Spotlight on Arts – Conversations on Creative Journeys
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This episode of Spotlight on Arts features a reflective conversation with artists Paul Caper Dexter, Laura Dalton, and Miffy Ryan, recorded at Fearon Hall. The discussion explores how artists develop their practice outside traditional art-school pathways, drawing on personal determination, place-based inspiration, and everyday environments. Paul reflects on landscapes, street scenes, and colour-led portraiture shaped by years of self-directed work, while Laura describes an intuitive, expressive approach influenced by travel, community connections, and creative spontaneity. Together, the conversation highlights Loughborough’s re-emerging creative energy and the importance of making space for art that grows from lived experience rather than commercial expectations. This SEO summary supports the podcast and accompanying blog by emphasising themes of creative identity, accessibility, and local artistic renewal.
This episode of Spotlight on Arts brings together three artists whose work grows from determination, lived experience, and a commitment to making creativity part of everyday life. Recorded at the community café in Fearon Hall, the discussion explores artistic identity, confidence, and the changing landscape of local creativity. The conversation unfolds without pretence, reflecting the realities of making work outside conventional routes into the art world.
Paul Caper Dexter speaks about a lifelong pull towards drawing and colour, recalling the moment when teachers first recognised something distinctive in his early illustrations. His practice now ranges from portraits to large-scale painting, influenced by railway posters, street art methods, and the landscapes he returns to again and again. His view from his flat window has become a recurring subject, showing the ordinary environment as something quietly atmospheric. For Paul, the drive to paint is rooted in personal meaning as much as public response. Exhibiting his work, and seeing people engage with it, is part of sustaining that momentum.
Laura Dalton describes a different but equally compelling path. Drawing since childhood and eventually studying at Goldsmiths, she talks about the struggle to believe in her own voice while surrounded by what felt like an unfamiliar artistic vocabulary. Returning to her practice more fully in recent years, she now works with immediacy and intuition. Her paintings often emerge in the moment, driven by feeling rather than predetermined concepts. Encounters with other artists and the experience of travelling to unfamiliar places feed this sense of openness. For Laura, inspiration often arrives through colour, movement, and conversation, rather than through formal structures.
Miffy Ryan, who brought Paul and Laura together for the discussion, reflects on issues of class, access, and the expectations placed on artists. She points out that language such as “creative industries” can flatten the more expansive, imaginative aspects of making art. The conversation shifts towards the pressures placed on artists to frame their work in economic or therapeutic terms, rather than being allowed to develop for its own sake. Each participant returns to the value of making space, whether at home or in a studio, to work without the noise of external judgement.
Across the discussion, a sense of place runs quietly through the artists’ stories. Landscapes, street corners, windows, and community spaces become part of how each of them thinks, makes, and shares their work. Rather than abstracting art from life, they draw from their environments and from the people around them. The picture that emerges is not of an art world defined by hierarchy or exclusivity, but of a network of creative practice shaped by persistence, curiosity, and local connection.
The full conversation captures these themes in the voices of the artists themselves. The podcast offers an opportunity to hear how they discuss their work, their influences, and the paths that have shaped them. It also gives a sense of the wider energy developing locally, as new studios, pop-ups, and collaborative projects begin to form a renewed creative atmosphere.
