I think this idea of drawing being ‘at the core’ is really more to do with attitude. I see a lot of artists who make their images through photographs, or tracing photographs, or using Photoshop, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that way of working but it doesn’t interest me. I like the fact that drawings made from life – or from the mind’s eye – go wrong, or look weird, that you have to respond to physical marks as you put them down on paper and rub them out again. There’s a struggle there, which has its own story. And I’m not interested in making images that are accurate, or flashy, I just want them to have a feeling. It’s hard to say what that feeling is, but from what I can see, it enters through the freedom of drawing, when the mind is completely focussed and the hand and eye are well practiced but loose and free. Painting and Printmaking to me are just extensions of this. They have their own dialects but they are the same language, and they all feed into each other.

I’d always identified as a bit of a wanderer and dreamer, struggling to find roots in the places and people around me. I think that’s what first pulled me to nature; the freedom it symbolises and the vastness it can hold. It felt endless and open yet increasingly familiar. I don’t know if it’s because I grew up in a rural place or if I started to tap into a more instinctual, very human, pull to the outdoors that predates me, but in nature is where I feel I most belong. Not all the time, but for the most part, immersing myself in the outdoors settles my often restless spirit with a sense of home.

It’s a tumultuous landscape for sure but I’m realising just how many passionate allies there are. As a professional artist, to earn a living from my work is a balance between responding to invitations, commissions, applications etc. and creating what I want without a specific framework in place for that work. It takes a large amount of faith, perseverance and flexibility and a supportive community who have a more self-initiated, nuanced value system and to question the capitalist idea that expediential acquisition of cash is humans’ main aim on this planet. My tactic is to be true to myself and make work that I think is strong and relevant and continues to resonate with people, and to use my skills to support myself and assist and enable others where possible.

In the first year of my BA (1990) the photography module was taught by a wonderful man called Steve Atkinson, who was a real pinhole photography buff. From him I learned all the basics of film photography (no digital in those days), and my love of everything pinhole-related is thanks to Steve. I was enchanted to discover that a photograph could be made with nothing more than an empty container with a tiny hole at one end and a piece of light-sensitive material at the other. The appeal of this purity and simplicity, qualities belied by the complex visual and psychological content of the resulting images, has only intensified with time. Also, using a pinhole camera means that the final image is largely the product of guesswork and is always something of a surprise. This mixture of the planned and the haphazard, of intent and accident, is one of pinhole photography's most appealing qualities for me.

We were brought together by music, actually. We’re both musicians, and we were roped in to play at an event one very hot January in Sydney. We’d be hanging out with the rest of the band, just eating and joking around, and within a couple of days of meeting it was clear that we thought about music in a really similar way ‒ it’s a tangible fixture in our lives, a kind of scaffold for living out our days and coming to terms with our hopes, fears, desires. That summer, I was in the habit of hosting listening parties with my housemates. A bunch of people would come around and share a song they loved ‒ any kind, any genre ‒ and we’d all sit around in the living room and listen to them in turn. No judgement allowed. It sounds totally pretentious, but actually it was a lovely way to just be with others and to share art that made sense to us, or maybe made sense of us.

Since opening the cafe the reaction has been so positive. We have such lovely regular customers and everyone always comments on the positive energy the cafe has! It’s so lush to see people get on board with our approach to sustainability too. For example we have no single use containers and our customers have been donating jars and containers they no longer use for others to use! We are creating a sustainable community. Not just that but the amount of customers who are loving our super healthy food is amazing! Customers trying fruit and veg juice for the first time or customers saying they don’t usually eat vegan food but they loved it! So many customers comment on how nourished and positive they feel after a visit which is the most incredible thing! Sharing wellness to allow others to live healthier and happier lives. The reaction and the first few months has just been beyond anything I could have ever imagined! I think it proves that if you have a vision and strong passion then others will sense it and they will want to join in!

My interest in geometry is a purely aesthetic response, and there is not much formal mathematics in my current work – it’s mostly logic determined by the structure of the weaving. However, I am now researching more formal maths which can be found within the surfaces I am creating. I began to construct vessels using layers of grids simply because I did not like working with wet willow although I did like the material. I read Geography at University and drew maps, and my vessels are constructed in the way you would build a relief map using the information provided by contour lines. I drew the profile and the contours I wished to achieve on graph paper and then built layer after layer of grids and pinned them together.

