‘Portrait of a dress’ won the Society of Women Artists Karin Walker Young Artist Award at the Mall Galleries in 2023, was selected by the prestigious Women in Art Prize, was lonlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize, and was preselected by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the New English Art Club. It is loosely based on Andreas Kronthaler’s MM corset dress for the Vivienne Westwood Spring-Summer 2022 collection, and explores both the identities of things and their relation to the identities of humans.
‘Nikki in pink’ is a commission for a private collection consisting of works by Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk and others. Nikki passed away to cancer and pink was her favourite colour. She was a strong local figure, and I have tried to show a more intimate, complex and authentic side to her.
‘The Bladesmith’ explores how both the concept of work, and the particular work we engage in, can affect our characters.
‘Alexa generate me an Arab woman’ is an interplay between AI and myself. Over many months I typed paragraphs into a text-to-image-generating AI app and then painted a tweaked version of one of the images that was generated. My resulting painting both depicts AI as a mirror of societal stereotype feeds and as something that can be prompted and therefore directed by us. The colours are loosely reminiscent of the watermelon in subtle support of a ceasefire in Palestine and Israel.
‘Lewis, hung-over and eating tinned pineapple’ is my second portrait in oils. It humorously overturns historical concepts of wealth and status symbols like pineapples in the discipline of portraiture.
‘Chashah, pregnant with Anisha’ is my first oil portrait, completed in September 2022, four months before being selected as a Royal Society of British Artists Rising Star in 2023 (and again in 2024). It depicts pregnancy, an overlooked subject in the history of portraiture, as is race.
Invited by the Women in Art group, ‘Nose ring’ was specially made for the famous Art on a Postcard initiative, to raise money for The Hepatitis C Trust. Other artists over the years include Paula Rego and Grayson Perry.
‘Rachel, on bpd break’ is a small study using oil paints and genuine 23ct gold leaf.
Commissioned pencil portraits of faces or whole bodies, in my style mixing the Baroque style with a modern definition, are available from my studio.
Some composition highlights include: inventing a new composition method, currently titled ‘Sound Scripts’ or ‘Literary Serialism’; composing for students of the Royal Ballet School and London Contemporary School of Dance; being composer-in-residence at the Philharmonia Orchestra’s digital composition course; composing for the relaunch of the Brambly Hedge children books series, which aired on the radio; composing and performing a specially commissioned piece of music with Charly Jolly by artist Emma Green for the Alde Valley Spring Festival (https://www.aldevalleyspringfestival.co.uk/cherry-ingram-blossom-residency/); composing for Mind charity; composing to MIT professor Asegun Henry’s periodic table sounds and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Centre whale-song; composing for rosin spray for ‘Up Close and Musical’ music festival founder Shiry Rashkovsky; and collaborating with Oram Award Winner electronic artist Loula Yorke. My sound art is included in the New Museum of Networked Art. I am working on my debut album in the background to my other primary artistic work.
I have performed internationally as a violinist and singer, from the Berliner Philharmonika to the Royal Festival Hall, and taught at Benjamin Britten’s Aldeburgh Music at Snape Maltings.
I studied violin with Jascha Heifetz's protégé virtuoso Pierre Amoyal, Hugh Maguire and Hilary Sturt, composition with Avril Anderson, piano with Janet Barwell, and am studying opera with world-renowned soprano Yvonne Kenny. I have also attended internationally acclaimed masterclasses from the Salzburg Mozarteum to the Dartington School of Music. I won scholarships to the Royal College of Music JD, before visiting the Lausanne Conservatoire of Music, and the University of Cambridge.
I won an Isaac Newton Bursary, an Instrumental Award Scheme Scholarship, a Dance and Music Scheme Award, an Award for Young Musicians’, a Tom Acton Trust Award, a Royal College of Music Bursary and the Freda Dinn and Ida Mabott Violin Prize for violin and composition.
My debut poetry collection Making Sense was published by Verve Poetry Press on 20 April 2023, and my debut poetry pamphlet Growing by Broken Sleep Books in 2022. You can get a copy of Making Sense from me, Amazon or here: https://vervepoetrypress.com/product/dide-making-sense/?v=79cba1185463. And likewise for Growing: https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/dide-growing.
