FIND OUT MORE ABOUT OUR BROKEN // MAKESHIFT EXHIBITORS
Broken //Makeshift is an exhibition that celebrates contemporary craft by finding the beauty in everyday objects and explores how our emotional attachment to them can survive a break, fracture, or tear.
Abdulrazaq Awofeso
Okrika
Abdulrazaq Awofeso is an artist of Nigerian origin who lives and works between Birmingham and Lagos, Nigeria. Abdulrazaq uses sustainable materials such as discarded pallets/wood for his work, resonating with everyday people within several settings such as migration, social and secular contexts.
In Broken//Makeshift, Abdulrazaq’s work depicts items of second-hand clothing shipped from the West to Africa, rendered in his characteristic repurposed wooden pallets. Here they are peppered with new details: brand names and sartorial flourishes all draw attention to the contrast between the sculptures’ rough materiality and the supposed refinement of the objects they represent.
By using repurposed materials to invoke luxury symbols, Abdulrazaq calls into question the relationship between identity, consumption and environmental degradation. Inviting viewers to consider what they themselves consume and discard, Abdulrazaq challenges the ways in which identities – both personal and cultural – are commodified through globalised fashion.
Abdulrazaq’s wooden garments embody the tension between the transient allure of branded clothing and the permanence of environmental waste, but they also poke fun at classist fears about counterfeit items. Alongside the stylish lapels and jaunty pockets adorning his sculptures, intricately carved logos of major fashion houses and designers dare a fashion-world darling to clutch their pearls, thereby conceding that the artist’s iteration of a Chanel handbag contains enough of the original to be worth worrying about.
In both scale and sensibility, the pieces in these series are abundantly human, bursting with humour as well as pertinent questions about representation, satire and homage. Is a brand just a logo? What does it mean to put one we all recognise on a surface we’re used to seeing in the backroom of a warehouse? Does changing the material of something change its meaning too?
After all, the majority of clothes dumped in the global south every year are fabricated with far less integrity than Abdulrazaq’s sculptures of them. Made from the very materials that shipped our clothes round the world in the first place, Abdulrazaq’s Okrika exemplifies the idea of medium as message. In his hands, the pallets for shipping clothes become the clothes themselves; what, then, of their consumers?
Confronted by items we consider near-disposable, suddenly monumentally solid and back like a bad-dream boomerang from whatever landfill we subconsciously (and physically) consigned them to, Okrika’s investigation of global supply chains insists that we consider our own place in them. The objects that comprise the series might be clothing, but by bringing the market stalls where they are sold again back to the consumers who sent them there, Abdulrazaq leaves no doubt as to the true subjects of his investigation: me, us. You.
Amelia Francis Wood
Sackcloth and Ashes
Amelia Frances Wood a Leeds based artist, a studio holder and co-director at Assembly House. Alumni of the Yorkshire Sculpture International Network 2022, Amelia recently completed her first Permanent Public Sculpture ‘Forged In The Muddy Beck’ Leeds, (2024). Forged In The Muddy Beck, is currently nominated for the 2025 PSSA Marsh Award for excellence in public sculpture.
Amelia explores creating in-between spaces that serve as a portal to other worlds unlike the ones we can see and touch. These worlds aim to reflect upon the liminal states of being human, what it means to exist in transition, where reality dissolves and where the physical self fades and something more primal, fluid, or otherworldly takes over.
Amelia chooses to work with materials that hold a weighted memory such as clay, wood, fabric, earthly material and found objects to create anthropomorphic sculptures. These sculptures reference the body, earth, ritual, and symbolic objects. Centering ideas around the body as a vessel, delving into the holistic interplay between the external form and the internal spaces.
Limbs become integral to sculptures, offering a unique perspective on the labour of our bodies. In this new body of work, Amelia observes the slow cycles of decomposition and renewal – exploring a fascination with her worm composting system, where a colony of ants had claimed the dry upper chambers, constructing an intricate network of tunnels and eggs. This organic infrastructure self-sustaining, instinctual, and indifferent to human constructs became a site of both admiration and existential contrast. The boundaries between species blur. In this dissolution of physical and conceptual distinctions, the work probes at the fragile intersections of autonomy and entrapment, instinct and structure, self and swarm.
Bridget Harvey
Bridget Harvey is a maker and repairer who investigates process – occupying a fluid space between craft and design, making and remaking. She hand-works discarded objects into one-off or small-batch artefacts using a combination of new and traditional materials, drawing techniques from multiple disciplines such as print, textiles, drawing and conservation to create tactile and desirable objects.
Her artefacts are hybrids of making, auto/biography and process, materialised to communicate discourses of repair-making, sustainability, and care.
Bridget seeks to understand ownership as stewardship, materially and emotionally, and to shift the repair process and artefact in from our peripheries. As things fall apart, repair – functional, decorative, or otherwise – offers a way to respond or reinvigorate. It epitomises tensions between preservation and loss, usable and forgotten; and repair work can soften the blow of damage, allowing us a space for care and rejuvenation.
