The Transistor Project
Transistor is a Bristol based artists collective and arts project that organises group and solo shows, open call exhibitions, pop up events and exhibits at art fairs. We work with a roster of mostly mid career South West and London based artists, who we’ve met over the years, and often become friends with. More than anything else Transistor is a vehicle for travel, a way of putting our work out into the world.
For this page, we’ve listed some of the artists we’ve been fortunate enough to work with over the past decade or so. One of the great privileges of working with the project has been the opportunity it’s given us to meet practitioners and discuss work, life and studio practice. It’s an ongoing dialogue.
If you’d like to know more about the project, you can email us here, or subscribe to our newsletter to receive studio updates and exhibition invitations.
We’ll look forward to seeing you at a show.
Project Artists
Project artists /
Chuck Elliott
Chuck Elliott (b. 1967, Camberwell, London) is a pioneer of digitally generated art. He claims to have used the first Apple Macintosh imported to the UK in 1984, the same year Apple launched the computers with their now infamous Orwellian advertising campaign.
Acquiring his own machine in 1989, he has been drawing, sculpting, editing and compositing digitally ever since. Graduating in 1992, he founded a succession of small, successful studios in London. In 2005 he moved to Bristol, where he now works full time on his sublime, fluid studies in light, colour, motion and liquid geometry.
Delighting in the machines' ability to hone and craft sculptural drawings, render, edit, mix, cut, paste, sculpt, and re edit, colour spaces are manipulated, light levels finely tuned, and a myriad of images and series of derivations are produced, using processes analogous to the way in which modern music is realised.
Chuck Elliott is reinterpreting the essence of abstract fine art printmaking for the digital age. Pure logical progression.
Project artists /
Frank Elliott
Frank Elliott is a London based artist working in the related areas of painting, conceptual art and modern artists’ books.
With a series of exhibitions, publications and group shows spanning over 30 years, his work is based around space, time and movement, and usually created within series of inter-related pieces that inhabit a separate and carefully defined style.
His work is in numerous collections internationally including the V&A, the Hyman Kreitman Research Centre at the Tate, UWE Bristol, York University, Middlesex University, Chelsea Art Library and various others.
Exhibited Artists
Exhibited artists /
Angela Thwaites
Based in South London, Angela Thwaites is an internationally active artist, researcher, educator and author. Her practice explores glass as an expressive sculptural medium, including commissions, site responsive works, wearables and collaborations with other artists. She exhibits regularly on an International basis and has taught in UK and Specialist Academies and Masterclasses across Europe and the USA.
Angela’s first degree was in 3D Design, Ceramics and Glass, 1982, at West Surrey College of Art and Design (now UCA). In 1983 she was awarded British Council Scholarships to study MA for 2 years at the Academy of Applied Art with Professor Stansilav Libensky in Prague. Not only studying to cast glass on a monumental scale but living under Communist rule in Czechoslovakia were life changing experiences with lasting influence on Angela’s practice, research and artistic development.
In 2014 Angela was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Scholarship to do a PhD at University of Sunderland (UoS), graduating in 2018. Her research explores digital/physical approaches to designing and making and is titled ‘Towards Making The Unmakeable : How 3D Printing Can Inform Kiln Formed Glass Practice in 21st Century.’
Angela has works in private and public collections including the National Glass Centre, UK, Stourbridge Glass Museum, UK, Glass Museum Fraunenau, Germany and Museum of Decorative Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Exhibited artists /
Daniel Miles
Daniel Miles has been honing his creative practice for the last 30 years, the roots of his sculptural work reach back into his craftsman foundations as a carpenter and oak frame joiner, a practice that he continues to this day.
He studied stone carving under the guidance of Peter Randall-Page , Reece Ingram and Simon Thomas.
His sculptural explorations are an interplay with materials and form, travelling as a way of meditation, exploring the edge between chaos and order; success and failure. He works intuitively, using these elemental properties, alongside the properties of his tools to guide him through this landscape of both familiar and alien forms and structures.
