United Kingdom

2019 & 2020 Artists List

Almudena Rocca

Glasgow School of Art

Almudena Rocca is a multi-disciplinary artist. In the last few years, she has been developing her skills using a variety of materials including metal, glass, clay, wood, digital photography, pen and pencil. Often her designs will start with a continuous line drawing and then develop into a piece of 3D work. Inspiration comes from a very personal interest in mental ill health, politics, feminism and the role of women in art in today’s society.

Amanda Shropshire

Manchester School of Art

My collection of geo-floral designs is inspired by a fusion of folk art traditions from Morocco and Scandinavia along with a mid-century modern influence of bold colour choices and clean lines. The tactile qualities of velvet and its luscious feel adds softness to the bold colour palette.

Amelia Francis Wood

Leeds Arts University

Amelia Wood’s practice is concerned with retaining the hand of the maker, a tactile approach to material is necessary within Wood's work. Wood characterises the seams of construction to reveal the visible processes of making that permeate the surface. This piece focuses on the two opposing aspects; chaos and control. The faces are revealed in their raw form simultaneously on the bed sheet.

Anthea Spivey

Leeds Arts University

'They Don’t Die, They Disappear' is a photographic series exploring the albino community in Senegal. The aim of the project was not only to raise awareness for albinism in Africa, but to also seek donations of sunscreen for families too. Working alongside Club Albinos SN, Spivey was able to meet families and individuals with the condition and hear their stories. Since starting the project, over 200 bottles of sunscreen have been donated to families from people around the world with more on the way.

Benjamin Campbell

Leeds Arts University

How we as humans navigate our reality is at the centre of my practice, how we perceive, experience and react reflects the individual and society we are engaged within. The digital world we live in, ultimately has differed not just the ways we live but how we undertake the inherent experience. Through the experience of my work I explore ways of seeing, living and being and how the times we are engaged within manipulates how we govern our reality.

Charlie Yates

Glasgow School of Art

My practice is driven by my reflections on journeys of discovery I have embarked upon over recent years. My work is made up of a series of observations of actual and partially recalled places, objects and memories in the form of sketches, photographs and recordings of both a written and verbal nature. I re-contextualize these experiences by translating them into paintings and inevitably lose information; this fall out is apparent in the paintings sparse and fragmented nature.

Coco Main

Glasgow School of Art

I have always had a curiosity and fascination with natural phenomena and objects of organic formation. This has led me down an artistic investigation into the natural world. Like nature I also change and transform materials. My methodology and innate connection to my subject matter has allowed for the emergence of a reciprocal ecosystem between tool making (process) and image narratives to permeate through the work.

Connie Burlton

Glasgow School of Art

Connie Burlton’s practice explores the contemporary return of the hand, considering making within the context of our digital age. Since the explosion of the internet, the manipulation of physical material has been replaced by simulations or visualisations. Whilst this may satisfy the eye it leaves the body feeling amputated. The physicality, materiality and tactility of her paintings provide a potent antidote to the ubiquitous screen and the progressively intangible digital age.

Corinne Hutton

Manchester Arts University

Hutton believes movement is essential for her pieces. Through chopping and changing the original, the work takes on a new innovative form. The patterns start off symmetrical and repetitive. The overlay of more layers disrupts this by taking away the rigid original structure to establish a fluidity. Hutton gives new purpose to something that is often disregarded and ascetically reinvests energy to create art from something deemed as nothing.

David Miller

Glasgow School of Arts

On an imaginary line along Earth's surface known as ‘The Agonic Line’ there are sites where a freely suspended magnetic needle indicates true north.I made a pilgrimage to these points to study, record and experiment with magnetism in its truest form. By employing this live, invisible & volatile force as a medium, we harness its power and interrupt its natural design with fascinating results.

Denisa Kreitzer

Leeds Arts University

My work is based on the ontology of the visual and its capacity to question reality, the juxtaposition of unrelated objects, worlds and concepts, whether by chance or intention. The order and choice of items is radically unnatural and these objects, as familiar as they might seem, exist in a parallel world beyond reality, creating another dimension for them to exist in through the use of paint.

Erin Taylor

Manchester Arts University

Taylor's work has stemmed from investigations into mapping of the urban environment. She is interested in alternative information gathering and non-traditional artistic methods of representation, such as graphs and data diagrams. She believes that these diagrams can reveal information about the everyday that may not be initially apparent. Data and statistics can reveal interesting trends and patterns that pictorial representation cannot.

Fern Cooke

Manchester Arts University

‘Do what is right’ is a completely recycled piece which gives a voice to the concerns and worries of younger generations around the ongoing climate crisis. As an artist I’ve always been very socially driven and ethics is a prominent theme in everything I create. I was very drawn to the idea of creating textile banners due to the key role they’ve played in marches throughout history.

