About and Artists

OutsiderXchanges – Short film by Martin Livesey capturing the process of OutsiderXchanges project

OutsiderXchanges is a pioneering visual arts project based on collaboration, reciprocal learning and creative exchange.

Over 7-months six learning disabled artists and six emerging artists from Manchester and Newcastle have collaborated to make new work. Taking parity of ideas and aesthetic approaches as a starting point the resulting works blur the line between art and life, inviting the viewer to challenge their own conceptions of art and what might be considered ‘outsider’ art.

Venture Arts is a Manchester based organisation that works to progress the careers of learning disabled artists.

This project is led by Venture Arts in partnership with Castlefield Gallery, Manchester and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and CVAN.

OutsiderXchanges is a moveable feast and offers several different happenings and presentations from September to November 2016.

OutsiderXchanges Artists:

Manchester: Juliet Davis, Barry Anthony Finan, Matt Girling, David James, Sarah Lee, Sophie Lee, Horace Lindezey, Rosanne Robertson, Leslie Thompson, Lead Artist Tanya Raabe-Webber and Lead Artist Mentor James Pollitt.

Newcastle – Gateshead: Jane Louise Graham and Simon Raven.

OutsiderXchanges is supported through public funding by Arts Council England.

For more information about the project or press enquiries please contact: info@venturearts or Director Amanda Sutton on amanda@venturearts.org or call: 0161 232 1223

OutsiderXchanges Artists

David James

David has been painting, stitching and drawing for many years, attending adult education classes and Venture Arts workshops to develop his artistic talent. His compulsion to make art was only recently discovered as we visited his flat in which every inch of his walls are finely decorated with painting, collage and found objects. We feel…

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Leslie Thompson

Lesley has a highly developed drawing style and draws constantly. He has always drawn avidly from memory, depicting scenes from television and film from 1970 -1990. His drawings are punctuated with fascinating anecdotes from film, music and TV and he also has a vast collection of superheroes which he binds and protects. It would be…

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Sophie Lee

Working predominantly with photography, installation and artists’ books, Sophie Lee explores social structures and the roles we assume within them. Investigating the idea of institution, her work considers themes of domesticity, education and ritual. Examining frameworks that have the potential to support or confine the shaping of our identities, Lee builds fractured narratives through the…

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Rosanne Robertson

I am an artist working with action, sound, objects and moving image. I aim for honest and meaningful interaction with space, objects, sound and people via as many platforms as is useful. I graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2009 and have since exhibited and performed at galleries from The Bluecoat, Liverpool to Departure…

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Matt Girling

Matt Girling uses a diverse and chaotic range of media including model making, moving image and comic-art to make work that often has modular and interactive elements. Re-occurring themes include the passage of time and the position of human civilization in relation to nature, which matt navigates with with generous pinch of humor. ”I was…

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Barry Anthony Finan

Barry sees himself as a writer and an actor, although he has an eye for producing bold striking visual art as part of this. It is important for him to enact the work through readings and broadcasting. Barry works consistently with text. The text is artistically important in that it highlights a vision of life…

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Juliet Davis

Juliet Davis (b 1991, France) is an artist and curator whose work spans across live performance, video, installation, and mixed media, always exploring lived experiences of the everyday and creating social situations where people are ‘activated’. She is also the co-founder of LEGROOM, a movement/art platform. In her curatorial projects she creates engaging situations for both…

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Sarah Lee

Sarah is a multimedia visual artist working predominantly in charcoal, acrylic, pencil and textiles. her work is influenced particularly by animals, architecture, history and literature, often blending these to make detailed annotations on life and the world around her. She has a collection of living sketch books which she takes everywhere she goes so that…

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Horace Lindezey

Born and bred in Manchester, Horace Lindezey has been making arts for over 30 years. He is a skilled illustrator, textile artist and ceramicist. Much of his work depicts the world around him, his local area (Moss Side, Manchester) his family and influences from the media. His work is intricate and detailed and gives his…

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Simon Raven

Simon is an artist who works in performance, video, painting, sculpture and sound. Currently he is writing his PhD developing original critical and creative research into the value that diversity, and a lived experience of disability might have in the production and appreciation of contemporary art. Collaboration is a key part of his practice. Recent…

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Jane Louise Graham

Jane’s work often touches on childhood presenting stories, animated or moving image, but when you look behind the story it has connections to mental health conditions, themes of isolation, not knowing which way to turn, lack of trust; themes that resound with disability.

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Tanya Raabe- Webber – Lead Artist

Tanya Raabe-Webber is an acclaimed visual artist challenging the notion of identity within contemporary portraiture, often creating portraits of high profile disabled people during live sittings in public art galleries and venues. Tanya, devises artworks exploring and challenging identity, a disabled self and the nude in contemporary art. She has exhibited as a solo artist…

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James Pollitt

James Pollitt is OutsiderXchanges Lead Artist Mentor. He is an illustrator who currently produces comic style graphic narratives for a medical publishing company. He also creates and illustrates original children’s books and graphic novels. Other commissioned work has included designing maps and producing an exhibitions of illustrated ghost stories and Japanese poetry and ghost stories. He has recently begun exploring puppet making and stop-motion animation, where he makes…

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