Marion Back is a painter living in North Ayrshire, with a studio in Largs. She took up painting later in life and has explored different styles and mediums before developing her own distinctive style.  Working mainly with acrylic paint she produces work which is abstract, based on shapes and colours found in nature. Recently her attention has turned to textile art, an artform she has long admired. Starting with small hand stitched abstract pieces she hopes to combine stitching and painting to create more interesting and expressive work.  She is looking forward to her time at Cove Park, where she intends to focus and develop her ideas. Instagram: @marion.back.abstract

Over the past six years since retirement, Sheena Beaton has had the time, and energy, to start on a journey to find my own voice through her painting. She has always drawn but needed to find the courage to find her own way of interpreting what she sees through colour, mark making and texture. She has gained and continues to gain inspiration from the shapes and organic forms in the landscape. Sheena is drawn to the land as seen from the sea, the shapes and formations of clouds reflected on the land. She has developed the freedom to explore subjects which interest and inspire her, making confident decisions about her work, understanding its complexity and enjoying the exciting journey that evolves. Instagram: @sheenabeaton

Alongside a career as a therapeutic theatre practitioner, Zoe’s fine art practice examines and renders portraits of the shimmering, resonant places that lie between creation and perishing. Interests lie in the complexities and imperfections of being human in relation to time, space and place. Using embodied, improvisational, and playful processes to make work, she harnesses a range of disciplines across drawing and painting, sculpture, poetics, performance, installation, and sound. Surfaces are unfolded to disclose or unmask hidden or partially exposed elements of objects, materials, and stories. Her intention is to, in some way alter perspectives and gracefully expose the tender, vulnerable and fragile. Walking and Butoh are tools that allow deeper access into the intelligence of her own body, rhythm, and choreography. This Japanese form of dance uses ‘reduction’ to great effect harnessing stillness and extreme slow motion. Gestural and fluid, her work re-frames her subjects, exploring ambiguous codes and shifting boundaries between public and private selves. Instagram: @darbyshirezoe

James Doak is a painter with a musical background who uses source material from drawings, sketchbooks, photography and memory to inform his improvisational and spontaneous approach to mark-making and painting. He works mainly in acrylics and oils, whilst often utilising charcoal, pencil, collage and ink in his process. Recently James has been experimenting by painting organic shapes modelled in papier mache. The observation and absorption of landscapes, both natural and urban, is the basis for his work. Jim has attended art courses and retreats both in Scotland and St Ives, Cornwall. His work has been used on album covers and advertisement posters. Instagram: @doakjim

Grace Fisher is an emerging artist who lives in Glasgow. Grace has an interdisciplinary practice that shifts between analogue and digital. She takes inspiration from botanicals and natural surroundings; the form and texture excite her and entice her to using new mediums and techniques. Grace is excited to see how Cove Park will add to her artistic experience and is interested in how the location will develop and advance new work and methods of making. Instagram: @gracefisher.art

Born and raised in Glasgow, working as a Florist for 20 years. Ruby’s appreciation of flowers and their fleeting pleasures started at an early age. Both her parents loved gardening, as did her Pa. She remembers watching them, so content in the greenhouse and planting flowers and vegetables. To claim time on her own with any of them would mean going into the garden. Filling trays with seeds & watering, watching them grow brought utter joy. The simple act of cutting flowers and bringing them into the house comes naturally to anyone who spends time in the garden. It is a way of charting the seasons, appreciating the beautiful lesson of the present and to live in the moment. Ruby’s drawings are a gesture to their unique beauty and charm, whether it is a frilly crinkled leaf, or their architectural form. Instagram:  @rubyflowersandco

Fiona Gibson is a full-time author who loves to express herself visually as well as in words. She enjoys exploring the fluidity of inks and watercolours and also loves to draw. Her sketchbooks are her starting point, in which she plays with line and colour in a spontaneous, unselfconscious way, working outdoors whenever possible. Whether it’s an urban park, woodland or the pebbles on a windswept beach, she is inspired by the natural world. Although self-taught, Fiona has been drawing since she could hold a crayon and has attended many art courses and retreats both in Scotland and St Ives, Cornwall. She has exhibited at Nicholls Gallery, had work selected for a show at House for an Art Lover, both in Glasgow, and her illustrations have been published in several national magazines. Instagram: @fiona_gib

Anne’s subject matter is the landscape and she sets out to capture the natural beauty, light and colour of her surroundings in the west of Scotland. They are landscape paintings and come about by being very familiar with a particular subject and/or view and being open to being continually obsessed/ transfixed by a certain set of motifs. Getting lost, physically and metaphorically in the subject of landscape and getting lost in the process of painting the landscape. Instagram: @anne.goldrick

Alison Harley is an independent practitioner whose work explores creative and cultural narratives through publication and exhibition. Over the past twenty years she has integrated her early interest in formal archive collections alongside the ephemera of practice, into a body of publications that focus on the unique voice of the contemporary maker/ practitioner and the creative process. Most recent examples include, The Making of Marthe Armitage: artist and patternmaker, (2019); and Bernat Klein (2022) a 224 page fully-illustrated book with contributions by designers, curators, archivists, architects, photographers, artists and collectors. Her curatorial work examines new ways of contextualising practice that engages audiences in an appreciation of original and contemporary practice, and their influence on each other. Established early in her career through the gallery system, Alison has maintained her creative practice and recently exhibited a new body of work developed during 2021 and 2022. Her studio practice continues to inform and underpin ideas about publication and exhibition about the individuality of creative practice. Instagram: @alisonjharley

Displaced by consecutive category 5 hurricanes in 2017, artist and maker Kim Lyons spent 18 months wandering the globe, exploring old and new haunts. Literally and figuratively struggling to find place and identity, she forged a kinship with an unlikely group of artists in the foothills of the Highlands. Now safely back at home in her native Virgin Islands, Kim is making her third trip across the pond to reunite with her chosen clan at Cove Park. “My practice is constantly evolving and crosses several media. I can only describe it as a search – a search for myself and for how to express those ever-evolving selves in the wider world.” Instagram: @k.lyons_studio

Natasha Marshall is a London based Designer and Printmaker who’s love of pattern, architecture, colour and being by the sea, are all present in her work. She is fascinated by architectural spaces, facades and nature – the patterns and lines which light creates. She predominately works by Monoprinting onto handmade papers with gouache and oils that are layered upon distinctive printed grounds. She enjoys working with a combination of materials, playing with how they respond to one another, exploring depth and the tonal value of colour, and how these components increase the vocabulary of her work. Instagram: @nminterior

Hilary Nicoll is a Glasgow School of Art, Environmental Art graduate, Secondary Art Teacher, Further Education Lecturer and has taught in various therapeutic and educational contexts. As an independent studio provider, she founded Albert Drive Studios which provided studio spaces to small creative businesses. Currently she owns and manages Nicolls Gallery a restored Glasgow locksmith shop. Her environmental art practice has informed her participation in Fraser Taylor’s drawing workshops. These have afforded a new approach to her recent work. Instagram: @hilaryjnicoll

Simon Townsend likes splats, drips, smudges, blurs. Evolving layers always running off the paper. Spontaneous shape forming, revealing depth intensity and emotional chaos. Instagram: @love_the_velvet_hat