Alicja Mrozowska is an emerging artist and painter. Her practice explores identity and the concept of ‘home’ through painting, film photography, installation and construction. She incorporates her own experiences, surroundings and relationships with nods to social structures, in an accessible way. These multidimensional artworks hope to prompt acceptance, curiosity and vulnerability.

Since graduating in 2018 and alongside exhibiting her work, Alicja has participated in residencies and led creative workshops in the UK, Poland and Germany.

Most recently Alicja completed a 6 month artist development residency at IOU Hebden Bridge Hostel and IOU Theatre, Halifax. During the residency she developed a collaboration with artist Paul Miller, led an experimental oil painting workshop and created a new installation piece ‘Painting in the Dark’ to be exhibited as part of Calderdale Year of Culture 2024.

Candice Dehnavi (b. Devon 1997) is a sculpture artist currently living and working in London, After receiving a first at Manchester School of Art for their BA in 2019 Candice went on to study their masters at the Royal Collage of Art graduating in 2023.  

My practice has evolved in exploring the distance of cultural familiarity: the other within and given body through recreated memories. Memories of an Iranian-English upbringing find themselves exaggerated through dreamlike imagery that communicates hazily remembered experiences and stories.

My work samples disparate elements from a personal history of detachment, and through the lens of absurdity, presents a comically exaggerated visual space into which one can insert their own narrative meaning. It transverses the dreamlike nature of formative experiential recollection to a physical world of representation. Each piece could exist in isolation, but there’s a thematic linearity that runs throughout; my wider practice is an act of cohesive world building. It often assumes a childlike demeanour, using comedy and play to hide deeper issues: intersectional identity politics, cultural estrangement, gender identity and the reflective doubt of self-image.

I have two main creative interests: Hand poke tattooing while seeking a tattoo apprenticeship, and making up-cycled e-waste accessories under the brand name Trash Generation.
Generation 7 is the product of my most extensive photoshoot since the inception of Trash Generation, when I found a brick phone keyboard by the Manchester canal and turned it into a necklace. Found materials from phones, printers, cameras and the like, are transformed into bespoke accessories in their afterlife, and sheeting from laptop monitor screens becomes treasure once again in the role of a mount.
It only made sense to present this fashion photography as the fashion was made; repurposing forgotten, discarded plastic, and trying to restore a portion of the beauty and fascination I find in those objects.
If I was reflecting on what I’ve achieved since graduating, I’d say I'm proud I was able to secure an interview for a tattoo apprenticeship (in spite of not being successful), and proud of an exhibition, STRETCH, which was co-curated including a couple of my co-exhibitors from MADE IT four years ago. More so than all of that though, I'm immensely proud of every time I've gotten back on the creative wagon after falling off.

As a dyslexic I’m forever looking for ways to better myself outside of a classroom or library setting, and quickly. I have created many long walks with arbitrarily imposed restrictions for me to set out on whilst I figure this out. These walks have acted as research for my practice for many years. Frustrated at a lack of opportunities to exhibit, I put my ideas down into self-published books and began life as an illustrator. I’m interested in exploring walking as a creative act and how one might create knowledge from this. I seek out situations that might put myself or a project at risk of total failure and then create work telling you how badly that went. This has mainly been in comic books and illustrations but has expanded over the years to include animation, sculpture and architecture. 

Anabel is a London-based architect and music producer who focuses on multidisciplinary research practices such as sound design, creative coding, gaming and film to explore her interests in aestheticising the intangible political impacts from complex ecologies. Her research 'Reclaiming Idleness' was curated by Sir Jony Ive's 'Optimistic, Singular and new' as one of the artists significant for the future alongside featuring in I-D magazine. Since graduation Anabel has exhibited her installations globally at the Het Nieuwe Instituut, Manifattura Tabacchi, The Design Museum, The Science Gallery, and various film festivals throughout the USA and Europe. Currently she is a founder of Passion Fruit Studios and is an educator for the Bartlett STORE program, The Design Academy Eindhoven and The Royal College of Art.

Babs Smith is an Artist based at Rogue Studios Manchester, and an Associate member of Ebor Studios. Born in the Northwest of England she has lived on the Yorkshire Coast and Western Spain. She has undertaken several public commissions and has her work is housed at: The National Outdoor Centre, The Autism and Criminal Justice System, Salford Museum & Art Gallery and DCC Manchester. 

After winning a Graduate Scholarship with UOS Art Collection in 2020 her practice has focused on investigating our visceral relationship with the Anthropocene, incorporating traditional mediums and New Technologies to explore climate change. 

Smith’s process alternates between tangible reality and virtuality subverting apps to explore movement, light and sound. This is presented in Augmented Reality, sculpture, and print. Cross disciplinary collaboration is at the heart of her practice, working with musicians’, researchers and scientists. Smith is a member of Paralab Manchester an independent organisation that facilitates collaborations between artists and scientists. Her work is currently being exhibited with SHIM in Berlin & Bridgport USA, Watergrove Reservoir and Gallery Frank.
 

