Charlie Levine is a UK based curator, critic and consultant, and founder of The Tale Tellers. She was founder, director and curator of independent gallery TROVE, co-founder and curator of Aedas Present (2010 - 2013) and programme manager of three (2013-14). She is currently an independent curator and Associate Curator at Sluice__ .
Read Charlie's tales here > 1 - Rastelli's Story by Walter Benjamin 8 - New York Night Club by Jack Kerouac 12 - All Right Now by Free 18 - New York Day Woman by Edwidge Danticat 35 - A Very Young Person by Rudyard Kipling Karl England is an artist, he makes things. He also co-founded the Sluice.
Read Karl's tale here > The Poor Old Woman by William Carlos Williams Ben Street is a freelance art historian, museum educator and writer based in London. He lectures, teaches and tells stories for a number of museums, including the National Gallery, Tate, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Christie's Education.
Image courtesy of Laura Mott Read Ben's tale here > The Owl Who Was God by James Thurber Elly Clarke is an artist & photographer based in London, Berlin and Birmingham.
When she isn’t posing for self-portraits at 5 in the morning, she might be thinking about mobile phones, or writing a song about them, or on a long walk somewhere probably quite rainy, out of range. For example. Read Elly's tale here > The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear Jo Gane is a photographer and educator based in the West Midlands. She teaches at a number of institutions alongside making pictures for gallery shows. Often working with historic processes, her work deals with ideas about time.
Image courtesy of Diana Phillips Read Jo's tale here > Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame Cathy Wade is an interdisciplinary artist who works through collaboration, curation and research. She has exhibited extensively in both the UK and internationally working with galleries and projects including Vertigo Gallery, Vivid, Toomey Tourell Gallery, Curfew Tower, Newlyn Art Gallery, Capsule, EC Arts, and Clarke Gallery. She is currently Research Director at Edible Eastside and Curator at A3 Project Space. Read Cathy's tale here > Grand Theft Auto, Vice City: Rockstar Games by PS2 Craig Paul Green is a multimedia artist based in and around Birmingham. He is a recent graduate of the Birmingham School of Art. His current practice explores semiotics, surrealism and the dissemination of information as a primary objective of filmic discourse. He also is interested in narrative form in art-specific film. Questioning the value of narrative and exploring how through filmic processes, with particular emphasis on sound, narrative can be manipulated.
Read Craig's tale here > Talkin' World War III Blues by Bob Dylan Carina Schneider is a Marketing professional with experience in PR, Events, Partnerships, Programming and Digital Marketing across the arts, charity and architecture sectors. Carina previously managed Public Programmes and Outreach programmes for RIBA West Midlands, including Love Architecture Festival 2013, collaboration on Thrift Radiates Happiness, Walking Architecture Birmingham and projects with the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design.
Her non-exhaustive list of too many interests includes the arts, architecture, design, current affairs, writing, good books, film, philosophy, theology, psychology, and in particular themes of identity, belief, place, belonging and language. Read Carina's tale here > Three wishes for Cinderella by Václav Vorlíček Camille de Saint Jean is a film artist based in Paris, France.
Read Camille's tale here > Le Comte de Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas Sanjay Theodore is a Mumbai based artist (sometimes curator) living between India and New Zealand.
Read Sanjay's tale here > Surface Tension by James Blish Enrico Gomez is a NY area artist, curator, and critic. He lives and maintains an art studio practice in Jersey City, NJ. He is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Parallel Art Space, an artist-run artspace in Ridgewood, Queens. A frequent contributor to esse arts + opinions, he is also the monthly art critic for WAGMAG Brooklyn Art Guide and was recently named by Brooklyn Magazine one of the “100 Most Influential People In Brooklyn Culture”.
Image courtesy of Anne Russinoff Read Enrico's tale here > A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway Daniel Salisbury Often poking fun at politics, social conventions and extremes in human behaviours whilst working with themes of the everyday and our relationship with the world. Individual pieces appear to belong to a larger, continuous ever growing narrative, embracing sculpture, sound, video and text, using humour to disarm or convey.
