For me, ikeduende sums up the two main passions in my life. Ike comes from Ikebana, which means Japanese flower arranging, though it is a lot more than simply flower arranging; the artist becomes very involved in and affected by the process while their senses – touch, smell, sight and a sense of space – create a unique art piece, like a sculpture, but alive, a naturally changing sculpture. Duende is taken from the world of flamenco and translates roughly as “fire” in English. It is the spontaneous sensation a flamenco troupe feels when they reach an elated state while singing, dancing and playing together.

My family had this simple point and shoot camera. I was 15 and I started to take pictures of myself to boost my confidence as my self esteem used to be very low. This way I discovered it was definitely my thing and I knew I had to do something with it. I had a short time at photography school back in Poland, but I mostly taught myself. I didn't really try to make it my career until I moved to Bristol though, I always had an excuse why it wouldn’t be possible. Luckily, I came to my senses!

Every single step had its own set of challenges – it took 7 years before any beans actually made the trip to the UK. Communication, language, technology, transport, quality control, education, post harvest facilities and tools all play a part. It's a very complicated set of variables which work very well when all lined up; however with one part out of place the whole thing falls apart.

Hearing the term Iron Curtain as a child was very strange. I thought, iron curtain, where is it? What does it look like? I had no serious understanding of it at all. I do recall the campaign to prepare for nuclear war by building bomb shelters around the time of the Cuban missile crisis. We did not build one.

I made up for my ignorance later by tramping around Central and Eastern Europe as a journalist. I was greatly influenced by Bill. When I met him in 1981 he’d recently been expelled from Czechoslovakia for performing the illegal act of giving a philosophy lecture to dissident academics. In Warsaw he’d photographed the Polish paramilitary police, ZOMO, putting down peaceful protest. So he had great stories to tell, setting off my lifetime passion for travelling in challenging places.

I’ve actually got two careers – I’m a qualified doctor and practise as a GP for 3 days a week within a vibrant community in central Cardiff. Until recently, I had very little free time to pursue creativity. However, since moving to Wales last year, and reducing my hours to part-time, I’m now able to dedicate more hours to making. I’ve been working with wood for around a year now, and aside from my lovely sculpture class, I’m self-taught.

I have lots of memories of living in a campervan when I was aged between 3 and 4. My mum was writing a book about European languages, my dad was taking photos and painting, and my sister was freshly born. Something that sticks out right now is a time I was really scared, I guess those memories stay more vivid when the others blur and mush together. My parents wanted to look at an old cathedral, but I thought that was boring and was determined to stay in the van. After not very long, I changed my mind and went to find them. But when I left the van, I found myself in what I remember as an open square full of people, my parents nowhere to be seen! I started screaming, as loud as I could. A kindly old man sitting on his moped offered me a sweet, but I remembered “stranger danger” and you are never meant to accept sweets off unfamiliar men, especially not if they are sitting on mopeds, so I screamed even louder. My parents recognised my dulcet tones and came running. This is probably quite a vivid memory for them, too. I remember the cathedral was boring after all.

Growing up surrounded by hills has also been a huge influence; there’s a history of climbers in my family. Climbing takes me to places I wouldn’t ordinarily visit, whether it be a 2000m wall in Yosemite, California, or a damp cave in the South Wales valleys (much to the disappointment of my girlfriend Danielle). It gives me perspective and inspiration which you don’t get from many sports – it also keeps me fit.

Responsible sourcing of our ingredients is central to our ethos.

We strive to celebrate British farming and support other local small-scale producers and farmers.

We believe in skin care which is simple, good enough to eat and of high-quality, which is accessible to everyone.

Using etching supports my vision in the subjects I am depicting. Textures and marks are important to my practice as it helps express what my eye witnesses in the urban landscape. The etching process requires an enforced decay whereby the acid bites into the copper plate, resonating with the natural decay of the structures that I am recording.

The slowness of the process allows me to continually reassess, expand ideas and fully enjoy the methodological approach of intaglio printmaking. Etching is something that cannot be rushed, it takes time and commitment. It’s extremely process driven and attentiveness is essential. There’s a real alchemy to this process which captivates me, one that I am continually learning something new about daily.

We first met through screen printing. Amber was the first to join a print studio Alex was building in Bristol. Working as freelance illustrators we became firm friends, we spent hours shacked up in the studio together, late night drawing sessions, glasses of vino and dancing on the tables.

I was a bit of a ragamuffin of a child; always looking a bit dishevelled and wearing clothes that had already been passed down through my five other siblings. I didn’t help myself though. When I was about four, I vividly remember finding myself some Crayola scissors (remember those?) and sitting in my parents’ hallway, hacking away at my hair. My mum spotted me from the landing, stared at me and just burst out laughing because I looked utterly ridiculous. I think I probably cried - I was trying to give myself a bob like the babysitter’s.

