Eight artists from East Oxford’s Magdalen Road Studios are taking their work out across the city to Art Jericho for a week.

Les McMinn is showing his charming series of pieces exploring what could happen on a wacky day out. These range from falling asleep en masse in a Stanley Spencer-inspired graveyard to intrepidly picnicking on a grouse moor in August, staring into a rock pool McMinn works on heavy paper that he treats with acrylic before finishing each piece by scraping and layering, techniques that reference the way landscapes themselves are created.

Marie Darkins has worked in porcelain to create tactile images based on her Mexican shell collection, each finished with a minimal glaze in colours that speak of beach and sea. The unpredictability of firing makes each piece an adventurous journey in itself. Ceramicist Rosie Wallace also takes inspiration from found materials, such as plastic packaging and tin cans. Her pieces focus on a specific and prevalent aspect of our contemporary culture: binge drinking. Her two substantial bottle-shaped pieces: Bingeing Bottle and Liver Bird are part of her Bingeing Britain series, each towering bottle topped by an unsteady gold Liver Bird. The birds are cast in ceramic moulds that make use of tankard handles for wings and bottle openers for tails. On the drinks tray, pictured right, three girls support each other under the banner ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.

Francis O’Neill describes himself as ‘tronie’, an ancient word showing he does not paint to commission. Rather he seeks out interesting faces and people and invites them to sit for him. Illustrated is a detail from Ruby Magic, as she lies on a couch, serene and demure, her wonderful expansive hair providing the perfect foil to her face and her golden bronze skin.

Claudia Figueiredo is showing seven pieces that hark back strongly to the 1950s. She drew inspiration from her collection of vintage materials. Figueiredo has used as her base plywood which she sands down between layers of painting to create blocks of colour that make strong references to domestic settings. In Cherries the impossibly bright and unrealistic fruit have been placed on and in part obscured by blocks of enthusiastic colour.

Anna Morris produces enchanting light delicate work, using mixed media and experimentation, incorporating thread to describe the haunting wide open land- and seascapes.

Tom de Freston is showing three sets of Untitled pieces in diptych and triptych. De Freston is better known for his large-scale canvases with their mutilated mythology and scenes littered with horse headed protagonists, which can be seen later this year at London’s Globe Theatre. Context and emphasis is provided for each of these large works by the tester pieces that de Freston creates on board. It is these, intense and remarkable, that he will be showing.

 The artists will also open their studios in Magdalen Road for the Open Doors weekend on September 14 and 15.

The work is at Art Jericho from Monday till September 8.