“In those moments when we are not in control, and remain open to possibility, we are exposed and vulnerable. I have to trust in feeling my way through the darkness, to follow the scent of an idea to its conclusion and its many possibilities.”
Daniel lives and works in Cornwall, his lovingly hand made creations are collected and lived with throughout the world.
Exhibited artists /
Stanley Donwood
Stanley Donwood is an English artist and writer.
Since 1994, he has created all the artwork for the rock band Radiohead with their singer, Thom Yorke, plus Yorke's other projects, including Atoms for Peace and the Smile. He also creates artwork for Glastonbury Festival and has published books of writing.
Using the pen name Stanley Donwood, Dan says: "I like to separate the person I am at home - washing up, vacuuming, picking up the kids from school and so on - from whoever Stanley Donwood is."
He describes record shops, with their shelves of vinyl sleeves, as his introduction to art.
Exhibited artists /
Anna Gillespie, RWA
Anna Gillespie was born in 1964 in Farnham. Having obtained degrees from Oxford University (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) and the London School of Economics (International Relations), 1992 saw a change of direction and the decision to become a full time sculptor.
Anna qualified as a stone mason in Bath before travelling to Italy to study with the sculptor and master carver Nigel Konstam. In 1998 she took an MA in Fine and Media Arts at Cheltenham, and became an Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1999.
Exhibited artists /
Angela Lizon, RWA
Lizon’s work is about connections, storytelling and family histories. Growing up as the daughter of a displaced person who came to the UK from Poland, she never met her grandparents and therefore has few family photographs, apart from the occasional photographs she received from unknown relatives sharing her surname.
Lizon uses the few photographs she does have, along with personal, found, or bought photographs from Ebay, as source material for her paintings. The anonymity and ambiguity of these images contain narratives within themselves, but when placed together they create visual links and connections, sometimes obvious literal ones, sometimes more subtle and personal to the viewer.
Lizon recreates these authentic moments using painting techniques that capture the chemical processing techniques used in 20th Century photography; blurs, over/underexposure, water damage and fading add authenticity to her small works.
Lizon graduated from Bristol Polytechnic in 1986 and lives and works in Bristol. She was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2012 and for the Threadneedle Prize in 2010, and won the Exeter Phoenix Open in 2009.
Exhibited artists /
Dallas Collins, RWA
Dallas studied sculpture at the RCA from 1999-2001 and specialised in foundry art practice. In direct succession, he worked for the RCA for two years and taught sculpture in Chelsea, London, Bristol and Cardiff.
In 2007 Dallas was shortlisted for the Jerwood sculpture prize with his work 'Sweet' and in 2008 was commissioned by Barratt Homes of Bristol to produce a major public art piece 'Ocular Gate'. Dallas has had numerous shows throughout the UK, Europe and USA and his work is held in private and public art collections. In 2009 Dallas helped initiate an artist collective; the group was shortlisted to represent Wales at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. He now lives and works in Bristol and runs dedicated foundry research projects and sculpture summer schools for professional artists and practitioners.
In 2018 Dallas was selected to become an academician and member of the council, and in 2020 a Trustee of the Board of the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. Also in 2018 Dallas was selected as a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Exhibited artists /
Barry Cawston, RWA
In his photographs, British artist Barry Cawston combines classical and contemporary components to produce detailed artworks with an appearance like that of a painting. Switching between architecture, portraits, landscapes, and social documentary with ease, he always maintains his unique, recognizable style.
Barry Cawston was born in 1966 in London, England. After earning a degree in Sociology from Leeds University, he took up studying photography at Kitson College in Leeds.
In 2007, he won the Exeter Contemporary Open and in 2010, he took the South West Art Prize. In 2014, his work earned him the Chairman’s Choice Award at the RWA Photographic Open.
His bestselling book about Banksy’s work, Are We There Yet? A Day Trip to Banksy’s Dismaland is a remarkable chronicle of the temporary pop-up gallery Dismaland in Somerset, England.