Fiona Burton

Manchester Arts University

My practice is primarily colour focused. Specialising in print design has allowed me to explore colour and composition through the means of collage, painting and digital design to create fun and playful interactive interiors and installations. My inspiration comes from all things colourful that entice you to want to explore their characters. The pieces created are intended to encourage and entice the viewer to want to play and engage their senses.

George Welch

Leeds Arts University

My practice is firmly rooted in painting specifically concerning landscape looking more in depth at expression, with a focus on; colour, form and composition, particularly in respect of how painting communicates emotion. I believe painting to be an incredibly personal and meditative form of art, projecting oneself through a tangible expression of your innate personality.

Holly Ainslie

Glasgow School of Art

We are drawn to the fragility of objects – pre-disposed to maintain and conserve the latter in a state of uncertainty. Teetering on the edge of disappearance. We find fascination and dread within this fine line – curious to see what used to be. Holly Ainslie’s practice aims to encompass this dichotomy of permeance through her painting; concerned with the state of an object, it’s relation to us and its ontological truth.

India Georgia

Manchester School of Art

My practice focuses primarily on drawing, painting and mark-making. I work in an abstract manner, and I am inspired by the surroundings of my homeland of Northern Ireland; my work is often a reflection of the land, its culture and politics, capturing it in an intriguing and conceptual manner. Further to this, I use free-hand machine embroidery as an extension of my drawing and mark-making skills.

Jack McGarrity

Glasgow School of Art

Taking the myth of Sisyphus as a point of origin, my work seeks to explore notions of the absurd, alienation, masculinity and the legacy of deindustrialisation. Combining the temporal and the mythic and rooted in a deep engagement with art history, the work incorporates a kaleidoscopic array of source material that collage in tangible, yet illogical, scenarios.

James Allinson

Leeds Arts University

James Allinson is a commercial and retail landscape photographer based in the Yorkshire Dales, his most recent photographic project, titled ‘In the Shadows of the Fells’, is an environmental documentary project that reveals more about the people who play a role in shaping, maintaining and conserving the natural heritage of the Yorkshire Dales. Allinson aims to showcase the work that they do and the relationships that they have with the landscape.

Jason Sojka

Leeds Arts University

Through lighting, styling and retouching Jason Sojka crafts images that elevate products to achieve maximum impact. Sojka's style is often clean and minimal, however an occasional playfulness adds to consumer engagement; increasing desirability.

Josh Newsome

Leeds Arts University

Josh's paintings emerge through real temporal experience, focusing on the uncertainty of the night within urban landscape. The paintings have moments of sublime passages where the uncertainty of shape and depth convey an ambiguity that is unsettling yet alluring. Subtle tones and brush strokes leave room for speculation, where the viewer is invited to look through the image and use their experience to build a relationship with the work.

Katarzyna Krynska

Glasgow School of Art

Focusing on political strains within society, Katarzyna Krynska's work explores people’s internal constraints, resulting from both what we are told and what is omitted from public, easy access media. Krynska works in oil, photography and theatre/film. Often intertwining mediums, such as within the painting ‘Konformista’, where a segment of the painting adopts the theatre practitioner; Stanislavski's theories. Looking upon the painting ‘Konformista’, we adopt an omniscient stance by overlooking the figures, seated in eerily similar, but not exact positions.

Lauren Brown

Leeds Arts University

Lauren Brown is an abstract artist who primarily works with oils on canvas. Lauren uses a balance of colour, marks and space achieved through different variations in paint application. Her work evokes an essence of fluidity, movement and improvisation, creating paintings with recognisable elements that contrast with unknown and intriguing marks and shapes. She allows the paintings to be open to interpretation.

Leon Thompson

Manchester School of Art

Predominantly a Graphic Designer, Thompson likes to explore his own relationships and interactions with the world in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, not afraid to pull his own short comings as a person to the surface for his work.

Lewis Andrews

Leeds Arts University

Lewis Andrew is an emerging artist specialising in photography, drawings and printing from Leeds. Inspired by early romantic notions of the sublime, he composes work that reflects on the overwhelming and powerful qualities within nature and the cosmos. Incorporating a style defined by a high contrast, Andrews uses photography to document moments where elements in nature display the power, terror and awe present within them, in this case the ocean.

Louis Nye

Glasgow School of Art

Louis Nye works with images that have a multiplicity of genre, exploiting their potential to gain new meanings as they travel through different mediums and contexts. In paintings and weavings he recreates sections of his bedroom walls covered in postcards, photos and clippings, with a particular focus on the space in-between the images: the parallels, the tensions, the historical and cultural leaps and, ultimately, how they can co-inhabit one space.

Matt Farr

Glasgow School of Art

My paintings take the cinematic image and transform it from its initial intent. By employing second-hand imagery, sourced from film stills, and embedding them with the first hand, new narratives are formed. These new narratives are in service of my own experience and personal feelings surrounding the limitations of masculinity, particularly in relation to mental health. The fictional other, stolen from cinema, is used as a vessel for these feelings.