Endorsements for Making Sense:
‘You don’t recognise what’s new until you trip over it. So many poems are busily trying to sound like whatever trend is just about to be over, but these poems seem to come out of nowhere. Strange they are, in the ways they use metaphor, in the ways they remake the world; but most of what they are is true, brave and touching. I didn’t see them coming.’ - Mark Waldron
‘Throughout this gorgeous debut collection, Dide’s unique ability to create images that startle, shock and surprise enthrals – they will make you look at the world afresh. She says it best herself: “any minute of any hour, you make me put eyes in my eyes”.’ - Rishi Dastidar
‘An unflinching and unique body of work. Dide’s voice is cool and exacting. Despite being political, the collection is deeply personal and often shocking in candour and philosophical eloquence. Language is lifted out of tropes and refreshed. Whilst this debut is serious at core, a skilled playfulness with form and curiosity makes it wholly compelling, allowing the reader to come away buoyant and altered, paying closer attention to the world.’ - Rushika Wick
Reviews for Making Sense:
‘Wrought from raw bruise and razor-sharp attention, the poems in Dide’s Making Sense (2023) have a highly distinctive and often startling power to reframe perception.’ - Marek Sullivan, The Poetry Review, Winter 2023 Issue
‘This is a rare work, combining radical experimentation with genuine thematic substance … Dide’s gift is that she has laid bare the turbulent nature of being human and of trying to understand ourselves, both intrinsically and in relation to other people and our environment. These poems, then, look at age old problems in new ways – they look inwards, and, most importantly, forwards.’ - Isabelle Thompson, https://thefridaypoem.com/making-sense-dide/
Review for Growing:
‘Dizzying and dazzling.’ - Roger West, Suffolk Poetry Society
I have also been published by The Rialto, Ink sweat and tears, Propel Magazine, Popshot Quarterly, Tentacular Magazine, as Editor’s Pick by the Bath Flash Award, Michael Terrence Publishing, Commonwealth-sponsored Active Muse, Suffolk Poetry Society’s Twelve River Ripples, Plastic Toy Stories, the Lettering Arts Society’s ‘On a Knife Edge’ and Tebbs Gallery. I won the 2021 Arvon mentorship competition.
I was commissioned by Waveney&Blythe Arts to create a poetry film, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKvpkA-ahjg, and my writing has been exhibited by Naked Theatre in London’s Covent Garden and Tenjinyama Studios in Sapporo in Japan. You can listen to my poetry on the Seamus Heaney Centre’s podcast from all the usual places, as well as on Ipswich Art’s film on YouTube.
My first novel was described by DBC Pierre, winning author of the UK’s most prestigious literary prize the Booker Prize, as a ‘winner’ and compared to Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book Middlesex, although I have not pursued publishing fiction.
I mainly write poetry, and am philosophically inclined, although I like to merge genres. I often incorporate my poems or texts into my music or visual art. I have also written short stories, novels, non-fiction essays and aphorisms for myself.
Diptych I, or ‘Our flesh is music so ephemeral’, in the Smoke Series is for ENO Assistant Director Chris Hopkins’s touring show, ‘Project Impressions’. It depicts the ephemerality of music with two hidden ink poems woven inside the smoke. One of the poems is from my recent debut poetry pamphlet ‘Growing’ published by Broken Sleep Books.
‘Forest fire’ or ‘Beauty does not condone’, ‘Extinction Rebellion’, ‘Smoke stacks’ and ‘Bushfire’ all have short one-line poems hidden in UV light, and come with a UV torch to see them.
‘A part of my body is dead,’ is an abstraction on Trent Parke’s photography, referencing colourful industrial smoke. It has an older version of a poem from my forthcoming debut poetry collection ‘Making Sense’ published by Verve Press, written in UV light all across the oil painting and visible under blacklight torch, provided with the painting.
Triptych I, or ‘In a world where you can be anything,’ sees smoke as a metaphor for life, fleeting and within certain constraints, and has a hidden ink poem from my forthcoming debut poetry collection ‘Making Sense’ by Verve Press.
Smoke Eagle I has an older version in ink of a poem from my forthcoming debut poetry collection ‘Making sense’ by Verve Press, hidden in it.
Tiffin, domestic dog and therapy dog.
(Photos in this order:)
UPLIFT (photos 1-5 and photo 9) is a jewel-like sub-series, exploring the idea of frailty, weight, balance and preciousness, as well as how size can affect artistic presence and gravity. They are made from bismuth and pewter, and balance stone and sea finds. They reflect the instability and confinement of mental health.
(Photos 6-8) take the UPLIFT sculptures and frame them in boxes to create wall art, with one-line poems hidden in UV light or written in paint.
MOLTEN (photo 10) is a sub-series of pewter sculptures with coffee filter ink poems. The idea was to unite an Asian Tradition (the fortune cookie) with a Finnish Tradition (pouring hot pewter at NYE) with a more general one (note in a bottle) to challenge the industrialisation and elitism of the commercial art world.