Dolan’s work focuses on language and identity, emphasising that the words we choose to use tell a story about who we are. Having spent her whole life in Liverpool, many of her works’ centre around the notion of ‘scouse-ness’, observing the phonetic history of the accent and how this has developed into the unique accent it is today. Dolan creates intimate, personal videos, using light-hearted storytelling to connect her own memories to nostalgic locations from her childhood, often combining this with bold graphics to narrate these stories from an alternate inner monologue.

Dolan was commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial and Liverpool BID in 2021 to produce a series of outdoor audio-visual works spread across up to 10 key sites in the Commercial District of Liverpool, titled Art in Motion: Remember How Boss It Was. This was later revisited and exhibited in SEVENSTORE Liverpool, which led to this show being a key feature in ‘Nike x SEVENSTORE – Talking Shop’ campaign. The film ‘Vivid Memory’ was initially shown exclusively at SEVENSTORE in 2022 and is currently not available to view online, it’s screening in 2023 at Paradise Works will be its second time exhibited.

Kohenoor Kamal is a multidisciplinary practitioner whose main body of work is influenced by her upbringing as a Bangladeshi- British Artist. Using her influences with having this duality in culture it has informed her practice through features such as how she uses colour and texture within the pieces of work she produces. She has been fortunate to have been able to work with Arts and Heritage, Tate Collective, National Museums Liverpool and The Bluecoat. 

Vivian Ross-Smith makes materiality-focussed and site-specific, painting, performance and textiles that offer an inclusive route into engaging with the art world. Exploring geographical, digital and bodily places, her work exists to be activated through touch, movement and functionality. Drawing from her perspective as a queer island artist and her experiences working in artist-led spaces and social care work, Ross-Smith’s practice considers themes of place, community, care, comfort, accessibility, and communication.

Currently focused on the activities of my ogres as they transition, slowly, from rock to flesh.

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The ogres, growing soft and gravelous, 
drag themselves about on arses,
raked and ribboned. They fear to stand
and meet the mountains that bore them. 
Slipping from pursed lips come voices, 
splintering and short, the sound of 
slate split upon slate, they gesture 
and croak, cackle, cry and commune.

Since graduating from my BA in 2021 and my MA in 2023, I have worked for a few arts organisations and exhibited work across Manchester. With these great opportunities came with a great number of microaggressions and therefore, the notion of being tokenised continues to perpetuate an uncomfortable scratching away at my identity. In keeping with the theme of representing my journey since graduating, I was interested in exploring a visual representation of microaggressions. I envisioned them to be little creatures with human-familiarity crawling around my head, weighing me down and threading thoughts of tokenism and positive discrimination into my head. With all this in mind, the goal of Working in the Art World is to evoke a feeling of discomfort and mild disgust onto the audience, the feelings I have when facing micro aggressions.

Skindom is a film exploring the perception of racialised bodies in the western world. It foregrounds the horrors of fetishisation, alienation and how that intersects with capitalism.

Princess Arinola Adegbite is a poet, performance artist, Factory International, Youth Music and MOBO Help Musicians funded musician and filmmaker from Manchester. Bitez is also a member of Young Identity and The Writing Squad. She is a winner of Slambassadors, BBC Words First 2020, Slam-O-Vision Manchester Champion 2021, and Manchester Young Creative of The Year 2021. Her in-progress poetry collection ‘Algorithms of Meaning’ won an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2023.

Lue Campbell-Smith (b. Blackburn, 2000) is an interdisciplinary artist, a catty queen, and a bird of a particularly poncey feather. Using abstraction, site-specific intervention, and assemblage, Lue reframes their personal belongings as the subjects of various grand and fanciful narratives. Through this, they aim to investigate how we identify with objects, and how we might use them to both invent and activate our own personal mythologies – colouring ourselves differently in the process. Ideas of transformation, hybridity, power, and aspiration are of recurrent significance within their work.

Lue studied Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, from 2019 – 2022. Shortly after graduating they co-found Loose Screws, a curatorial collective which aims to create high quality opportunities for early-career artists. Loose Screws delivered its first project in March 2023 and, following a short break, is now back on the hunt for funding and ready for round two. 

Visual artist Sandeep Ubhi explores the figures from his own subconscious with the use of clay and oil paint as his media. Graduating from Manchester Art School and exhibitor of MMU 2022 Graduate show Sandeep originally born in Birmingham, now continues his practice in Manchester. Taking part in Short Supplies MADE IT 2022, displaying his work along with many other young artists. 

Since graduating, through the Castlefield Gallery Mentee Award he continues to grow his practice with mentoring from Katie Tomilinson. Using expressionistic painting techniques, Sandeep delves into the portraiture and figurative work headfirst exploring the presence of the subject. The use of fragility and size conveys the emotions of the figures,and the place that these characters stand within the artists life. His art explores  the connection between the human obsession with control in a world of chaos as well as his own relationship with these themes.

Shivani Patel (b.2000, Blackburn) is a British South Asian artist and within her practice, she investigate themes of cultural heritage, diaspora and dual identity. She uses self-portraiture, objects and materials to explore the medium of photography.

‘Carrying my Culture’ is a developing project centred around identity and how she incorporates little tokens relating to her culture in her daily life. She has been expanding her knowledge and skills in the darkroom, shifting her focus on black & white imagery.