We’re excited to announce our recent partnership with Cluster London, supporting their latest illustration residency with Mexican artist Paula Rivas. Rivas used Winsor & Newton gouache, pencils, coloured pencils, and Promarkers to explore her practice during the residency. Watch the video below to hear Paula discuss her work in more detail.
Cluster Illustration was founded in 2016 with a goal to set the tone for art fairs that eliminate the middlemen between creatives and collectors. Instead, it set out to be London’s most affordable art fair. Since then, it’s grown into a celebration of diversity, style, material, and themes, of ethnicity, background, age and class, a melting pot defined solely by the artistic necessity to express.
To date Cluster has held eleven fairs spanning illustration, craft, jewellery, and photography. With over 300 creatives featured, Cluster has formed a community of practitioners, which it supports through a programme of monthly gatherings, career support, one-on-one development sessions, talks, seminars, workshops, and a robust residency program of which Rivas was a part of.
Rivas’ practice combines creative explorations of her native Mexico with social concerns. She crates narratives (primarily in pencil and gouache) that explore the subject matter of mental health and how it relates to her cultural background. Her artistic practice captures the beauty and magic of Mexico and Latin America while exploring issues of identity. She is interested in the intersections between memory and place as sites of personal and collective belonging.
Her compositions explore the memory of places, people and landscapes through poetic realism, striking colour combinations, and hard-edge abstractions. Her images are populated by lone figures that transport us to an imaginary world of understated beauty and stillness.
You can find out more about Cluster and their residency program here.