Lauren: I did an animation degree at the University of Wales, Newport, and went freelance straight out of uni rather than contracting at studios. So the start of my journey was mainly eating toast for all meals and trying not to spend any money. It took me a few years to build up a client base and get a reliable amount of work through word of mouth. Eventually I got some big enough projects to employ other freelancers – it was fun having room to collaborate and it gave me a little taste of what it might be like to run a company.

Dani: I had quite an opposite journey to Lauren – in that when I graduated from Swansea Metropolitan University I went straight into industry as a worker-bee! My first job was animating realistic faces for some computer games (Grand Theft Auto!) and from there I made my way into Children’s TV. I got a lot of experience animating in many different styles and made tons of contacts. Along the way, I always had the feeling that you could never be ‘heard’ as a worker-bee and I had ideas above my station!

I had always admired and enjoyed the Festival (I first attended in 1989, when I came to Herefordshire) and when I screened the films I really enjoyed being around ‘live’ events again. My background is in theatre, and even though my work had moved into film and digital media there is still something about the ‘live’ event that I find incredibly appealing and enduring. I think it’s the connection you can make with an audience and the opportunity to be emotionally engaged with others in the same room. Whilst I was at Rural Media I found myself creating new digital projects that encompassed more live elements, for example Life Loves to Change, a large scale film and poetry project in Ledbury that placed 32 films in 16 businesses across the town and culminated in a live performance of the poem with film projection and Five Years in the Fifties, an archive, poetry and music project, which encompassed performance, digital media, poetry and a new score. Hay seemed a natural step back into the ‘live’ event world, an opportunity to explore new ideas and be involved with a Festival that had a significant national and global reach.

For a pot to be successful it has to work properly. If it functions well but isn’t successful aesthetically, it’s still a mug, that’s one of the nice things about making functional objects. My aim is to make pots that express energy and life through their making. I focus on form, technique and materials to do this. They are aspects of the making process that allow for a lot of expression whilst going hand in hand with function.

We’re lucky enough to have an ethical cooperative less than 50 miles away from Ripple, so they provide the majority of our bulk wholefoods. Non-food items are curated from a mix of local makers and ethical brands who are doing amazing work to ensure they pay a fair trade and raise up their workers across the globe. I spend a large portion of my time researching, connecting and pitching to businesses who I want to work with. There’s nothing in Ripple that I haven’t tried-and-tested myself. That honesty means that I won’t always stock a popular brand, despite being asked by our customers. Sometimes, that’s because I’ve found a smaller independent that I’d like to support, but quite often it’s because that brand which everyone knows, has grown a rapid and hollow following amongst the distorted marketing tools of greenwashing.

I am drawn to wilderness and large spaces, the huge and intangible. My efforts to capture these on paper may be attempts to tame them and make them more familiar and accessible. My recent work has focused on the Earth, sky and water. These elements are immeasurably large, but the process of observing, selecting and reproducing a portion of them inside a frame makes that section more knowable. But it also hints at how unknowable the whole is. They are shifting and unstable bodies of matter, which I attempt to suspend outside of time just for a moment.

Tim: We are definitely different, different approaches and different points of view. We always use this to test each other’s ideas and ways of working. I love the discussions we have. We really make sure every perspective is covered.

Elena: Dance has always been a glue between us: we grew together on stage as much as behind the wings. After graduation we always had alternating periods when we’d work together or separate, so we both developed our own individuality but always searched for the other’s opinion and confrontation. We are both quite stubborn and we enjoy being challenged. We spend hours discussing certain subjects and I think we sort of become each other’s biggest challenge.

Globally, it is an issue that some businesses are trying to tackle, specialty coffee for example is trying to improve traceability and increase the money paid for the coffee so that farmers earn well and have good living conditions. People like Tony’s Chocolonelyare going into communities which have a reputation of slavery to buy their cocoa and directly tackle the slavery and build sustainable infrastructure at the same time. Other industries that have extreme problems with slavery and child labour is fishing industry ‒ especially in places like the coast of Thailand for shrimps! Or child mining for metals used in our phones (cobalt etc.), and blood diamonds and gold, where people are being exploited to mine some of the most expensive materials in the world! Places where the profit or bottom line is more important than people will always leave vulnerable people exploited. Every business has the potential to exploit people and have slavery in their supply chain or business.

