Salon 006

20th January 2026

The sixth Salon of Doubt will start at 18:00 pm 

Address: The Art Workers’ Guild,  6 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AT

Further details of this event will be available shortly.

To reserve Tickets please click HERE

The Salon of Doubt was up until now  a free event, you could reserve a seat via an eventbrite  link, the evening was always popular and sold out very quickly. Unfortunately, quite a large proportion of people who reserved seats never turned up on the night and as such people who really wanted to attend the evening didnt get a place whilst there were many empty seats in the hall.
Hopefully this new policy might deter people from booking and not attending. The funds from ticket sales will go towards the Art Workers’ Guild Outreach department and will be used to fund future projects with our community.

Click on name or photo to be taken to the speaker’s website.

Llewellyn Thomas

Llewellyn taught for 30 years mainly at Maidstone Art College and was head of the BA in Illustration there. He also taught Art History at the University of East London. His final five years of teaching were at Farnham Art School where he headed the Further Education courses.
He was part of the team that created the model Foundation Diploma for UAL. He was a visiting moderator across the UK for that qualification and for the BTEC in Interactive Multi Media. 
He is a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild.

Llewellyn will be posing the question  “Now that UAL* is advertising for a ‘Generative AI Artist’. To become part of its teaching team is there a real plan for Art Education in the post Coldstream** environment?”

*University of the Arts London
** William Menzies Coldstream, (28 February 1908 – 18 February 1987) was an English realist painter and a long-standing art teacher.
Between 1958 and 1971 he was Chairman of the National Advisory Council on Art Education, which published its first report in 1960—called the "Coldstream Report"—outlining the requirements for a new Diploma in Art and Design (Dip.A.D.). Coldstream's proposals eventually led to more art school courses being given degree status.

Isabella Kocum

Isabella is a frame conservator at the National Gallery, responsible for the care and conservation of frames in the collection.
She is a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild.


My doubt;  The acquisition of antique frames followed by their alteration presents a professional concern from a conservation standpoint. While the curatorial aim of presenting antique paintings in historically resonant frames is understandable, the modification of original frames raises issues regarding conservation ethics.

Vicki Ambery-Smith

Vicki Ambery-Smith has a  well established international reputation for her architectural silverware and jewellery inspired by architecture.  She has worked on this theme, (much to her own surprise!) for over 40 years and yet still gets anxious before handing over a commissioned item to a client.  She calls this ‘stage fright’.  Why does it happen?
She is a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild.

In Vicki’s own words

“As the work we do is so personal and specific to each of us we are laying our soul bare for judgement at that moment of revelation.   Lack of confidence from knock-backs at earlier years at school?  Feelings of being ‘found out’.?

Discuss!   I would like this to be open to hear others thoughts on the subject.”

Claire Collison

      

Claire Collison is a writer and visual artist. She teaches Creative NonFiction and Poetry at City Lit, and designs engagement for various folk, including the Government Art Collection. Her most recent poetry pamphlet, 'Placebo' is published by Blueprint. She is not a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild.


Recently I've been transcribing birdsong. I'm interested in doubt as a creative force for good - Keats's negative capability, or what Barthes described as "the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself."

Gareth Mason

Gareth Mason is a ceramicist. He is a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild.


"'Ceramic Doubt — An Unreliable Witness'

I make pots that are not easily resolved to the apparent settled order of ceramic art, especially that of porcelain, burdened with its time-honoured purity. This talk is an attempt to speak from within, rather than about. I will take the turbulent emergence of one recent piece of work — its near-destruction through several firings, to its final dissonant incarnation — to illustrate the madness my practice routinely puts me through.
What is said will not resolve. Because uncertainty is always there, in my work and words."

Michael
Hrebeniak

Michael Hrebeniak is the Founder and Convenor of the New School of the Anthropocene, an
experimental micro-university based at the AWG, which is dedicated to confronting biopolitical emergency through the arts, and Associate Professor of Film Poetics at UCL. He is not a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild


He’ll be speaking about the positive value of uncertainty as a gestalt across the postwar American arts and how this spirit actively informs the ethos of the New School of the Anthropocene.

Johnny David Bowie

I draw because it makes me feel better than if I hadn't. He is not a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild

I would like to share with the Salon of Doubt a series of Christmas and Birthday pictures I have drawn for my partner Carolyn over the years.

Geoff Grandfield

Geoff Grandfield is an illustrator, educator, and researcher.
He has been commissioned by publishers, newspapers, design studios, advertising and exhibition clients. He teaches at Kingston School of Art and currently supervises practice-based PhD research students.
His own PhD research uses illustration practice as a tool to understand and articulate the legacy of pre-verbal experience and the visualisation of absence.
He is not a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild

He is looking forward to presenting four aspects of not knowing and a positive plan.

Markus Vater

Markus Vater is a painter, draftsman, interdisciplinary artist, and author. He studied Fine Art at the Münster and Düsseldorf Art Academies and the Royal College of Art in London. He has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and the Royal Academy London. He has been a visiting professor at the HFBK in Hamburg, the Karlsruhe Art Academy, and a lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London. He is currently Professor of Painting/Graphics and Interdisciplinary Studies at the HBK Essen. He lives and works in Düsseldorf, London, and Folkestone.
He is not a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild


I will probably talk about drawing. How it is a rip through our world maybe, a line, that is a gap exposing the construction we call reality.

Also about doubt as a creative catalyst and then maybe more general about doubt.

* Markus is holding “Painting, that needs help”, Acrylic on paper, 60cmx40cm ,2025

Katie Lennard

My name is Kate Lennard, some call me Klennard. I’m a multidisciplinary artist and educator with a BA in Sculpture from City and Guilds of London Art School (2016). She is not a Brother of the Art Workers’ Guild

“Mark making is a big topic in Art, but I’m also interested in Marc making! My fascination and fictionalisation in the Rock icon Marc Bolan underpins much of my creative pursuits. I intend to talk about being a nearly-official-member of the Marc Bolan fan community for the past twenty years, documenting the characters, situations and uncanny synchronicities of Marc making. I sometimes doubt, where does Marc end, and we begin?“