Peer/Peer Collaboration
One of our collaborations for this partnership is between Leslie Thompson, an artist with Venture Arts, and Royal Society of Sculptors’ member Eleni Maragaki. Keen to learn more about sculpture, Leslie's drawing-based work often depicts scenes from popular culture, mostly from the seventies and eighties, often punctuated with memories from film, music and TV. Eleni's art practice engages with the idea of geometry as a fundamental language, that both systemises the urban environment and provides a means of comprehending the natural one. In London and Manchester, the artists will be connecting in each other’s studios as well as over Zoom over the next few months.
Leslie Thompson
Leslie Thompson has a highly developed style, drawing both from memory and through live observational drawings. He depicts scenes from television and film from 1970–1990. His drawings are punctuated with fascinating anecdotes from film, music and TV and he also has a vast collection of superheroes, which he binds and protects as he incorporates them into selected artworks.
Thompson has been a regular artist at Venture Arts studios for over twenty years and through this has been able to extend his innate illustrative gifts into stitch, ceramics, animation and printmaking. He has shown his work widely regionally, nationally and internationally.
Venture Arts is an award-winning visual arts organisation working with learning-disabled artists. Through their studio programmes, exhibitions and collaborative projects, they remove barriers to the arts, put artists in the lead, champion neurodiversity and provide pathways for every individual to develop their creative identity.
Eleni Maragaki
Eleni Maragaki is a visual artist born in Athens, Greece. She studied Painting in the Athens School of Fine Arts (2013-2018) and MA Fine Art in Central Saint Martins, UAL (2020-2022), as a recipient of the Mona Hatoum Bursaries Award. Her work is focused towards bridging the dichotomy between urban construction and the natural environment. As a response to the densely manufactured cityscape, she is inspired by the delicacy found in the system of natural structures, including chemical elements and crystals.
She has taken part in numerous exhibitions including a screening in LUX Moving Image, a group show in the Art Station Dubulti in Latvia and the Shijiazhuang Youth Art Biennale in Hebei, China. In 2023, she was the winner of the TATE Christmas Card Competition and shortlisted for the First Plinth: Public Art Award. One of her latest projects was public commission for a light installation by Stavros Niarchos park in Athens, Greece. She is currently a resident at the Muse Gallery.