Arabel Lebrusan – leading visual artist, jewellery designer and creative campaigner – welcomes visitors to The Palmtree on Brighton’s Fiveways Artist Open House Trail in May 2025.
Address:
Venue #23, 15 Hollingbury Crescent, Brighton, BN1 7HD
Opening Hours:
10:00 – 17:00
Saturdays 3rd, 10th & 17th May
Sundays 4th, 11th & 18th May
Bank Holiday Mondays 5th & 26th May
Private View:
17:00 – 19:00
Saturday 10th May
Limited numbers – please RSVP via Instagram DM
Opening her doors for the very first time, Lebrusan will host a sample sale of exquisite filigree jewellery in recycled silver under her award-winning ethical jewellery brand Lebrusan Studio. Designed in Brighton and hand-crafted in Lebrusan’s native Spain by master filigree artisan Lorenzo, each of the jewels on sale is a one-off, never to be recreated.
Alongside Lebrusan Studio’s jewellery, Lebrusan will showcase prints, an award-winning collection of small sculptures crafted from dollhouse furniture, and test pieces fresh from the artist’s studio.
“My practice often treads the fine line between art and jewellery,” Lebrusan says. “Most of my works are conceived as artistic responses to specific social injustices, ecological concerns and feminist viewpoints, narrating powerful stories using a poetic language. I feel very privileged to be joined on this adventure by other women with their own stories to tell.”
Lebrusan’s open house also makes space for a curated selection of other women artists from the local area:
1. Katy Beinart with her etchings
www.katybeinart.co.uk
@katybeinart
Katy Beinart (b.1977, Birmingham) is a visual artist whose artworks include sculpture, installation, public art, textiles, film, drawing and performance. She is currently based in Brighton, UK.
After studying architecture, Katy has practiced as a multidisciplinary artist since 2004, combining art and spatial practice to make artworks in the public realm as well as exhibiting in galleries, festivals and biennales in the UK and internationally.
She uses processes of archival research, participatory research and social practice to respond to the context and history of places, and her work examines relationships between heritage, history and memory, culture and environment, performance and ritual, migration and home. She draws on past and present material cultures in her projects, often adapting old technologies and industrial processes, found objects and everyday activities and rituals. She is interested in forms of mapping and psychogeography that rethink our relationship to place. Her work aims to reveal and question pasts, and ask how these belong in the present circumstances of places, and might shape their futures. In this sense she is interested in memory as a practice that is active and alive.
Katy is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Brighton, a Fine Art Tutor for Open College of the Arts (part of the Open University) and is a board member of Ixia, a public art support organisation.
Gabby Leigh and her intricate sculptural metalwork
www.arttutorbrighton.uk
@gabbyleighko
@arttutorbrighton
With over 30 years of teaching experience – along with the invaluable insight of having her own children – Gabby is a fantastic art tutor. She understands that art isn’t just about the techniques, it’s about embracing mistakes and enjoying the process.
Gabby works mostly in metal, including steel, gilding metal and silver, to provoke conversation about #digitalmess.
She has had her practice for over 25 years, and when she’s not working as a 3D Design & Craft technician at the University of Brighton she runs her own business teaching young people from from her studio.
Alison McKenna and her bold colour-block paintings
www.alisonmckenna.com
@alisonmckennastudio
British artist Alison McKenna works in a variety of media including painting, film, photography and collage. Her interests encompass protest, alchemy, social utopias, spiritual evolution and sites of pilgrimage and gathering. McKenna uses photography and drawing on site, for later exploration in the studio. Research visits have been made to Crete and Delphi, Greenham Common, Glastonbury Tor, Waun Mawn in Wales, Ardmore in Ireland and Croydon Country Park Nature Reserve. The resultant works were then created and offered as acts of resistance and transcendence.
“My paintings are made from perception and memory after visits to places or sites of ancient worship, gathering and pilgrimage. I choose colours and composition to support or destabilise, dependent on whether juxtapositions act to harmonise and resonate or jar and dislocate. Sometimes shedding the outside world to a more hopeful utopia.”
Carrie Stanley with her delicate blue drawings
@carrie_stanley_artist
Carrie Stanley is British figurative artist based in Brighton, England. She uses the mediums of painting and drawing to make work that is visceral, physical and colourful and that reflect emotional and psychological responses to her subjects. Carrie often uses family as a starting point, these works often develop through an automatic process to allow for memory and personal symbolism to emerge. She’s currently researching ways to access healing through creative imaging, the use of petunias in shamanic journeying and alternative paint surfaces including velvet and interfacing.