I got into meditation at 20 years old as I was looking for a healthy holistic way to decrease my number of seizures. Anything other than increasing my medication. I had enough of hiding seizures under tablets that were making me feel tired, forgetful and slow at thinking. I was diagnosed with epilepsy during my teenage years. Meditation not only decreased my number of seizures but it also changed my life in a range of other ways. I became a happier person, I learnt to love myself, relationships with family grew stronger and I became more confident alongside loads of other benefits!

Social and environmental matters are mainly the ones I like to focus on. I want the viewer to experience through my eyes the places I've been to. I also like to photograph subjects that I think people should know about. I love photographing older people that I’m either familiar with or are complete strangers. I feel that they carry a lot of history and the textures you can get are amazing. I always try to evoke the feeling I had when I was there, taking the picture.

We enjoy problem solving and having fun with our work. We balance it so we don't end up repeating monotonous tasks but find a flow in our method of working. We bounce ideas off each other and the design process for a new style is like a call to an answer choir with one person taking the lead and the other responding until we find something we’re both excited about.

I’ve always wanted to make things with my hands and create. The craft of making and altering clothes came really naturally, it was so satisfying to start learning the skills. I still find the practice immensely satisfying and mediative now, the breadth of techniques seems endless and I feel I’ve always got more to learn and practice. My grandma taught me when I was young, she’s been making clothes for herself and for our family all her life, her enthusiasm for it motivated my interest. I went to study fashion and clothing design at college in Nottingham and at Falmouth University, having graduated three years ago.

Daniel: Around the age of five or six I remember a shoe being sucked off my foot in the deep mud of a creek near our home. The creek was totally out of bounds, forbidden. But we played there anyway. I couldn’t find the shoe, which belonged to a new pair specifically purchased for my pageboy role at a wedding the same day. I was a pretty good kid, but I failed there.

Susan: I remember endless card and board game sessions, successively with my alcoholic and bedridden grandmother, followed by my parents and then my (much younger) brothers. I am currently working at Wild & Wolf here in Bath who happen to design and make real, physical board games, which seem to be making a comeback. Like magazines!

We are painters who converted a removal lorry into our home. For a year or so it was our studio too but that turned out to be a hectic way to live, and now we have a separate studio. We both graduated from Brighton University with a desire to travel and work so we converted the truck and set off to Europe where we did those things and also found an opportunity to set up a residency on a disused farm near Granada. We did that too and it ran for 5 months accommodating lots of lovely early career artists. Returning for the English winter seems a little mad but we have done some work on the truck and renewed some long awaited paperwork. Another trip is in the pipeline for sure.

Dafydd: I don’t really have any vivid memories, and I have to admit that I also have terrible memory recall, so anytime I try to remember something my mind just becomes a big empty space. It’s like someone literally scoops out all my thoughts... and then I usually just start daydreaming. My memories just tend to be outlines of, vague feelings of, or impressions of.

Zosia: My long-term memory is too good, so I have lots of memories. I guess one of the most vivid ones is sticking my head inside a massive washing machine and yelling, asking my parents to come back home from work (no idea why I thought they could hear me). I remember the smell of it, the texture of the insulation and the echo of my voice. I hated preschool and was lucky that my grandma retired just as my parents gave up on sending me there. I always preferred hanging out with adults, so I was not the most popular child as you can imagine.

Dance is communication. I believe any art form needs to be communicative. As artists I feel we are responsible to communicate to people, and allow people to communicate when they are part of one of my works. The beauty of dance is that the body is our instrument of communication, words are not always needed. Everyone moves. Everyone is able to connect to movement. I think dance becomes an art form when the message an Artist wants to convey is not hidden or shadowed by movement but the message becomes the initial source of the movement.

After a late drum & bass night we missed the last tram home in Montpellier (France). As we crossed the city on foot we found all sorts of stuff that had been thrown out on the street, a coffee machine, a chair, clothes, kids toys and a lamp, we think! Hannah didn’t have an income at this point and we decided to do a flea market. John’s family and friends passed on all kinds of things they no longer wanted and built a stock for our very first market. It was a great experience, we loved it. John instantly became captivated by the treasure hunt, reinvesting 1-2€ to find interesting valuable pieces and Hannah loved finding homes for unwanted belongings, content in the knowledge these things were not going to landfill. We used to stay at the end of the market to collect pieces that had been left behind. Quickly our stock evolved from car boot sale style to a more refined vintage stock, we were instantly hooked.

I have many vivid childhood memories. The first record I ever owned was a 45 rpm single, called “Message Understood” by Sandie Shaw. Shortly after getting it my father took me to see her perform at the London Palladium where she was the headline act on a variety show. Just him and me. My father was a fast and purposeful walker and I remember holding his hand trotting along to keep up, taking the train up to London, then a bus to get to the theater. I found cities very exciting. She was famous for performing barefoot which she did at this performance. It seemed exotic and rebellious.

Being held underwater. It sounds more morbid than it was! My dad took me on a water slide in France after I’d begged all day, I was about 3 at the time. The drop at the end was bigger than Dad realised and he couldn’t let go of me, so he had to hold onto me and try to swim up as quickly as possible. It was probably no more than a few seconds but my most vivid memory is looking up at shadowy figures through the bubbles & water for what seemed like hours. I was terrified at the time but weirdly that memory has always given me a tremendous sense of calm. I love the serenity and aloneness of being under water.

