blimey!
collective
blimey! is a female led Darlington based artist collective who work across a diverse range of creative practices. Artists include Carol Sommer, Amanda Marshall, Nicola Golightly and Vicky Holbrough. The collective is a catalyst for artist led activity, using an adaptive and responsive approach in bringing individual voices together to celebrate contemporary visual arts practice in the region.
The propositions of hospitality, community and shared values run through blimey!’s twelve year history of working together, and previous projects include ‘blimey! Social’ in 2009 and ‘blimey! Lounge’ in 2011.
For 2019/20, ‘blimey! Lucretia’ responds to the centrepiece of ‘The Power and the Virtue’ exhibition at The Bowes Museum - Guido Reni’s Baroque masterpiece ‘The Death of Lucretia’.
blimey! Collective Artists
Amanda Marshall
Amanda Marshall is a Darlington based artist who explores many mediums in her work, including painting and creative craft works - inspired by her love of colour, light and the great outdoors. She has had works displayed in various regional exhibitions and competitions, in which her pieces have been highly commended and others selected for use in marketing material. She has been an active member of the Darlington based collective, blimey! since its inception.
Nicola Golightly
Nicola Golightly is a graphic designer and visual artist. Specialising in image making, print and design, she applies these skills in order to inspire others through participatory projects, client led work and commissions. Golightly perceives design as a tool to motivate, encourage and initiate forward thinking. Most recent works have included The Chernobyl Library (Slavutych, Ukraine) and commissioned Associate Artist, exploring Life Story Work (South Shields).
Vicky Holbrough
With a predominantly fine art based practice, Vicky Holbrough explores techniques such as sculpture, printmaking and drawing through participatory projects, commissions and residencies. These have included several public art commissions in Darlington and County Durham. She is a co-founder /director of artist-led arts organisation Navigator North - developing new spaces for artists to create and show work, as well as initiating and curating projects, artist commissions, exhibitions and public events across Tees Valley and County Durham.
Carol Sommer
Within the aesthetic context of conceptual writing Carol Sommer’s practice includes performance readings in the UK and abroad, as well as film and installation that respond to the representation of women in fiction. In 2016 she took part in Reading as Art at Bury Art Museum, and is the author of Cartography for Girls, an A - Z of Orientations identified in the Novels of Iris Murdoch. She teaches Fine Art and Critical & Contextual Studies in Art & Design at Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College, Darlington.