Exhibited artists /
Conor Wilson, RCA
Perhaps the overriding concern is with exploring the relationship between nature and culture through the concepts of 'the wild', 'the domestic' and 'the pastoral'.
I like art to be ambiguous, odd, difficult to understand, but I often feel that it is too easy to be 'weird'. I want something that expresses an individual's own particular take on the world, but which is also engaged and relevant to its time.
This is what I have been struggling to do - to produce work that has something to say about the value of making by hand in a post-industrial society and how we understand that activity in a world that also includes industrial and pre-industrial societies.
On another level, the work is pure display. I am a Bower Bird and this is my glittering nest. We lead a merry dance of cooperation and competition. My recent practice has focused on ceramics as a discipline, as opposed to just utilising clay as a material.
One of the strengths of ceramics is its eclecticism. Many ceramic traditions seem to have borrowed from everywhere - 'high' and 'low' art, social commentary, nature and always what has been considered the best of the pottery production of trading partners. The history of ceramics illuminates complex trading links and the discipline almost functions as a metaphor for cross-cultural fertilisation.
Exhibited artists /
Rob Manners
Rob Manner’s practice moves fluidly between disciplines and has consistently explored and exploited common perceptions of where boundaries between painting, printmaking and drawing begin and end. Studying Mural Design at Chelsea School of Art laid the foundations for a cross-disciplinary practice. A twelve-year hiatus running a successful ceramic tile design and manufacturing company was followed by the completion of an MA in Multi-disciplinary Printmaking at the University of West of England.
Painting has always been central to Rob’s practice but this has been significantly influenced by the disciplines and processes of printmaking and collage. Rob’s studio output reflects a deep interest in the materiality and physicality of the work itself whilst simultaneously investigating themes of authenticity and modes of understood painting ‘styles’ (the abstract and the representational). Close observation of the materiality of all these disciplines remains an integral component of his practice.
Rob is also actively involved in a number of artist-led organisations and has worked as a curator on a number of arts establishment funded projects in Bristol and in the South West.
Exhibited artists /
Harriet White
Harriet White is a contemporary realist painter living and working in Bristol, UK.
‘My paintings evolve through an instinctive interest in surface, light and pattern, and involve large scale interpretations of my own photographs. Switching between faces and botanical themes, the subject matter is unified by an implication of drama and a sense of a hazy, ambiguous narrative. The scale invites close scrutiny; the oversized flowers or a closely cropped face are enlarged to such an extent that on physically close inspection they take on a different feel, the colours and shapes touching on pure abstraction. Stepping back, they take form and it’s human nature to recognise the familiar and seek a narrative. The reflected light and imagery suggest a sense of something happening elsewhere, just out of frame; the image captured is a close crop of an implied wider picture. Uncertainty and ambiguity are key; The lighting and crop often reference cinema, but the paintings remain distanced from any kind of conclusion, maintaining a sense of something slight, dreamt or misremembered.’
She has exhibited regularly in the UK and the USA, has twice been selected for the BP Portrait Award and the Holburne Portrait Prize and was a shortlisted artist in the 2013 Threadneedle Prize for Figurative Art.
Exhibited artists /
Ian Chamberlain, RWA
Ian Chamberlain's work reinterprets manmade structures as monuments placed within the landscape acting as architectural metaphors of past and current technological achievements.
Ian has had a longstanding fascination with technology and architectural forms, these have included structures within industry, agriculture, science and the military.
These in the past have included Goonhilly Earth station, The Lovell Telescope, The Maunsell Sea Forts and the Acoustic Sound mirrors.
Ian's most recent body of work deals with "The Atlantic wall "the WWII German defence system built along the west coast of Europe. These brutalist forms are being interpreted as architectural metaphors concerning boundaries and borders,
Ian is interested in the use of a traditional Print process such as etching being used to record subject matter that is generally at the cutting edge of technology for its time.
Ian has exhibited Nationally and Internationally including London, Hong Kong, Sydney, New York, Barcelona and Berlin. His work is held in several national collections