Into the Woods

Presented by Outside In

Artwork credit: Sara Rivers, Into The Woods 1 (Blue Series). Courtesy Outside In

Outside In is a national charity that supports artists who encounter significant barriers to the art world due to health, disability, social circumstance, or isolation. The charity provides a range of opportunities for artists to develop their creative and professional practice through exhibitions, workshops, training, bursaries, and mentoring.

At the fair, Outside In will be celebrating their 20th anniversary by showcasing artists Manuel Bonifacio, Drew Fox, Jasna Nikolic & Sara Rivers. Artists whose practice has been supported in a variety of ways during the charity’s two decades of work. Visitors will be able to find out more by talking with staff and Artist Ambassadors - a network of supportive artists, sharing their work and voices to advocate for the charity and help find more artists in real need of support. Funds from art sales and donations will enable new programmes of creative workshops and training opportunities and allow more artists to benefit from bursaries.

Into the Woods brings together Manuel Bonifacio, Drew Fox, Jasna Nikolic and Sara Rivers - four artists whose practice has been mentored and championed through Outside In's two decades of work supporting artists who face barriers to the art world. Manuel Bonifacio makes intricate depictions of the world as he sees it. Sara Rivers paints intuitive scenes of nature, often in flowing blue ink. Drew Fox layers plywood into strange, half-remembered landscapes. Jasna Nikolic paints icons of myth and nature on canvas and paper. Each artist shows how the impulse to make can become a way of mapping a self and a world.

Artist Biographies

Sara Rivers is a North London based artist and trained at art school in the early 1970s, where her mental health difficulties first emerged, and her work has grown out of that experience ever since. She describes it as a cycle of breakdown followed by breakthrough. She says, "my need to make marks is a vital part of living”, and the experiences that threaten to disrupt her life also inform her work and renew it. Within Outside In she has been both art maker and art critic - raising awareness of how artists whose artistic practice is intimately woven with journeys of recovery are often sidelined by galleries. Sara’s work has been shown in the 2023 Outside In National Open at Sotheby's, Project Ability in Glasgow and Hove Museum.

Drew Fox is a Glasgow-based artist who came to art in 2020, in the aftermath of a serious illness that brought him close to death. He began making work to make sense of what he had been through, "around my experiences in the land of the dead and the question of our identity, our reality. Who are we really?". A diverse and multi-talented artist, he works across a wide range of media. His paintings explore how illness has shaped his life, body and outlook, featuring abstract interpretations of his inner world, the strange landscapes he inhabited in semi-lucid states, and characters that emerged unbidden as he painted. Drew’s work has been shown at Fabrica in Brighton and in the 2025 Outside In National Open, Shelter, which toured from the New Art Gallery Walsall to Christie's in London.

Manuel Lança Bonifacio was born in Faro, Portugal in 1947 and moved to England with his sister in 2001, settling in Surrey. He left school at the age of eight and pursued drawing and pottery on his own terms. Today he is supported by ArtVenture, a creative day centre for adults with learning difficulties in Guildford. His work often returns to a childhood ambition to join the army, depicting helicopters, aeroplanes and boats. He first came to wider attention with his drawing Mermaid, in which Manuel was an award winner at the National, 2013 at Pallant House Gallery. The judging panel included Roger Cardinal, who coined the term ‘Outsider Art’. A solo show, My Imaginary Cave, followed at Pallant House in 2014, with a show shared with fellow winner Nigel Kingsbury and the Outsider Art Fair in Paris in 2015. His work is now held in the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne and in private collections in New York.

Jasna Nikolic is a British artist of Serbian origin. She was born in Belgrade in 1966 and trained there as an iconographer - a discipline that remains present in her densely worked paintings of myth, nature and mortality. In 2006 Jasna exhibited in an exhibition with Outside In, earning a solo show in the Studio at Pallant House Gallery. She has stayed close with Outside In ever since, becoming an Artist Ambassador and being named Artist of the Month in November 2021. More recently, she has shown work in Creativity of Freedom at artsdepot in 2024. Her wider record includes being featured in a Telegraph survey of outsider artists around the world, several international prizes, exhibitions across Europe and Mexico, and exhibitions with Henry Boxer Gallery.