FLICPICS are a series of fine art oil paintings exploring the concept of flipbooks and film for wall viewing. The engage with photographic elements of shutter speed, focus, bokeh and depth of field, but are interested in the unique idiosyncrasies of oil paint in the act of translation (between photographic and painterly techniques). They further explore the place of narrative in art, and in our developmental society at large.
‘Arrangements’, currently unframed (in the process of being framed), oil.
‘A blustery day in Elmshurst Park’ is the first of this work-in-progress series. It is a study of rubbish bins mounted onto black bin liner. In times of hardship, I try to find beauty in the overlooked and in doing so try to readdress their value in our judgemental gaze.
‘Comrade’, inspired by a baby gorilla from The Gorilla Organisation. The poem, from my debut pamphlet ‘Growing’ published by Broken Sleep Books, is hidden in the veins of the foliage and goes anti-clockwise around the gorilla from the bottom.
‘Phoebe’, an orphaned black rhino from the World’s largest rhino sanctuary, Care for Wild and Rhove Africa. The poem is incorporated into the bottom of the drawing.
Drawing samples from ‘Grey matters’ for MIND charity, a project combining portraits with a musical soundtrack incorporating speech from interviews I undertook with those directly or indirectly affected by mental health.
Two flower oil paintings, titled ‘Looking through 1’ and ‘Looking through 2’, looking through a bouquet of flowers and playing with translating photographic techniques to oil.
‘Bruise I, on the thigh’ is the first of a series of bruises, exploring the topography of trauma. It was used as the cover image for my debut poetry collection Making Sense. The other two in this series (not pictured) make direct use of topographical and geographical maps.
Two nipple paintings inspired by the presumed ‘Portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrées and Her Sister, the Duchess of Villars’ explore the unsettling nature and touch of nipples in the Fontainebleau School style and raise gender equal, race equal and cancer issues in a non-sexual way by questioning the paused time and space in terms of control, confidence, consent and over-analysed physicality. ‘Curtains’, my first oil painting ever in summer 2020, aims for the poise and antiquity of a Renaissance still life, and ‘Meating’, the raw, carnal aspect of flesh (close-up of ‘Meeting’ at the end of the page, after ‘Scar 1’).
‘Scar I’ is the first of a series of scars (others not pictured), after Fontana. Unlike Fontana, who cut his canvases, these are stitched back together and make a feature of the needle, thread and oil paint.
The three sea anemone paintings are inspired by the film ‘My Octopus Teacher’ and what humans can learn from ocean symbiosis, urging us to discover and protect oceans more. They celebrate habitat as a life form and encourage symbiosis between creatures in environmental protection.
Unique bronze casts of personal clothes using the lost wax method provocatively reference the double-speak sign at Auschwitz – Arbeit macht Frei – to raise awareness of current cheap labour slavery in the fashion, clothes, and textiles industries, without suggesting at a parallelism between the two. ‘Arbeit macht Baumwolle’ is written into the original label and attached to the bronze cotton top, which is not cotton like the label states but bronze; likewise, ‘Arbeit macht Spitze’ is stamped into the bronze sides of the lace doily. Fabrics I and II have words written in the oil-painted shadows. All are hung on the wall.
Suggesting at personal searches for self-narrative and the shaping of identity through colour and fabric, the elements that clothes heavily rely on, ‘Swatches’ are sensual, emotional embodiments of the mundane. Each close-up oil painting is of a fabric from my wardrobe, exemplifying each person’s unique quest to present themselves according to their own images, or desires, of themselves. This series views paintings as trade swatches, highlighting the industrialisation of art, like the industrialisation of clothes. It also hints at the needs of some people, especially those who are on the autistic spectrum, to focus on images bit by bit instead of an avalanche of visual stimuli that so often accompanies our modern worlds.
Approaching a sculptural element – brass metal – as painting instead of sculpture, these patinated, layered and orchestrated sheets play with the ideas of interpretation and meaning, which is all the more paramount in our time of fake news, double speak and misplaced trust. There is no paint, just controlled patina.
In order of appearance:
‘Bushfire I-V’, patinated brass abstract ‘paintings’ of bushfires and jungles, raising awareness about the importance of trees to our ecosystem.
‘Wonderland’, patinated brass.
‘Atomic I-III’, tempered and patinated brass.
They still need to be mounted onto the wall for display purposes.
(Photos in this order:)
CAST OFF (photos 1-8) - Patinated bronze casts of discarded rubbish, exploring notions of preservation, recycling and worth, and questioning our approach to waste and climate action, in our era of climate emergency and romanticised art.
CORALATION (photo 9) is a moving bronze sculpture with carbonated coral. It has a soundtrack composed for classical instruments featuring underwater coral sounds recorded off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. It also has three poems. The idea was to raise environmental awareness by highlighting the similarities between humans and corals, notably in stress management.
