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Aurelia

Cooper

MADE IT

2020

MADE IT

2020

Kaya

Fraser

Katie

Butler

Lydia

Ahmed

Rithika

Pandey

David

Reynolds

Florence

Carr

Enorê

Nim Tung

Tang

Stiliyana

Minkovska

Hattie

Malcomson

Amber

Brown

Baba

Webb

Ella

Jones

Harvey

Rutter

Babs

Smith

Heidi

Nicholson

Nicholas

Delap

James

Knights

Aisling

Ward

Rosalyn

McLean

Martha

Scott

Hellie

Cartledge

Anna

Davies

Maya

Wallis

Emalia

Mattia

Hannah

Lim

Ameerah

Dawood

Celestia

Anstruther

Anabel

Garcia-Kurland

Katie

McVeigh

Isabelle

Kenningham

Kohenoor

Kamal

Rodrigo

Costa

Sarah

Richardson

Suri

Park

Vivian

Ross-Smith

Heather

Bell

Tayo

Adekunle

Sarah

Larby

PAINTING

HATTIE

MALCOMSON

The central subject of my practice is the process of women empowerment in the context of contemporary society. Whilst exploring themes of women’s sexuality, beauty standards, sex working, coronavirus and loneliness, my paintings present powerful female characters with aggressively formed, almost caricature-style, ugly faces and confident poses. I am interested in creating contradicting feelings of attraction and repulsion in 

the viewer and testing the aesthetic boundaries of taste. I also want to evoke feelings of awkwardness and discomfort in the viewer, and particularly for the male gaze. This, along with the attention seeking confident poses, brushstrokes and intense colours, and intimidating (sometimes seducing or mocking) female gaze at the viewer is an attempt to challenge and confront patriarchal society.

AURELIA

COOPER

The only thing we have to galvanise us against the dark is hope - however powerless we feel, we must all make this conscious effort to transform ourselves, thereby changing our environment. Turning to 

the natural world, we can be inspired by its resilience, so representations of growth - holding both death and joy of living in the same space – pervade my work such as plants, trees and flowers pushing toward the light, alongside bold, dynamic lines.

Concerning this ongoing internal struggle for hope, I thought not only about the contents of the work, but also its relation to the surrounding architecture - with material coming off the walls, even being shown outdoors. I am further influenced by the crossover of language and image that occurs in poetry, placing words or phrases - often fragments of song lyrics - within the pictorial realm to activate the imagination and add to this sense of expanded narrative.

JAMES

KNIGHTS

My work is typically concerned with ideas of performativity. Often critiquing ‘homomasculinity’ – a term that describes the dominant hegemonic masculinity diffuse throughout queer visual cultures that resists submissive oppression. I often critique the overinflation of desire. Through use of visual motifs I create visual languages for my audience to identify themselves through. I work with painting, drawing, sculpture, video and performance. My work is absorbed in queerness and class.

SCULPTURE

MARTHA

SCOTT

Martha Scott makes sculpture with mass-produced, everyday objects that can be categorised as domestic or industrial. She creates points of tension and tenderness through
playing with the unnoticed.

He leans forward and picks a small piece of dry skin from her bottom lip.

Scott gathers her objects, like ingredients or building blocks, into a space, arranging,bonding and fastening them into forced relationships. Informed by their material properties and elements of chance, she refines and presents them in a highly controlled manner.

He points at her laptop, correcting small and unimportant elements of the website she appears to be editing.With his left hand, he touches the tassel that ties her top together and the sun catches the silver band around his finger.

Tensions are created through the recurring element of the fastening: a taut rope extends from floor-based objects to the wall, anchors onto a cleat or utilises existing architecture, a metal clamp or length of electrical tape fix a paper print onto a bracket.

Because of this sun, she insists they move table, away from the window.I wonder if it's because she's noticed me looking.

The presence of fixings, fastenings, clamps and blocks, heightens the delicacy of the intimate details embedded within the work. These intimate moments allude to traces of human actions and gestures, such as the familiar squeeze of a toothpaste tube, the press of a piece of Blu-Tack or the indent in a carpet.

He orders a BLT. He talks at her about advertising.Apparently she needs to be more concise.

Text collected from stories and conversations is treated much like her objects, as material to be arranged with humour and romanticism. These titles often contradict and contrast to the physical objects themselves.

Now he's got mayonnaise in the corners of his mouth. She puts her cardigan on inside out.

Martha Scott’s work calls to notice both the pleasure and discomfort she finds operating within the mass of objects that surround her.

SARAH

RICHARDSON

For all life, survival of the species is paramount. To achieve this the natural world is constantly adapting and evolving in response to ever-changing environments. My visual research focuses on carnivorous or ‘man-eating’ plants. I was attracted, much like their prey, by their flamboyance and ornate and decorative appearance. I was further intrigued by their devious character.

These plants can act as monsters of the natural world as they use their evolutionary techniques of trickery to lure their prey in, before trapping them with their dubious surface textures. Each carnivorous plant is uniquely and skilfully designed to catch the eyes of the natural world in order to thrive.

This collection celebrates a terrible, dark beauty in uniqueness. Inspired by the plants ruthless yet successful survival techniques, I have created a collection of repeat prints to portray a sense of continuous growth. I also use scale to create visual impact and mirror the endearing qualities of the visual source. The printed textiles have been developed digitally while retaining hand-drawn qualities and a lively variety of marks within bold compositions to translate the personality of the carnivorous plants. Additionally, this collection builds upon the printed designs creating dynamic textures through embroidery and embellishment, to produce a bold and striking aesthetic.