Two ways. One, via the use of surprise. And the other by making something that is extremely still. I often think of a piece by Jayne Parker. It is called ‘All the knives in my house’. Several knives are in a box that is photographed from above, flattened into an image and ready for a wall, as if out of reach. The piece makes me think of the time around the boxing up of the knives, and of course the emotions that live in that time, both before and after. It is an event that is still and it gives off time like an aroma.

Photography and lens-based media have long been popular and accessible to diverse audiences, providing a compelling vehicle by which we understand and represent our own experience and that of society evolving around us. The ubiquity of photographic images, the sheer volume of them and the speed at which they are digitally transmitted and shared around the globe, can at times be overwhelming. However, at its best photography can command our attention and enable us to see the world differently, to change the way we think and feel, and to better understand what our lives mean to us. It is photography’s transformational power which I feel underlines its importance to society.

‘Hundreds’ is being modest. We had over 2000 people at the march in Newport. Unbelievable numbers. My philosophy is multi-faceted and multi-layered because the issue at hand is multi-faceted and multi-layered. My philosophy stems from my experiences and my knowledge. To quote Thomas Sankara, you can only replace systems with systems. When we tackle the problems of racial and social injustice, we have to bear this in mind and this is what I aim to instil in people. No amount of individual benevolence will ever lead us to victory. We have to collectively imagine and then struggle to create a system that will replace the current status quo and power dynamic that we currently have in society right now. Secondly, I believe it is the activist’s responsibility to raise the social consciousness of the people they are proclaiming to help. I try to educate people as much as I can from all walks of life. The disruption and distortion of our epistemology has been one of the most insidious effects of racism. I want to undo this. I want my community, my people, to have access to as much knowledge and information as possible because this is essential in the struggle. I’ll end by saying that my call to action is to inspire people to imagine and then fight for a more utopian, egalitarian and equitable reality.

The philosophy with Old Faithful is to work with ingredients from nature that our bodies recognise and accept, are suitable for their purpose and beneficial for our wellbeing. The name 'Old Faithful’ is a nod towards the age old history and effectiveness of the natural ingredients we use in our products. These ingredients from plants and trees have seen the passage of time and they are still as relevant today as they have been for centuries. I actually think they are more relevant today than ever!

One of the most valuable lessons I learned when shadowing the press photographers was to shoot what interested me. Like anything in life, if you enjoy something or are fascinated by something, you’ll put more effort into it. These days I’m project driven in nearly everything I shoot. I’m not really a random snapper anymore. I used to do a lot of street photography, but I find it a little ubiquitous now, and I think that’s something that can be laid firmly at the feet of the digital revolution. Primarily, I want my photos to tell a story, to dissect a certain subject, to put a different slant on a subject, and that’s the same whether I’m shooting NHS staff, or as I am at the moment, working on a book about corrugated iron, or a woman’s transgender journey. The work has to have an honesty about it if it’s to work as a documentary, but I also like to introduce humour into my stories. I would also say that although I don’t describe myself as an artist, I do pay an awful lot of attention to light and composition in my documentary work. There definitely for me has to be an element of drama or even foreboding in a shot, and that’s something that black and white film gives in abundance.

In all honesty I was tired and looking for a regular income. It’s tiresome trying to keep afloat from project to project. I also enjoy engagement work and working with people. I was interviewed by a panel including a teenager. They asked me to take him on an impromptu tour, he said he didn’t like contemporary art but I showed him a vase by Grayson Perry and we ended up chatting about toxic masculinity. I remember pointing out Allan Measles as Grayson’s spirit animal and my description was “That’s Allan Measles there, the teddy with the erection with bells on.” I went home after that and thought I’d completely blown it. I don’t have many filters. But the young man apparently really put his foot down and said that I was the right person for the job - so now I feel like I work for young people. They’re my bosses and the museum is a toolbox for trying to manifest their visions.

The gallery has been incredibly well received by the local community and particularly by the other traders in Hay. I alerted the existing creative enterprises that I was opening and I understand that I have set somewhat of a trend with no less than four further galleries opening after me. If Hay can be known as the town of art galleries as well as the town of  bookshops then that is a result. Initially, whilst still living upstairs, I introduced a community supper club in the gallery on Monday evenings with fine Italian cuisine cooked by my friends at Nonna Caterina. This then switched to being Italian all-afternoon Sunday lunches and the best story here is of a gentleman paying £25 for his lunch and walking out with an artwork worth £900 and he has carried on purchasing ever since! So you never know where or when your clients might emerge. They are many and varied, from local Hay residents to a wonderful lady from New Zealand who visited in my first year and has since bought online. Once I had moved out from upstairs, The Atelier, my self catering apartment sleeping two, became home to an ever changing collection of paintings from current and past exhibitions affording my guests/clients ample opportunities to fall in love with the artwork whilst staying for the weekend.

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.