Anya Keeley

Anya studied art at Newcastle-under-Lyme and when finding it hard to develop ideas on paper, she started to 'draw' with pieces of wire instead. After moving to Hereford some years later, she started to collect things whilst walking along the River Wye that she found on the ground, like driftwood and pebbles.

Says Anya “I have always been a collector of damaged, decayed, broken and abandoned objects, many of which I use in my current practice.  There was always a mental battle, as a child, of whether my love of finding objects would lead down the path of archaeology or whether my incessant inventing of stories and assembling of objects would take me along a more artistic route. The latter prevailed and eventually my object collecting has become a necessary material for my practice and my practice has become an essential usage for my amassed accumulations.”

Now Anya creates her wonderful 'Curious Creatures' each one a named individual character, mostly hand bound from wire, then bought to life using paper, fabric and vintage finds.