About

Two key elements of my life since my teenage years have been a commitment to Christian belief and its expression through my art practice. These, sometimes conflicting, elements have informed my creative and faith journeys as I have sought to integrate and authentically articulate them through word and image.

Artistic practice and religious belief deal in paradox, ambiguity and enigma; the artist and the believer are both invited to walk a path with no clear destination, where “bewilderment can occasion a new way of knowing”. This is a concept which is at odds with today’s culture, driven as it is by the need to quantify and control every aspect of our lives. Our current obsessions with aims, objectives and control contrasts with the witness to the mystery of Divine activity so vividly cited by Isaiah: “I will lead blind men by a path that they do not know”.

After graduating from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1966 with an honours degree in fine art (sculpture), I moved to the Isle of Wight to help build and run a sailing and outdoor activities centre, the Medina Valley Centre. I returned to fulltime art practice in 1978 and in 1986 was invited to set up a fulltime art workshop for long-term prisoners in a maximum security prison. I researched this work at the Royal College of Art for an MA; and was awarded a Churchill Fellowship and a National Art Collections Fund award which enabled me to study art in prisons in the USA and to establish a UK charity to fund prisoners studying art.

In 1995 I returned to being a freelance artist working in education, community, prison and mental healthcare settings. I have had three residencies at the Cill Rialaig Artists’ Retreat in County Kerry and have visited Australia three times. I have exhibited regularly, and have work in public and private collections in the UK and the USA and have completed around a dozen public and private commissions, including two for the Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham and five for St Mary’s Hospital on the IOW. I now live and work in St Just in Penwith, Cornwall.

Email: richesart@hotmail.com