Nancy Collantine
Recent exhibitions include The Pearls and the Oyster, Birley Studios, Preston and The Cabinet of Fancy, Terrace Gallery, Huddersfield.
Established Mura Ma, independent Art Space and Gallery in January 2023.
Finalist in the Beep Painting Prize 2022
Recipient of the Castlefield Gallery Development Award 2022, Manchester Open
Turps Correspondence Course 2020-2022
Artist Statement
I paint from landscape, nature and the body, in particular the human connection to the sea. I use my drawings as a starting point to amalgamate of the topographical combined with feeling and experience. Building tension, through drawing, colour and the slipperiness and versitility of oil paint, using impulse and gesture that usually has to be rectified along the way – a process of action and elimination of anything that feels forced in favour of the raw and unpremeditated – a state of feeling rather than thinking.
Biography
Nan Collantine lives and works not far from Manchester in the north west of England. After completing an art foundation in 1989, she worked in advertising and communications for 25 years, in the last ten years she was a passionate advocate for culture, education and the arts working with cultural and arts organisations.
In 2016 she moved with her family to Queensland, Australia in 2016 and restarted her daily practice of drawing and painting. Responding and influenced by Australian painting she has been learning and committed to educating herself about art and especially painting, ever since.
Nan has recently completed her second year of the Turps Banana Correspondence Course 2020-22 to continue developing her painting and drawing practice. In 2019 she started Dez Rez Projects, a DIY exhibition production that organises opportunities for emerging artists outside of the gallery system and in 2020 opened the Northern Atelier studio with the aim of offering artist-led opportunities to the local community and further afield. This has recently led to her opening a permanent space, Mura Ma in Stockport, Greater Manchester. She is also an arts writer and reviewer for Northern Soul magazine.
A former student of an alternative art school, the Islingon Mill Art Academy, Nan has exhibited in group shows around the North West and London and is the recipient of the Castlefield Gallery Artist Professional Development Award as part of the Manchester Open 2022. She works from her studio in a former textile mill in Marple, Greater Manchester.