Read Daniel's tale here > Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis by Tom Waits Chinmoyi Patel b. 1985, lives and works in Baroda
Chinmoyi graduated with a BFA (Painting) from Fine Arts, M.S.University in 2006 and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2009. In 2006-07 she was awarded the Madanjeet Singh Scholarship by South Asia Foundation, New Delhi for a one-year residency at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. In 2013 she co-organised the Paradise Lodge International Artists Residency Lonavala/Mumbai. She has participated in residencies at Ondarte, Mexico 2012; Changdong Art Studio, Seoul 2011; Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila 2011. She was a finalist for the Celeste Art Prize 2011. In 2013 she conducted an Introduction to Video Art workshop at New Media Department, NID, Ahmedabad. She currently teaches part-time at Fine Arts, South Gujarat University, Surat. Chinmoyi works primarily in New Media and uses 'play' to metabolize and critically evaluate contemporary situations and question one's role in society. Read Chinmoyi's tale here > The Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris Renée O’Drobinak is at once a freelance graphic designer, catsuit-weilding contemporary artist under the guise Ladies of the Press* (www.ladiesofthepress.org), in-house designer and Comms extraordinaire for an architect’s practice, a Japanese to English translator and simultaneous interpreter, a very occasional published writer of niche essays and reviews, a fish enthusiast and a mongrel. She is known to perform (and at times badly sing) some of her own writing in run-down pubs to a drunk poetry audience once in a blue moon, but we won’t talk about that bit.
Read Renée's tale here > 痴人の愛 by 谷崎潤一郎 Elizabeth White is an artist interested in preparedness, fear, and freedom. Based in New York, she teaches at Bennington College in Vermont and in the MFA Program in Digital Arts at Pratt Institute.
Read Elizabeth's tale here > 31 - The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein Anna Lowe is interested in the intersection between digital innovation and art and is a cofounder of SMARTIFY, an app that allows museum visitors to make meaningful connections with art.
Read Anna's tale here > 33 - Forgetfulness by Billy Collins John Ros is an artist, professor, curator and activist. He currently lives and works in New York City and Harrisonburg, Virginia. He obtained an MFA from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, in 2013 and a BFA from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2000.
John is an Assistant Professor of Art at James Madison University’s School of Art, Design, and Art History, where he also serves as the Director and Chief Curator of the Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art. John has taught at the City Literary Institute (London, UK), Brooklyn College (New York, NY), SUNY Binghamton (Binghamton, NY) and the National Academy of Art (New York, NY), and has lectured as a visiting artist at NYU: Steinhardt, London Metropolitan University, George Mason University, North Florida Community College and Jefferson Technical and Community College among others. In 2015 John founded studioELL, an alternative, transient and hybrid space for higher education in the studio arts, where he is currently the Director and teaches a variety of courses. During the past twenty years, John has worked on more than 70 exhibitions with over 250 artists. He founded and directed two alternative gallery ventures, pocket, (2002-2005, Binghamton, NY) and galleryELL, (2008-2016, New York, NY), and has been involved in many artist and non-profit initiatives such as; Board Member of Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance (2018-present, Harrisonburg, VA), Art Director of Perspectives International (2005-2008, New York, NY), Board Member of Spool MFG. (2004-2005, Johnson City, NY), and Museum Educator at the Hillwood Art Museum (2000, Brookville, NY). Read John's tale here > 38 - The Creative Process by James Baldwin |
Ed Wakefield is an impassioned collage artist currently based in the West Midlands. Carving out a singular niche in the world, when he isn't creating paper masterpieces he's reading challenging literature of every kind.
Read Ed's tale here > The Odyssey by Homer Naroa Lizar is an artist and photographer currently based in New York City. She is the brain behind iArtistLondon and co-founder of ArtLearningBank.
Read Naroa's tale here > 1984 by George Orwell Kate Spence is a live artist from Birmingham, UK. She creates performative installations with a strong focus on intimacy, desire and human interaction. Kate is also now Co-Director of the live art collective Home For Waifs And Strays.