Maura Gaven

Glasgow School of Art

My practice focuses mainly on the concepts of personal histories and mythologies, the occult, and the relationships between the body and space. These paintings are part of a now-complete two year project to paint a full set of 78 individual Tarot card designs. Each card was carefully considered and designed according to my personal interpretation of the card’s meaning and symbolism, and painstakingly hand painted in watercolour.

Nat Akinyi

Glasgow School of Arts

Nat Akinyi is an artist of African descent based in the UK whose work explores digital and environmental inequality in Africa. This work imagines what the private moments of an African kleptocrat might be like through a glimpse of him and his wife’s journey on a luxury train. I chose the setting of a train due to its associations in Africa with colonialism, industry and wealth inequality.

Natalia Robak

Glasgow School of Art

In my practice I use collage as not only a medium but a form of self-expression. texture, colour and composition are the most important aspects of my work. Exploring the topic of state farms allowed my work to become less bound by the restrictions of the subject matter and more of a unified representation of space, filled with depth and layers.

Noel Griffin

Glasgow School of Art

In my practise, I explore the concept of reality, truth and authenticity. I work in a fashion similar to that of an archaeologist or alchemist, utilising fragments of information in the form of artefacts and narratives which I transform through a variety of processes both traditional and contemporary. The work often appropriates historical artefacts or narratives which are brought into a dialogue with our technological present.

Olivia Warby

Manchester Arts University

Warby is a multi-disciplinary artist that specifically works with old-fashioned processes such as signwriting. The work that she creates is mainly based around restoring old, unwanted materials. She takes traditional advertising techniques and transforms them to highlight the importance of self-care, using a compilation of reassuring texts that her Mother has sent to her over the duration of her time at University.

Radhika Parekh

Manchester School of Art

Graduating with a Fine Art and Art History Bachelors degree, Radhika Parekh is a flourishing young artist who practices with acrylic and oil paints. Using sensitive mark-making, layers and contrasting colours, her current project explores her Sri Lankan heritage and the connections she made on her recent trip there. Radhika uses frames and gold embellishment to draw attention to the nostalgic natural landscapes she saw throughout the Sri Lankan countryside.

Robert Lallement, Ollie Jones, Maria Samaniego, Remi Rabillat, Sasha Gallagher, Tristan Pike

Manchester School of Art

This was a collaboration of a group of six animators. Creating a 3D animation, we took inspiration from Disney & Pixar and their use of colour for mood changes throughout their films. As Luz is very fast paced our colour script changes rapidly and with fluidity.

Roslyn Ewin

Manchester Arts University

Reoccurring themes of surrealism and grotesque portraiture, influenced by the idealism of the Baroque period. Ewin’s work deals with sombre feelings in a humorous way and is often tightly framed and dressed minimally to leave room for the viewer to project their own thoughts and context onto it.

Samantha Dick

Glasgow School of Art

The basis of Dick’s multi-disciplined practice is the rejection of social expectations. How can one best dismantle the social and psychological constraints placed upon the body by an oppressive society? Through the use of theatrical play the artist encourages the viewer to disrupt their own impressions of normality. Dick’s work challenges gender norms, addresses power relations and conformity, whilst subverting society’s ideals and heteronormativity.

Sean Ellcombe

Glasgow School of Art

Using a curtain subject was to make a window image. Which came from an investigation into the spaces between the sitter, artist and the viewer. Inspired from the structures in the portrait genre. Looking and favouring for the portrait space. Making a developmental response on the relevancy in the representation of a sitter held in the painted object to the ever-changing and passing viewer.

Siusan Patterson

Glasgow School of Art

' 'The Judgement of Paris' from Greek mythology is the reference point for these two works. The implied narrative in my paintings signifies the right of females to present themselves without fearing criticism and considers how society ought to ‘stop’ judging individuals on how they look. In a society obsessed with body image and youthfulness, my work reflect the joyful euphoria some women experience by rejecting the unrealistic and somewhat unattainable expectations placed on them and seeks to reclaim and celebrate more realistic representations of women.

Victoria Nash

Leeds Arts University

Victoria has created a series of still-life images which focus on the positive side of the sustainability movement. It explores the incredible things people are doing for our planet and how consumers can make their everyday habits more sustainable. The aesthetic approach intends to pull viewers in and educate them about sustainable lifestyles, hoping that they are more likely to want to make simple, positive, changes within their own lives.

Vincent Python

Manchester Arts University

Je Fais Souvent ce Rêve Étrange (I Often Have This Strange Dream) depicts a strange scene of an abandoned blue and purple tennis court. The intention was to study colour and blend reality with fiction by contrasting linear and painterly ways of painting. The purpose of my paintings is to reveal the beauty of strangeness by defamiliarising my subjects.

Yingxin Liang

Manchester Arts University

Yingxin (Cassie) Liang explores various perspectives of everyday routines. In modern society, showing one's daily life is not new, but the question she has been thinking about is whether everyone is willing to show their real, boring and repeated everyday life to the public.Liang’s works are not only the connection between art and everyday life, but also the dialogue between private and public spheres.