, energy and movement in her art, everything she says her illness has taken away. Macwilliam’s practice involves travelling into surreal landscapes and mythologies using watercolour, dip pens, textiles or clay. Each material adds a different dimension, with a lot of whimsical animism in her work. Always working from an automatic process with no planning or sketching, allows purely instinctive play, with her hand dancing in all directions, adding the marks, forming the clay or laying the stitch. 

Of the ‘Energies’ series Cara says, "I refer to these as my energy drawings. They are created by hundreds of layers of watercolour pencils, which take hours to do. As with all my art they are automatic with no planning. Art transports me out of the mundane walls of my sick and housebound state, I drop away and off I travel. I have suffered a number of traumas and creating these drawings are such an anchor when I'm feeling emotional distress, they coalesce with my nervous system which creates an energetic shift within. It's like every stroke laid down is a moment of love for my sensitized body, touching every fibre and cell of my being. I love the positivity they exude once finished and it never ceases to amaze me how much of an emotional charge has been enacted at the end.” 

In 2021, Cara won the London based College of Psychic Studies Art Competition. In 2022 Cara received a DYCP grant from Arts Council England and is currently in a phase of R&D with her drawings and learning projection mapping to take them to a new level and experience.

Interview with Cara from the College of Psychic Studies

Carlo Keshishian
(b.1980)

Carlo Keshishian (b.1980) is a visual artist based in London, working primarily with ink and paint. Since 2010, Keshishian has focussed on a series of text-based diary drawings that capture his engagement with what he considers the illusory nature of time. Music has also been intrinsic to Keshishian’s creation process. The pace, rhythm, mood and level of intensity of the music he is listening to while he works affects or can at times in part instruct the outcome regarding its content (text), quality of line and speed with which the work is executed.

His diary drawings have become part of notable collections such as the abcd/Bruno Decharme collection, Antoine de Galbert (La Maison Rouge) collection and the Eternod/Mermod collection, Switzerland.

Features in an article in Raw Vision number 86

Valerie Potter 
(b. 1954)

Upon reading the seminal Outsider Art book from 1972 by Roger Cardinal, Valerie Potter (b.1954) decided to send its author some drawings. The art historian was so impressed, he curated Potter’s first solo exhibition at the University of Kent in 1985, recommending her to collector Monika Kinley.

Although always creative, Potter did not consider herself an art-maker. Born in Kent in 1954, she had spent a childhood in Nigeria and adolescence in Jamaica, alongside her father, a teacher and educator. At 19, Potter enrolled at art school, but found it restrictive and left, continuing her drawing at home. When she caught sight of a stranger, cross-stitching on a local train platform, she considered whether fabric might give her more freedom and portability. It was a moment of realisation; and it led the artist to explore a new and exciting format.

Potter’s practice shifted. Elaborate weaves described personal associations. Fantastical landscapes and microscopic worlds were fuelled by the artist’s love of botany. They tied together symbols of birth, death and love with non-religious iconography, all in cross-stitch. Complex and swirling monochromatic works formed the next phase of her production. The line drawings on cloth (as she describes them) use graphic text and image to describe the dense inner monologues and dialogues of her analytic mind. These materialisations offered a means to articulate ideas and concerns, philosophies and phobias. The drawing is not planned, and Potter just draws whatever pops into her head, as well as her thoughts and emotions from that day. She likes having a blank canvas and being able to fill it. It takes around one month for a piece to be finished, working for two hours per day. The last one of her embroideries is always her favourite until she is part way through her next one, then her favourite always changes to that one.

Potter continues to live and work in Margate, where she also writes poetry and knits. Her drawings, paintings, tapestries and embroideries have been exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, UK), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), Whitworth Museum (Manchester, UK) and Tate Britain (London, UK). Collections include the Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester, UK) and Bethlem Museum of the Mind (Kent, UK).

Features in an article in the most recent Raw Vision Magazine