Read Kate's tale here > Take it With Me by Tom Waits Nicolas Julliard lives and works in Berlin. It is in 2001, during his Master II in Fine Arts at the Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University, that Nicolas Julliard, creates the Pelomorphes. Textile volumes, human-sized security blankets, Pelomorphes are strange humanoids creatures, coming from a security blanket of the artist’s childhood. After some exhibitions in recent spaces (Le Garage Moderne in Bordeaux or La Citerne Gallery in Marseille in 2004), Nicolas Julliard meets Cécile Griesmar who invites him to join the artists of her Hors-sol Gallery in Paris. Pelomorphes are then shown in the first edition of the Slick Art Fair, one of the FIAC show off in 2006. In 2007, the obtaining of the creation grant from DRAC Aquitaine allows the first exhibition abroad: Product art festival in Varna, Bulgaria in 2008. The grant for the mobility from the Regional Council of Aquitaine in 2010 support a project of residence in the dance company Donko Seko in Bamako, Mali.
Read Nicolas' tale here > The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling Antonio Roberts is a new-media artist and curator based in Birmingham, UK. whose work focuses on the errors and glitches generated by digital technology. Since 2007 he has curated a number of exhibitions and projects including fizzPOP (2009 - 2010), GLI.TC/H Birmingham (2011), the Birmingham edition of Bring Your Own Beamer (2012) and Dirty New Media (2013).
As a performer and visual artist his work has been featured at galleries and festivals around the world including Databit.me in Arles, France, Laptops Meet Musicians Festival in Venice, Italy, Notacon in Cleavland, Ohio, US, Leeds International Film Festival in the UK, and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, UK. In 2013 he contributed the foreword to AlphabeNt: Experiments from A–Z, which is an exploration of glitch art and typography by Australian authors Daniel Purvis and Drew Taylor (ISBN 978-0-9874007-0-3). Read Antonio's tale here > Drinking in LA by Bran Van 3000 Vishwa Shroff is an Indian Artist currently based in Tokyo. She creates installations with life size drawings with a strong focus on impermanence of place and the city.
Read Vishwa's tale here > 15 - Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll 37 - Shatranj Ke Khiladi by Munshi Premchand Mary Yacoob appropriates symbolic visual grammars from architectural plans, geological maps, scientific diagrams, and alphabets. Some of her work involves documenting the minutia of daily life in diagrammatic form. In other work, she creates drawings and collages that are proposals for often unrealisable or absurdist architectural or artistic interventions. Mary Yacoob is an artist based in London. She studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and London Metropolitan. For Tale Tellers, Yacoob chose one sentence from every other page of Chapter one of Ursula Le Guin’s Sci Fi novel ‘The Dispossessed. She then searched online for images related to that sentence and did a drawing in response to what she found.
Read Mary's tale here > Chapter 1, The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin Kate is director of PlatformE Marketing Limited and has been bringing arts and architecture together since 2010 via individual site specific arts activity and arts programmes including education and events. As a business development and chartered marketing professional, Kate is passionate about collaborations between arts, community and the built environment.
PlatformE is based in Christchurch, New Zealand, with a UK office, working on projects across the globe. Kates Tale Tellers is based on The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth. He is the master storyteller in her opinion, and this is the book that she was read as a child by her Pa – she now believes it was a little scary as it involves war, ghosts, impending death; but it is an incredibly heartwarming tale, showing that how ever much planning you put in, sometimes you need a little divine intervention. Something we should all remember in our daily challenges! Read Kate's tale here > The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth Paul Haworth has performed at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Chert Gallery, Berlin, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, and Battersea Arts Centre. He is the author of three novels, the Silk Handkerchiefs trilogy, published through TRUE TRUE TRUE, Amsterdam.
Read Paul's tale here > Who Am I? by Will Young Lauren Cookson is an independent curator based in the West Midlands, UK. A Deutsche Bank award winner in creative and cultural practice (2012) Cookson is currently based at Spode Works heritage site, Stoke-On-Trent, UK. She is also founder and director of the Deutsche Bank sponsored project theartistinbetween- an online exhibition space reviewing culture in cities.
Read Lauren's tale here > The Bundle of Sticks by Aesop Patrick Hough (b.1989, Galway, Ireland) is an artist who work incorporates moving image, photography, lighting design and installation to examine how history is constructed and represented in the present. His most recent body of work uses an archive of historical film props to explore how the cinematic image is indelibly embedded in our perception of history. He received his BA in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2011 and his MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art, London in 2013.