The collection is designed for couture inspired, high fashion womenswear. Brands like Delpozo and Richard Quinn are key influences with relation to their use of artisan hand processes and bold prints.  The collection is digitally printed onto a range of tactile materials, from thick linens to delicate satins, to achieve unique statement prints. The use of contrasting textural fabrics creates a tactile experience much like the plants dangerous and intelligently designed surfaces. This collection captures the devious personality of some of nature’s most intriguing plants and evokes it through bold and dramatic fashion textiles.

FLORENCE

CARR

Centred within Julia Blackburn's book 'Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land', these works relate to the lost Mesolithic land, Doggerland. Through a repetitive process of discovery and documentation, this body of work pieces together site-specific 

facts and fables. With particular focus on removal of artefacts from their soil bed.

“The people of Urk … a very remote and religious community … adopted a new boom-trawling method in the late nineteenth century… starfish, crabs and lobsters, all hauled into the air in a muddled heap of desperation. But what also came up in the nets was the bulky presence of the skeletal remains of huge beasts: curling ivory tusks as long as a fishing boat; stone-heavy skulls no one could identify. Some said the creatures had been drowned found thousand years ago when Noah’s Flood was rising, in which case the fact they did not survive meant they were not wanted in the world because they were the work of the Devil. Others simply found them too strange and too threatening to contemplate. They broke the bones in pieces and threw them back from where they had come from.” Pg. 92, Time Song

I am a glass artist and began my creative journey in 2017 following a background in maths and technology. I specialise in combining hot glass casting with kiln-casting and glassblowing techniques, and I’m passionate about innovation within glassmaking. I currently work with clear glass and create my own colour using metals and oxides which transform on contact with the hot glass, alongside reagents which create bursts of delicate 

bubbles under the surface. My goal for the future is to continue exploring glass as a material, pushing it to its limits and discovering new and exciting ways of working.

HEIDI

NICHOLSON

ELLA

JONES

Video - Textures of isolation (No sound). 2020. The film would be projected onto a white wall. (1 minute 33 seconds).

The video presents a series of vignettes showing my sculptures and costumes being interacted with and worn, as well as close-ups of their colours and textures. Since Covid19, I've been making fictional ‘COVID Coping Costumes’- outfits, such as conjoined gloves to facilitate hold

Watch Here
Textures of Isolation // 2020

hands while maintaining social distance. A furry hood/poncho to catch the virus spores before they get to your face (thinking of how animals can catch the virus in their fur).

Also, hand, feet, and head cones inspired by pet cones and umbrellas, that resemble petals protecting the inner bud.

Lastly, a pink latex suit that limits feeling with the hands exploring how we've become mindful of our touch using our feet to open and hold doors.

All these are shown in the video.

​

Two large fluffy latch hook tongues studies the ‘tactility’ of the Welsh language.  I’m a Welsh speaker and I miss Wales and speaking Welsh, especially when I'm not able to go there. The phonetics of the Welsh language seems to utilise the tongue, therefore, I made two tactile tongues imagining there fluff feeling and touching and prodding words and letters.

Kohenoor is a multidisciplinary practitioner whose practice includes a focus on working with clients and briefs which highlights inclusion and accessibility through research-driven design. Her designs are made up of bright and bold colour palettes which utilise minimalist structured designs. She is as much influenced by traditional design concepts as she is by other forms of media such as cinema, photography and

illustrative movements.

She is currently a freelance designer and illustrator based in Leeds working on developing her practice further.

KOHENOOR

KAMAL

SARAH

LARBY

What unites my work is an understanding of materials, using materials in such a way that the viewer is unsure of the processes involved in the making of the object, searching for a type of pure form where the visibility of the hand of the artist or the creation of the work is secondary to the thing itself.

I would describe myself as a maker of things. Not sculptures or paintings or objects but things that exert their

materiality and proud undefinable “thinghood”. 

Inspired by Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, my treatment of materials differs depending on whether or not I consider them to be animate or inanimate. She believed that ‘the curious ability to animate, to act, to produce effects both dramatic and subtle’, I try to reveal this and find the inner life of every material I work with.

I would consider plaster, silicone, resin and expanding foam as “animate” materials, since they have a transitory temporal state before setting. Working with these casting materials, when they are transitioning between two states of matter in the curing process, is a crucial aspect to my artistic practice as the dynamic fluid form metamorphoses into the static, allowing materials to form their own shapes in a balance between human control and chance.

“Inanimate” or dead materials are materials which have been in one state of matter for a while and which have no movement or agency. This includes set casting materials; as well as materials such as rubber, wood and fabric. When working with inanimate materials, I tend to exercise more control, manipulating the material in a more labour and time-intensive process. 

By taking materials out of context or traditional use we can begin to question our immediate relationships to them, showcasing something new and unexpected.

What happens when you struggle to recognise yourself and the person you are can no longer be found? I use my work to explore relationships and the impact they have on me.

Within my work I want to create curiosity, disquiet, humour and to play with the narrow margin between attraction and revulsion. I aim to create an emotional or physical response in my audience and make them ask:

HEATHER

BELL

What is that?

What is happening?

What is the relationship?

 

With my anthropomorphic creatures I look to create and question narratives. I hope for a double take, a feeling of unease or uncomfortableness and a sense of otherness and the unknown.

When lockdown hit I was mid-built on large human scale pieces, I didn't have many finished pieces and no facilities or space to work on them at home. The two pieces I have chosen are very different. The small pair 'Bob and Geoff' were made early in my final year.The larger metal piece 'Hollowed Out' is a personal expression of how I feel, even more pertinent after this year.