Stoke Newington Artists Group (SNAG) are a group of multidisciplinary artists from Stoke Newington / Hackney who formed in 2009, and meet regularly to discuss their practice, drawing inspiration and ideas from each other. In this, their first collaborative exhibition, SNAG explores the theme of ‘Local’ and has invited other artists from a variety of disciplines to join them through their investigation into ‘Localness’.

Each artist has individually responded to the theme by making new works that pose the question ‘What is local?’, engaging with the subject through a variety of media including sound, photography, drawing, painting and installation. From a walk to the local shop, new constructions changing familiar places, objects we find beneath the surface of our gardens, textures under our bare feet or recognisable faces we see in the street, to a cup of tea we share with neighbours; the aim of this exhibition is to bring together artists, not all of them ‘local’, to present works that reflect locality and invite the viewer to think about what local means to them.

A. Banu Cansever born in Istanbul in 1975, is a mixed-media artist who lives in London since 2001.  She graduated with a first class degree honours in BA-Fine Art from Middlesex University in 2010. Banu takes on the challenge of creating works that fall somewhere between figuration and abstraction. Her art works enable her to visualize her internal thoughts and articulate and question the world around her. www.banucansever.blogspot.com

Photograph by Francisco Riego

Maria Begasse was born in Portugal in 1982. Since October 2010 she is doing her Master in Photography at the London Metropolitan University in London. www.mariabegasse.com

Alexandra Blum lives and works in London. She has had numerous shows in the UK, Japan and Paris.  Awarded an artist’s residency on the vast Dalston Square construction site in Hackney (2008-10), she spent 18 months charting the transformation of Dalston, drawing both from the streets and within the building site itself. The process of navigating the construction site to draw became almost a Situationist derive, the interior of the site revealing a compressed version of the life cycle of spaces evolving over a longer time span throughout the city as a whole.   A selection from the series of 180 drawings will be shown during ‘Local’. www.alexblum.co.uk

Zoe Clifford has recently graduated from Camberwell College of Art. She makes costumes and dolls. Her work for ‘Local’ is concerned with the idea that as each generation moves in or out of London town, some traditions gradually fade from view. The charity fundraiser who first took pearly buttons and sewed them in patterns upon his suit became the original Pearly King. The Pearly Kings were soon joined by Pearly Queens. In an attempt to capture in doll form some of the old Hackney and east end tradition, her piece in the 'Local' show is a Pearly Queen doll which has been made to celebrate the Pearly’s decorating expertise, and how they dress up and show off their suits.   www.drawingdolls.blogspot.com / zoec2007@yahoo.co.uk

Paul Driscoll lives and works in London. He studied for a BA Painting and Photography degree at Columbia College Chicago, after previously gaining a degree in Politics from Birmingham City University.  His interest in politics, and living in a significant Greek Cypriot/Turkish area in North London, lead to several visits to Cyprus, which sparked his interest in the link between history, political and community divisions, and the development of myth. This theme was developed in his MA Fine Art at London Metropolitan University, which resulted in the series of paintings entitled Green Line. www.pdriscoll.com

Caroline Halliday is a Londoner, a lesbian-feminist, an artist, and a grandmother, currently engaged with an MA at Sir John Cass School of Art at the London Metropolitan University.  She has been in numerous shows in London, Brighton and Colchester. She is interested in  re-arranging ‘things’, so their symbolic connotations emerge or are contradicted, taking objects to pieces or cutting them with a jigsaw. Chairs, drawers, earth, ironing boards, books, language, fairy tales, and filmic images/text- and questioning their many facets - patriarchal, gendered or heteronormative - she uses a feminist gaze, to reframe them. Her work for ‘Local’ uses text tags to write about how a girl child forms a sense of what is familiar or safe. www.carolinehalliday.co.uk

Photograph by Francisco Riego

Stephen Harwood completed an MA in Fine Art at Central St Martin’s, London. His practice is an investigation of the affective power of place. Harwood’s work in the show comprises a group of drawings of the familiar places of the Shropshire village where he grew up; the images originate from Google Streetview. The use of Google Streetview seems to set up a similar distancing to that of his painting practice, where the photographs taken by his parents and posted to him are his main source material. www.stephenharwood.co.uk