I’ve always had an interest in cultural and creative activity – both doing it and trying to understand it and how it connects with people. From a young age, I got involved with participating in anything and everything creative including music, theatre, art, dance, etc. I studied theatre and English literature at university and was particularly interested in live performance and events and the impact they had on audiences and places.

When I was at university (20 years ago) the creative industries weren’t as clearly defined and understood as they are now. I don’t recall ever saying to my parents that I was going to work in the creative industries, but I guess now that is something graduates might have more clarity and information to consider in terms of a potential career direction and wider opportunities.

The work I make is, at its core, simple storytelling or myth making. I’m influenced by folktales and local history and the everyday gunk of living. When not painting I work in a bookshop and read a lot of fiction, so the stuff I’m soaking up with my eyeballs needs to be released somehow. It seeps out of my fingertips. Sometimes I can barely recall what books I’ve read, but it’s all absorbed and years later it might gradually ooze to the surface and influence a painting. So generally the philosophy that underpins what I make is taken from the written word and, as my wife will tell you, the books I read are always, always about the same thing, even if the blurb on the jacket might protest otherwise. It’s come to my attention in recent years that I like a book about humans (in particular outsiders or those at the fringes of society) at the very brink of their emotional, physical and spiritual tether, so I guess that’s what comes out in my work and is what I fundamentally explore.

I would say drawing is what I feel closest to, as that is how everything starts. I can make a simple line drawing and take it anywhere. I find that I usually lean more towards either printmaking or embroidery depending on the project at hand. The medium can amplify the message, for example embroidery is seen as instinctively domestic, which I think lends itself well to storytelling. In both processes there are fast and slow techniques and plenty of room for experimentation, so I might start with creating relief printed shapes and hand stitch on top, or use a digital embroidery machine to create large dense areas of stitched landscapes, and then finish with hand embroidery techniques that the machine can’t do. I work intuitively, and find balance that way, so each outcome is slightly different.

The perks are definitely learning about and meeting others who have set out to become independent. It’s nice to hear from other people who are driven not by money or by climbing the career ladder, but by passion for their work. Because of this, people will generally have genuinely interesting, and often very meaningful things that they want to talk about when we interview them or ask them to write a piece for us. Occasionally this doesn’t transpire, and sometimes a location we’re featuring won’t have quite a compelling backstory, for example. It can also be a challenge to find content that is varied enough: we like to include stories from a range of locations around the world, and from men and women who come from different backgrounds, and having a good range across each issue is often the most difficult thing to do.

Simply, it has been a solution when you don’t have access to other people. When I make theatre or performance works, which is generally how I make a living, you are part of a group and you all need to turn up to make the thing work. For the visual art projects that I make it is usually me sitting at home on my own so I often turn to me as a subject. It means I don’t have to do so much or any forward planning. I can be spontaneous, I can work quickly. If I had to wait for other people, then I wouldn’t get as much done. I’d probably give up. Also, I know what my face can do, what it looks like when I do this or that to it. I’ve looked at it a lot. I’ve made a lot of theatre shows. Lots of images have been taken of me in various states. Actors get to look at images of themselves all the time. Your actor’s ‘headshot’ is your calling card. For the Instagram ‘Mask’ project it had to be me. It’s me in my house working with materials found in my house or garden. I can’t imagine having someone else taking the image of me wearing a mask. It’s quite a private task. If anyone is in the house I can’t proceed. Several photographers have asked me if they can take photos of me in the masks but that isn’t the project. Maybe I could collaborate in the future… on a slightly different project.

During my 5 years of stay in Japan, I studied photography for 2 years at Nagoya Visual Arts College where I built up my knowledge of film photography. At the same time, I worked 2 years in a photographic lab in Nagoya where my passion for film increased more and more. After graduating and moving to Tokyo, I worked for one year as a staff member mounting lighting sets up at IINO MEDIA PRO studios. Back in Spain, I worked for one year in another lab and I am currently working in another lab while I’m running film photography workshops in Bristol. Looking back to my beginnings, I have always loved photography and I have always tried to do something related to it both in my personal life and in my professional life, as it is my passion.

