2022 Archive

Rhea Cusick is a multidisciplinary fine artist who focuses on the creative process of making art for therapeutic purposes. Cusick has explored art therapy within her practice and aims to spread awareness about the positive impact participation in creative arts has on mental health. Whilst Cusick enjoys tapping into all areas of art such as painting, printmaking, drawing and mixed media, she has recently become emersed in the process of transforming her 2D paintings into 3D works. She has a love for abstract work and includes shapes, colours, forms and gesture in her practice. 

Lucy Beth Clay is a fine artist based in Leeds, England.

Her studio practice is rooted in painting and branches out to collage, sculpture and installation. Intertwining her poetry throughout these forms of art Lucy captures the raw elements of chronic illnesses and pain.

Her practice is based on the deep connection to the elements of colour and movement and the representation of chronic illnesses and pain in the medical field, emphasising the anonymity of the sufferers by leaving the facial features blank, whilst expressing their stories and confessions.

Sophie Donovan is an artist whose experimental practice explores the shared formative adolescent experience. Using made or found objects and mark making, she weaves together memories of childhood innocence, teenage crudeness and adult nostalgia by tangibly bringing the past into the present.

Ellie Holdsworth explores politics and social constructs, all with the use of the art. She uses installations and sculpture in a range of mediums that she thinks represents the political and social agendas to gain understanding. Such materials as plaster, clay, wood all in the hope of depicting realistic imagery for the audience.

Louise MacLeod explores how women are often absent from historical narratives. Suggested rather than seen, these missing women exist as trace fossils; imprints of lives defined by their edges and the spaces where they once resided. ‘Matrilinear’ is her attempt to give these lost female ancestors a presence through art.

Hannah Mitchell is a fine artist based in Scarborough. Hannah makes it her mission to get up close and personal with found objects from the estate where she is from. Using the character of the estate as her main source of inspiration, she creates work using photography, illustration, and sculpture.

Lizzie Smith is an artist who creates work predominantly through the use of painting, printing and embroidery on fabric. Her work deals with themes such as sexuality, mental health and the male gaze, through the use of imagery, colour and text.

Breagh Reid is a fine artist based in Yorkshire. Breagh takes inspiration from the bodily functions and the way everyone must go to the bathroom. Her artwork focuses on installation and performance art. Breagh currently looks at the pain and personal experience of the menstrual cycle.  

Thomas Rowsell is a painter based in the South East of England. Thomas’ creative practice is inspired by the old masters and higher art periods, such as Renaissance landscape and Neo-Classical portraiture. His works are predominantly paint based and focus on themes of escapism, drawing inspiration from classic literature.  

Jena Sharp is a surrealist painter whose colourful work focuses on the relationship between the self and the mind, tackling the subconscious and its versatility in its manifestation. Sharp creates work with urgency as well as a sense of vulnerability, while incorporating mythological and historical tropes.

Helen Raisbeck is a mixed media artist investigating life cycle themes.  Drawing on nature’s colours and processes of renewal, the iterative actions of printmaking inform vibrant abstract pieces.  Using close up photographic imagery of her work, new forms are interrogated through painterly marks, surface texture and material responses.

Rebekah Smith’s screen prints, photographs, and installations are raw and present an unfinished element. This combination of found images amongst the unfinishedness of Smiths installations, represents the gap of knowledge and curiosity towards the figures in her immersive pieces. This gap allows a want to explore the ways which allow the images to create a presence in her chosen materials.

Matilde Tomat is an existential psychotherapist, writer, and artist. Her practice investigates the processing while making, and its relevance within the interplay of time and isolation. A lover of silence, she is intrigued by hidden connections, synchronicities, and the mystical. Originally from Italy, she now lives in the UK. 

Fine Artist Shannon Vertigan’s practice is an interrogation of space. Through exposing levels of openness and closedness seen within urban cities, both the private and the public become entwined. Site-responsive works and installations intend to examine the notion of territory, boundaries and rebellion to question ownership of both property/ space.

Robbyn Walker is a multi-media fine artist based in York. Their creative practice is inspired by popular culture to provoke nostalgia, comfort and distraction. Research and personal experience with mental health and anxiety further drives the work to create autobiographical prints, drawings and sculpture.