SHEERAN LOCK - Creativity & Enterprise

Online Art Gallery

In 2008, Sheeran Lock celebrates its 18th Birthday and coming of age! To mark this, we have opened an online art gallery - www.sheeranlockartgallery.com - with a variety of high quality art for sale by living artists. We have been thinking about it for a few years and now feel that technology and global communications networks are good enough for us to take the plunge. We are very excited about the possibilities.

Artist Consultancy

It is the 15th anniversary of our Artist Consultancy service. We have advised numerous artists, photographers and musicians both in the UK and around the world on all aspects of their professional careers and it has been a great pleasure to witness their success over the years. If you are an artist and are interested in an Artist Consultancy, please contact us.

Young Brits at Art

We have been asked by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK to organise Young Brits at Art 2, a major national art competition and exhibition for 11-19 year olds to encourage young people to express their thoughts and feelings about living in 21st century Britain. The competition provides an ideal opportunity for the Commission to promote its ethos and agenda and to engage with young people and the media. Students will be encouraged to address key contemporary issues as subjects for their creativity, including human rights, the environment, cultural identity, globalisation, poverty and deprivation, gender, race and equality, and sense of self. The competition will be launched later this year and the award ceremony and exhibition will take place in 2009. In 2006, Sheeran Lock organised Young Brits at Art 1 for The Commission for Racial Equality. The award ceremony and exhibition took place at the Royal Albert Hall, London. The competition, exhibition and accompanying publication were widely praised for giving a valuable insight into the lives and everyday concerns of young people.

Mierins

We are working closely with the Latvian émigré painter Mierins, helping him with high profile international projects, including his 80th birthday celebration in March 2009. We first met Mierins 16 years ago when we did an Artist Consultancy for him. In 1995 we organised his first retrospective exhibition at the State Art Museum of Latvia and published the first book on his life and art. Since then Mierins has become established as one of the best-known contemporary artists in the Baltic States. He has been decorated by the President of Latvia with The Order of the Three Stars, the country’s highest civilian honour. We are currently preparing an 80th birthday publication on the artist. Mierins is one of the artists featured on our new Sheeran Lock Art Gallery website (www.sheeranlockartgallery.com), which includes various films made by Sheeran Lock about his life and work.

Laurence Edwards

We have been advising the sculptor Laurence Edwards and helping him with Creek Men, a fascinating exhibition which chronicles the year-long creative process behind his making and siting of three monumental bronze figures in the reed beds in front of Snape Maltings, during the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival (13 to 29 June 2008). Edwards’s work is inspired by the ancient woodland, marshes and Saxon history of the coastal landscape between Aldeburgh and Sutton Hoo. The exhibition is being held in the Concert Hall Gallery at Snape Maltings, and includes photography and film of the sculptures being modelled in clay, impregnated with organic matter from the landscape, and cast in bronze by Edwards at his Butley Creek studio and foundry. It also follows their remarkable journey on a raft by river to Snape and their siting on the tidal mudflats. Notes, sketches and small bronze studies reveal Edwards’s deep interest in the natural, historical and cultural identity of the area.

Phillip Butah

We are helping the artist Phillip Butah with a fascinating sporting portraits project. We have known and advised Phillip ever since he was a teenage prize-winner in the Young Artists’ Britain competition, which we organised in 1998 for the 50th birthday exhibition of HRH The Prince of Wales. Phillip is currently working on a series of portraits of his sporting heroes. He has recently completed a portrait of the British Olympic sprinter Linford Christie, and is arranging to travel to the USA to do portraits of Pele and Muhammad Ali.