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PAST EVENT

Art Works That Inspire

  • Sue Hamer
  • Sep 22
  • 2 min read

Updated: Sep 30

Thursday 18th September 2025

Towner Eastbourne


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Helen Chadwick ,The Oval Court, detail.

In September, we piloted a new event, Art Works That Inspire, featuring three of our artist members — Stephanie Grainger, Agata Read, and June Nelson — each giving a short talk on the artworks that inspire them. This event offered a wonderful opportunity to discover a wide range of artists and to explore how their works resonate with and influence our speakers.

Blue Monkey would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to June, Steph, and Agata for sharing their inspirational choices and providing such a fascinating evening. We’re excited to repeat this format again in the future. The artists who took part were as follows:

Steph’s early career in theatre has a powerful influence on her work. She enjoys experimental collaboration and mixing drawing, photography, and digital techniques.  Steph also creates animations with her partner, using drawing on paper in combination with digital creation, motion graphics, and music.


Agata’s practice merges photography and textiles to explore the spaces between past and present, brokenness and repair. Using embroidery and patchwork as feminist interventions, she transforms photographs into layered narratives of memory and resilience, where thread becomes both material and metaphor for connection, healing, and continuity.


History, myth, and the emotional weight of experience are central to June’s work; the suppressed lives of women underpin her imagery,   telling stories of resilience, loss, and hidden histories—whether through intimate family moments or allegorical figures, using wax, graphite, smoke, ink, paint; using installation, assemblage but, most recently on canvas, in a focused return to her painting practice.


From top to bottom: Image 1: June Nelson sharing work from Louise Bourgeois. Image 2: Stephanie Grainger shared some incredible drawings from a handful of artists where redaction was the theme that brought these works to light, including William Kentridge and Robert Longo. Image 3: detail of artwork by speaker Agata Read Image 4: detail of drawing by Stephanie Grainger Image 5: detail of painting by June Nelson





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