Putting pencil to paper! Drawing lots of individual pencil layers, and shuffling them into a nice composition. Or scribbling terrible thumbnails and attempting to turn them into something beguiling. If I have the luxury of time, I like to snoop around bookshops for inspiration, but often I rely on the web or my reference books for imagery.

I am inspired by so many people. I love to look at local galleries to see who is showing and how the work has been hung. I draw inspiration but also decide to do things differently. I think The Tablein Hay-on-Wye has a great little set up. Absolutely love Huxley Parlour, London. Ffotogalleryin Cardiff. And Phrame, a new female driven photography collective.

I would say there is no such thing, yoga is for anybody and everybody, regardless of age, gender, religion, culture, physical ability. I am reading a book at the moment called Yoga mind. In the book, the author ‒ who is also a well known yoga teacher ‒ finds ways to teach yoga to her friend who fell in an accident and is completely paralysed from neck down. Yoga is beyond the asana (posture) practice, yoga is about connecting one’s mind, body and soul. We all have that but often don’t connect the three.

I have always cared ‒ from as young as I can remember ‒ about the planet. As a young teen I used to watch Planet Earth avidly. In the past few years I found myself staying up late at night ‒ reading and researching about the impact humans are having on this Earth and I felt compelled to do something. When I moved onto a canal boat 3 years ago (for the first time) I discovered that I felt a deep satisfaction in having minimal impact on the planet ‒ which propelled me to volunteer at a range of eco-homesteads in Sweden and Germany and finally in India. India was a true turning point for me ‒ I lived in a community of over 100 people called Sadhana Forestwhere they practice Ahimsa (non-violence in thought and action to all beings) and have beautiful circular processes that lead to minimal waste creation. It’s when I returned from India that I felt I could do something to limit the amount of waste created in my Bristol community.

There are indeed many established and successful interiors blogs around. The only way to stand out is to offer something different and to deliver it with personality. Boreal Abode offers long-form articles featuring original photography. Creating few, but high-quality design stories helps Boreal Abode stand out. There is a lot of research behind each blog post, and they vary in length between 1,000 to 4,000 words. It’s definitely not the easiest blogging route, but it’s the one I feel most comfortable with.

I’ve wanted to be a photographer for a long time now. I guess it started when I was quite little. We'd go to family events or days out and when Mum would develop the film from the old disposable cameras it would be full of my photographs. I’d take pictures of random napkins laid out in a certain way or party poppers made to look ‘arty’ and she’d get so frustrated! I just loved to focus on the little things that most people wouldn’t have even noticed. I kept taking photographs and it eventually became the answer I had to the typical “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question. I took Photography as an A-Level and at one point I actually nearly dropped it as a subject, but my teacher was insistent that I carry on. It was thanks to her (Mrs Rhonwen Jones, now Morris) that I pursued it and she helped with all the prep for my University interview. I know that without her, there’s no way I’d still be doing it today.

We come from quite different backgrounds and have different skills which together covers most bases. Heidi is a graphic designer by training so manages all the creative side of the business, from the brand and product design, to the website and customer experience. Toby is an engineer by education and has worked for a management consultant in the energy industry for years after graduation, meaning his strengths lie more in the analytical and business side of the company.

My current practice centres around the realms of family life and so I constantly document this, looking out for those weird and freaky moments children provide on a daily basis and photographing them. My kids are now 5 and 7 and I am amazed every day by how utterly exhausted I am and how no one ever warns you about how difficult parenthood is. On the flip side though, I really don’t think I would have gotten back into painting with such gusto if it wasn’t for them. I’ve never had a muse before but now I find myself living with two mini ones.

Creativity has always been woven into my life from early childhood. I was a shy but passionate child and would sit transfixed for hours entranced by drawing and painting. I was a daydreamer and easily distracted at school and would sit transfixed looking at the classroom walls or outside the window. Art was my escape; but it also helped me express myself and developed my voice. Whilst I can’t remember the artwork that I made or the artists that inspired me around this time, I do remember the joy that art gave me ‒ this excitement hasn’t left!

We were made co-editors of the magazine’s yearly arts supplement, Tŷ Celf. This sparked ideas about publishing art. We were also really aware that the kind of work we liked was not being represented anywhere. Sadia had had some interaction with zines & DIY art publishing from London. But we knew from our experiences that this energy of art and creation that we wanted to experience was not at all present or accessible in Cardiff.