Read Patrick's tale here > C by Tom McCarthy Ana Čavić is a performance artist whose work explores the dangerous, darker side of the poetic. Existing between fact and fiction, her performances and poetry employ non-linear narratives informed by magic realism and offset by an element of risk in their execution. Failure, or more precisely, potential failure, is the subject and object of her work while introducing elements of fiction as a strategy for real forms of risk taking. Whether reciting poetry while biting her willing audience, ingesting poisonous flowers to the point of vomiting or dangling from light fittings – her often performances are both playful and provocative. Her spontaneous performances and poetry investigate the relationship between risk taking, contrasting meaningless action with meaningful words and vise versa, in order to break rules and create alternate realities.
Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art (2008) she has been living and working in London and has performed both solo and as part of the art duo Ladies of the Press* nationally and internationally Read Ana's tale here > The Tinder Box by Hans Christian Andersen Katsushi Goto is an architect / urbanist with expertise in housing development and productive space in relation to the city and the built environment. His current research focuses on domesticity and geneology of domestic materiality. He is also working on the development of law in architecture and built environment for the Japan Institute of Architects.
Read Goto's tale here > The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe Caitlin Griffiths is an visual artist based in Birmingham UK.
"I want something from you. I want to know where you are, how you got there, who you think you are and who you’d like to be. I collect pieces of people and build myself among them.” Read Caitlin's tale here > 32 - Another Earth by Mike Cahill Rosanna van Mierlo is a contemporary art writer. Her articles are often semi-fictional observations that cross-stitch criticism with poetry and images. After graduating from the Contemporary Art Theory MA at Goldsmiths University, her research focuses mostly around questions of loss and longing, (female) fetishism and hybridism/morphing.
She wrote for several art magazines, including Nadelunch.com (online), Kunstwordtterugkunst (Gent, Belgium), Lokaal 01 (Antwerp, Belgium) and nY Magazine (Gent, Belgium) as well as running her own blog on photography (www.seeifitblows.com). Read Rosanna's tale here > 34 - Houseboat by Anais Nin 36 - A Natural Disaster by Lydia Davis Adam Nathaniel Furman is an artist & designer of Argentine & Japanese heritage based in London. They trained in Architecture and Fine Art, and work in those areas as well as products, interiors, writing and teaching. Adam's work has been exhibited in London, Paris, New York, Milan, Melbourne, Rome, Eindhoven, Minneapolis, Portland, Kortrijk, Tel Aviv, Veszprem, Mumbai, Vienna & Glasgow, is held in the collections of the Design Museum, the Sir John Soane's Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Abet Museum, & the Architectural Association, and has been published widely. The atelier has completed, and ongoing projects both internationally (Europe, the US, S America, the Middle East, East Asia) and in the UK. I have lectured at the RIBA, Harvard GSD, UC Berkeley, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Vitra Design Museum, Cardiff University, Innsbruck University, the Casa dell'Architettura Rome, the BSR, and the Biennale Interieur, amongst others, have taught courses at several universities as well as having been Studio Master at Central St Martins in London, Adam is co-director of Saturated Space at the AA (an influential research group on colour in Urbanism and Architecture), and has been a judge for the Dezeen and FRAME awards, amongst others.
Read Adam's tale here > 39 - FERN HILL - Dylan Thomas Amber Perrier is an artist from UK. Amber studied Fine Art at University of East London then signed up to become a trainee at the Library through Culture& who works in partnership with arts and heritage institutions to develop programmes that promote diversity in the workforce and expand audiences, which lead Amber to work at Community Engagement Team at The British Library.
Her work involves using Inks and pen drawings on the City of London and illustrations of people. Her artistic flair has engaged with communities in Newham, Tower Hamlets, and Kensington and Chelsea. Amber has delivered commissions and live art illustrations for East End Women’s Museum, Numbi Arts, Somers Town Festival, Notting Hill Carnival, Alternative Fictions and Newington Green Meeting House. She has also got involved as an Assistant Curator for ITV creates on behalf of Black History Month in October 2020. She is a Young Trustee of Rosetta Arts Centre in Stratford. Read Ambers tale here > 40 - A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond |