John Holmes

John Holmes is an experienced arts marketer who has worked at a variety of music organisations, including English Touring Opera, Sinfonia Cymru and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE). He specialises in working where marketing and cultural programming collide, developing programmes to reach new audiences, such as Bach, the Universe and Everything, the OAE’s pioneering music and science series.

John also researches and writes strategies for local authorities and cultural organisations, using a variety of creative methods to incorporate the views of local residents. Work includes Green & Gold, a strategy to put the environment and child-centred creativity at the heart of regeneration in Ellesmere Port, and the audience development strategy for Culture in Common in the New Forest.

Rachel Hill

Rachel Hill is a freelance artist, songwriter, and choir director based in St Neots. Her music has been featured across regional and national radio, including BBC Radio 1. Rachel was awarded ‘Best Acoustic Act’ at this year’s Cambridge Bands Competition 2025. She is set to complete her third international solo tour this year. As a live performer, Rachel is best known for the captivating use of her vocal loop pedal, creating enchanting performances with layers of live-recorded harmonies. Having only recently moved to the area, Rachel is excited to be a part of the Neotists community and to connect with other local creatives. So if you are reading this, click on one of her social media links and say hi!

Michael Murfin

Michael is a painter, draughtsman and teacher, born in St Neots, Cambridgeshire. He studied at Leicester Polytechnic, Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham and Birmingham Polytechnic, then worked in a timber yard in St Neots.

During the 1980s Murfin participated in Artist in School schemes in Cambridgeshire and nearby counties, in 1983 gaining a major award from Eastern Arts Association. In 1990 he was visiting lecturer at University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and artist-in-resident at Oundle School.

Michael has also shown his work more locally in St Neots, Huntingdon, Peterborough and in one of his favourite exhibition spaces — The Yarrow Gallery at Oundle School in Northamptonshire (where he has been Artist in Residence on three occasions). More recently he has been supported by Woodbine Contemporary Arts in Spalding and Uppingham.

Hilary Murfin

Hilary is an artist, craftsperson and designer who started to revive and extend her drawing skills through the observation of plants in her somewhat wild garden. She looks for the extraordinary in the ordinary; all the better for being nearby since mobility issues and arthritic hands have obliged her to redirect her creativity. Hilary’s handcrafted papier mache vessels that she began making around ten years ago have unfortunately been discontinued.

Paul Muir

Paul Muir is an artist and drama therapist, living and working in St Neots. Professionally trained at Newcastle Polytechnic, Leeds University and St Albans College of Art and Design. Paul now dedicates his time to portraying the beauty and meaning we experience in the people and landscapes we encounter.

His history is in applying drama therapy theory with groups and individuals with children of all ages. Believing that play leads to an enriched understanding of ourselves and others. His work has largely been in schools and colleges in Yorkshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire.

Presently his art studio is a Narrowboat on The Great Ouse where he draws his inspiration.

Melina La Firenze

Melina La Firenze is an artist and philosophy teacher living and working in St Neots. Born in Italy and brought up in London. She is self-taught and has been a painter all her life. Her paintings have been exhibited in London and Barcelona. She curated a gallery in Barcelona. She has also done a wide range of restoration work; colour restorations of 16th century to modern paintings, and restorations of sculpture and furniture.

Her artistic work is an attempt to give nature such as trees and animals a voice through the paintings working primarily in oils. She also takes regular commissions for portrait work.

She facilitates philosophical enquiry with primary school children and has made several films documenting their dialectic discourse covering all sorts of subjects from infinity to socialism.

Paul Pibworth

Paul Pibworth is an artist and sculptor who left school in 1979 and found himself starting working life as an apprentice sheet metalworker. He worked for a number of companies before stepping out on his own designing and manufacturing bespoke, furniture, fittings and artefacts.

Paul found that he had a talent for making things and that he could coax the idea from his clients concept right through to completion. At this stage in his career he leapt back into education, firstly taking a HND in 3D design in Bedford, followed by a BA in Spatial Arts and Arts Management at London Metropolitan University. Hosted within the architectural school he studied alongside and was encouraged to collaborate with the architectural students.

Maria Merridan

Maria Merridan is a Bedfordshire-based artist and printmaker and part-time lecturer in art and design. Her work is about creating unusual relationships between personal experiences and the following themes: science, natural history, navigation, weather and journeys.

Awarded The Peoples Award in 2015 for an artwork titled ‘Making Materials Come Alive’ – a large, mixed-media composition produced for Cambridge’s Pint of Science Festival in collaboration with group leader at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at Cambridge University, Dr Stoyan Smoukov.

Maria’s work was recently selected by the Circus of Illustration to exhibit in their Love Conquers All Exhibition and in 2015, was selected for Summer Exhibitions at Courtyard Art Gallery, Hertford and The Babylon Gallery, Ely. She has also exhibited with the arts collective Mark 5 at the Michael Heseltine Gallery in Oxford and Courtyard Art Gallery in Hertford.

Stephen Molyneaux

Stephen Molyneaux started his career in the games industry before moving into cinema. He is now a visual affects artist in London, working on major feature films like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Prometheus, Guardians of the Galaxy, X-Men and the upcoming Disney’s Jungle Book.  Stephen excels at character creation and visual development and is an accomplished artist both digitally and traditionally. Stephen studied under world renowned artists Steve Huston, Jeffrey Watts and Henry Yan and has work published for both digital and traditional work. You can view more of his work on his website or blog.

Oliver Winconek

Oliver Winconek was born in Bedford, England. Having chosen to not go down the route of formal Art education; he is primarily self taught. His work is always based around people, cities or a combination of both. Over the years Oliver’s work has continuously evolved ranging from bold, graphical cityscapes, pen and ink drawings and Oil painted portraits. He prefers to let his working style be semi dictated by the subject matter that he is portraying, this allows him to have an organic method towards his work that keeps things interesting for both the Artist and the viewer.

Oliver has exhibited all over the world including the Saatchi gallery and his work is held in many private collections.

“I am fascinated by people and the everyday, those situations and moments that we all encounter on a frequent basis that often hold no obvious significance or resonance. The fleeting  happenings that we take for granted are those that I like to use as a subject matter. I love experimenting with colour and pushing the boundaries of an image to increase interest. I now work pretty solidly in Oil, creating both portrait and figurative work as well as cityscapes that reflect the charging buzz that you only get from a massive group of strangers inhabiting the same outdoor space or building. My daily inspiration comes from people I meet and the scenes that I discover, I find it very satisfying documenting elements of the world and the people within it via the medium of paint.”

Fiona Brice

Fiona Brice has spent her working life bringing together creative practitioners and young people to raise their aspirations and broaden their creative thinking. She started out working in education programmes for orchestras in Newcastle and London and then moved to Creative Partnerships, which for many years was the Government’s flagship Creative Learning programme. This was a great opportunity to explore how a creative mindset could inform teaching approaches in schools and give a voice to young people both influencing the work of a range of practitioners and their own learning experience.

A move to Singapore in 2010 gave Fiona the wonderful opportunity to experience a range of different cultures at the same time bringing up a young family. She also joined a social enterprise who were delivering the global Design for Change programme to children in Singaporean schools. Fiona took the Design Thinking element of this programme and developed holiday programmes in innovation for preteen and young teenagers, usually culminating in an unusual collection of prototypes made out of recyclables.

Vicki Clark

Vicki Clark is a talented artist and illustrator who has now launched her own creative business. Vicki can offer anything from a small sketch of your beloved pet up to a huge statement piece for your home, business reception area, party, wedding or corporate event. Contemporary and modern, or more traditional, Vicki has it all, plus graphic design services. Visit Vicki’s blog for the latest news.

Chiharu Gotoh

Chiharu Gotoh was born in Yamagata, Japan in 1980 and studied hairdressing at Tokyo Hair & Makeup School, graduated in 2000. She worked as a hairdresser in several salons in Tokyo for 15 years before moving to UK in 2016 where she is now a freelance hairdresser.

Will Webster

Will Webster is a visual artist interested in the evolutionary competition that arises from the production and display of images. Investigating everyday systems of exchange and attempting to mesh them, Webster probes concepts of labour in contemporary society and bias inherent in “busyness”.

Working across various aspects of photographic process, Webster focuses specifically on ideas of capture and display. This approach is inspired by a Derridean concept of the frame as a bridge between inside and out, a fuzzy boundary that in its own way suggests and undermines the autonomy of art. Previous projects have harnessed financial assemblage, the rhetoric of interview, Cartesian geometry and the concept of homo economicus. Core to these activities is a concern to invigorate perceptions of competitive altruism in human exchange.

This approach is informed by a decade working as a commercial photographer of spaces and locations. Some of this work can be seen here.

Jessie Stringer

Jessie Stringer recently graduated from studying architecture at Falmouth University and is also an artist in her own right. Co-curating her first exhibition entitled Her Perspective earlier this year, she has taken part in various art fairs, art direction roles, and connects creatively predominantly through social media. Her work revolves around abstraction of portraiture and form through sculpture, painting and instillation with themes of mental health and femininity. Jessie is actively seeking painting and sculpture commissions whilst looking to get involved with local creative endeavours.

Jelena Jordanovic-Lewis

Jelena Jordanovic-Lewis is an illustrator, born in Yugoslavia and grew up in Germany. She learnt art when she was young from a classical Serbian artist but she focussed on science in her studies and has only just recently returned to her passion of drawing and painting. Jelena’s main focus is illustrating children’s books and creating cute adorable characters using watercolour. Jelena lives with her brave, adventurous baby girl and her lovely husband in St Neots but tends to move where the winds of life take her.

Georgina Manning

Georgina Manning is an artist who works mostly with paint, but also installation and digital media. With 17 years’ experience of working with children, young people and communities in a variety of settings, Georgina has been responsible for organising and supporting a range of projects and events.

With a focus on using art to help raise confidence and bring people together. Keen to break down barriers to art, she is currently involved in projects in Huntingdon, working to increase arts engagement in the area.

Alongside her own practice, she also offers private tuition and runs art workshops for different events including children’s parties.

Joshua Cadogan

Joshua Cadogan is an aspiring concept artist, who loves world-building and telling stories through digital painting. For the last five year’s he has been travelling and volunteering abroad and now wants to tell some stories. He is most excited about finding exactly what makes my client’s projects come alive and what makes their world worth exploring. Joshua is interested in the next trend of atmospheric and ambient virtual reality games and believes how stories are told in the games world is about to be the next big space for creating worlds and storytelling tools

Chris Green

By day, Chris Green is a design engineer in the agricultural and food industry, but his real love is building things from corrugated cardboard. Chris has been cutting up a cardboard or cereal boxes for as long as he remembers and uses corrugated cardboard for its accessibility and limitation the material brings. He chooses never to hide the material and rarely ads any additional paint finishes to the material. His main influence is science fiction, with a lot of the projects being based on movie or video game robots. In recent years the builds have moved from small table top models to large freestanding sculptures, up to 4 metres high.

Diana Scarborough

Diana Scarborough is a Cambridge-based artist-engineer whose collaborative practice is inherently cross-discipline with technology and the contextual bias. She takes her inspiration from research and science, working with world leaders in the fields of astronomy, nano-biotechnology materials and space weather data with an eco-focus. Diana is currently collaborating with British Antarctic Survey, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge, and the School of Music at the Australian National University.