Karin Janssen is born in Utrecht, the Netherlands and has studied at the Academy for Visual arts and Design in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. She lives and works in London since 2009. In her work Janssen plays with the fine line of when beauty becomes ugly, and especially when the repulsive becomes attractive. This way the ideal images of the female collide with reality, and get dragged into the absurd. www.karinjanssen.com

Anna Lopez born in Milan, and working and living in London, recently completed an MA in fine art at Metropolitan University, London. In her work she uses text, sound, images and discarded objects. She investigates human emotion and neurosis in connection to the way we relate to things around us. Her work Three miles out is a composition of sounds sourced in the local area: daily activity, fragments of conversation, personal stories captured in Hackney Wick, she uses all of these to play with the fine line that separate local – the specificity of a place – and global – the sameness of a place to any other.

Simon Mills  studied at St. Albans School of Art and at the Central School of Art, after which he spent several years in Tuscany and Umbria. He has lived in Hackney for 17 years and for the past six he has been working on a series of paintings of the borough at night. He is fascinated by the ambiguities of an environment that feels friendly and safe but also sometimes hostile. In searching for the drama and beauty in the commonplace he chose to paint at night when the colours are more intense. The images are partly deconstructed as a way of finding an essence and in order to encourage the viewer to look a bit harder.

Miro et Moi, Juan de Dios Miro Garcia and Xavier Gunther, both work and live in London. Xavier completed his BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, Juan completed his BA in Applied Art and Design at Middlesex University. After this they started working together. Their collaborative practice allows them to mix art with design, concept with fantasy and to create imaginative flourishing works of art. By adding a new aesthetic value to the waste materials found in their direct surroundings they attempt to minimise economic value imposed on their life. miro.et.moi@gmail.com

Henry Mulhall lives and works in London. He is currently in the final stages of a fine art photography degree at London Metropolitan University. Mulhall is interested in the tension between the thing in its living context in time, and its graphic representation in the photograph. He is fascinated by the epistemological implications of this tension. His ambition is to substantiate the idea that tension is a way of knowing.

Santa Piterniece is a photographer born in Latvia, currently living in London, UK. At the present she is undertaking an MA degree in Fine Art Photography at London Metropolitan University.  The photo “UNDERWORLD” is part of her project “Shoreditch of my illusions”. These photographic compositions are reflections of their inner landscapes, which are built of un-countable memories and experiences that materialize into lucid states of mind. By getting to know surroundings and passing local places many times over, it has created these illusions about Santa’s current home area that are represented in these multi-dimensional photographs which challenge perceptions of time, space and scale.  www.santasstudio.eu

Tony Rickaby has studied at St. Martin's School of Art in London. He has shown his conceptual works, installations and paintings throughout Europe and the US. His current work reflects on walks around south London, where he lives.   www.tonyrickaby.co.uk

Aisling Roycroft studied sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts. She is an installation artist and uses a range of different materials including sound, projection and the found object within her work. Aisling’s installations focus on the notion of the ‘seen and unseen’. Taking objects out of their natural environment and context, she endeavours to portray the ‘unnoticed’ side of these objects and explore the ‘overlooked’.  Inspired by an article she read about tea being the gel that holds a local community together, she decided to use this as a starting point for her research into ‘Local’. In this exhibition, Aisling aims to use a cup and saucer she found as the basis of her exploration into local communities, starting in Well Street, Hackney. www.aislingroycroft.com

Tematrilia (Maria Lopez Fabal) is born in A Coruña, Galicia. She studied at the Escola de Artes e Oficios Pablo Picasso in A Coruña, where she specialized in Volume.  She lives and works in London. The creative process is a tool for her to encounter the world. Her creative endeavours are fostered by curiosity and aesthetics.  Life and universal dynamics are her main inspirations. Her imagery comes from research and observation, it is assembled by drawing. www.tematrilia.blogspot.com

Keir Wickenham an illustrator from Pennsylvania, USA, studied at Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Ivy School of Art. She lives in London, close to Arsenal's old Highbury Stadium. When it closed in 2006, she did a series of watercolours to chronicle the work of diggers and demolition crew, as historic old stands were pulled down to make way for luxury flats. Her work in Local is a collection of pieces found in her back garden. Artefacts, which will be displayed in the show, range from bones, stones, rust-covered nails and shells of snails to plastic children's toys and an effigy of... "Is it Barbie? A dig in another garden might unearth evidence of Boudicca. But in Highbury, it's Barbie."