Open studios events, where artists invite the public to visit their workshops and studios to see art in the making, have been mushrooming throughout the country in recent years. One of the longest-running and largest, is South East Open Studios. South East Open Studios has come a long way since it began in 1996 with just 46 artists working in the Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks areas. This year there are 265 artists taking part throughout Kent and East Sussex.

The aim of Open Studios is to provide artists with an opportunity to show and sell work. Equally important is the opportunity to encourage a wider audience to enjoy art and the chance to discuss and learn about techniques. There is a wide range of art forms from painting, printmaking, photography through to glass and metalwork. This year artists taking part include: Christine Dumont, Mandy Munroe, Mike Tedder and Anna Wilson-Patterson.

Christine Dunmont is a jewellery designer from Belgium who has recently returned to Kent from Canada where she and her partner Michael Tremblay took part in an annual open studios event. The detail of organic forms, often only visible under a microscope, is what inspires her art. She works with polymer clay which she finds is the ideal medium to reproduce the turbulence of molecular tension at work in nature.

Mandy Munroe has been taking part in SEOS for 6 years. For the duration of open studios she works out of Furse Studios in Smarden alongside Chris and Vikky Furse and Rib Bloomfield. Mandy is a textile artist who specialises in contemporary wall pieces. This is a particularly busy year for Mandy as she is creating work for an exhibition in New York this autumn as well as for Open Studios. She will be very pleased to talk with visitors and will be demonstrating dyeing techniques on 20 June.

“Mike Tedder from Dover is very active on the South East Kent art scene and as well as exhibiting his work internationally. He experiments with a diverse range of media including paper collage, paint and photography and is inspired by his own experiences through childhood.”

New to SEOS is the artist Anna Wilson-Patterson has recently opened a gallery, shop, studio and sculpture garden nurturing home-grown contemporary art and design, in a timber-framed cottage built in 1727, in the centre of Herstmonceux. Anna is exhibiting landscapes of the South Downs and a series of grand chicken portraits.

Further details are available on the website: www.southeastopenstudios.org.uk

Photograph: Artwork by Mandy Munroe; Artwork by Anna Wilson-Patterson; Liz Garnett Open Studio