The damaged and broken crockery featured in Broken//Makeshift has previous existences. The repairer sees some of it in palimpsests, traces, and senses something of this past through the chips, fissures and cracks which pit and mark the surfaces. Here, Bridget’s repair work is considered ‘not excellent’. In fact, through their mending, she has rendered these plates ‘not excellent’, possibly even anti-functional. This repaired crockery poses potentials, stories and ideas. It visibly proposes repair models, and stimulation is its aim: to act as provocateur or goad; to question us questioning them.
The point when damage entered their narratives could have been their end, yet, damage always has its own character. This is a constant fascination of Bridget’s. Breaks always need individual consideration before repair can begin.
As their repairer, Bridget write part of these object’s story, and they become part of hers. Looking to recast things through making, remaking and repairing, to explore leftovers/left-behinds and values, she sees these objects as part of our futures. In a post-waste landscape where we (begin again to) value all materials and objects, and their intertwinedness with all lives. Rather than breakage and loss, these plates show repair as a care for the past and the future at once.
David Fox & Liz O'Connell
Hanging by a Thread
David Fox is a Weaver based at Red Lane Studios at Sunny Bank Mills. He currently creates 3D woven work based on local textile heritage, and is employed in textile education. He weaves on multiple looms, including a Dobby Loom from the 1950s, with an interest in structure and a range of materials including paper. He graduated with the final BA Textile Design class at the University of Leeds – a course that is no longer running. Across the UK textile-based school and university courses are ceasing to exist, and the future is unsure.
Liz O’Connell is a contemporary craft maker exploring textile narratives. She is interested in heritage and craft processes to examine the fabric of who we are, using our psychological and physical links to objects creating glass pieces and ‘emotional fabric’. Liz Graduated in 2020 with an MA in Glass & Ceramics from The National Glass Centre, Sunderland – which is now under the threat of closure.
The pair met through Sunny Bank Mills Museum & Archive and now create collaborative works combining glass and weave.
Their shared interests have led to conversations about craft skills and making, and more in-depth research into Bradford College’s Textile Archive and Sunny Bank Mills Museum & Archive. Together they investigate heritage, craft processes and the joy, value and importance of making.
This emerging work is a collaboration of crafts that are under threat and facing an uncertain future, particularly, the funding and investment of textile and glass skills. Liz and David have created a series of pieces which combine glass and woven pieces relating to the technical skill and material history of weaving. David weaves 3D sculptural forms and Liz creates woven glass pieces and sculptures.
During their research trips to Bradford College & Sunny Bank Mills’ collections, David and Liz accessed detailed hand drawn notes and artifacts from a Warp Twister in the 1960s and a student at Bradford Technical College who studied weaving in the 1920s. The artists have explored both collections, drawing inspiration from the artefacts, skills and archive knowledge.
These works balance investigations with the psychological relationship between makers, and their tools and technical notes. The archives are a touchstone – they invite conversations about craft heritage and skills. They show our fascination with trade secrets in dusty books and time served mentors.
They touch on the current climate of financial pressure felt by makers and our unease about the erosion of heritage skills and potential loss of knowledge. The artists are aware of interpretations what of ‘craft skills’ mean and are creating pieces of technical exploration. Together, their work uses archival observations, explores the risk of craft careers and the joy of discovery and making.
Technical Unravel on a Beam
“This piece is based on Edgar Creek, a student from 1922-1926 at Bradford. His detailed workbooks are in the College’s Textile Archive. We have combined glass by trapping it in a 3D woven cloth. Glass has become a ‘back beam on a loom’ abstracting Edgar’s textile machinery diagrams, playing around with form and tension. The woven paper and cotton piece displays a peg plan from Edgar’s study of Pattern 1, which is a dissection of a small square of cloth. The glass bobbin was made on a lathe in Sunderland’s National Glass Centre, which is unfortunately under immediate threat of closure.”
Indigo Ghost
“This is a glass piece carefully constructed from woven glass threads, which have been kiln fired. This piece is based on research into the history of Indigo (at that time it was locally grown woad) in Knaresborough, which was a major site of linen and flax weaving upon the River Nidd. All that remains of the industry are the beautiful buildings and mills (now used as housing) and the local historians who diligently gather information to remind the community of its legacy.”
Intersection of the Wefts
“This woven cloth is on a glass bobbin, representing warp yarns on the beam of a loom. The 3D woven pleats are ingeniously based on Edgar Creek’s cross section diagram of a plain weave. It also explores our emotional tightness, our strength and robustness.”
A Mill Workers Tools
David and Liz were both drawn to a Warp Twister’s 1960’s era tools and tins from Sunny Bank Mills Museum & Archive. The tools were hooks and knives used for threading a loom. It was common for workers to create, pass down or purchase their own tools for the trade, as mills did not supply them. David has wrapped and dismantled loom parts to create new tools. Liz has recreated weaving tools with glass. Some are robust, others are objects of craft memory.
Tensioned Uncertainty
This glass/weave sculpture brings together the Twister’s Tools and Creek’s drawings of a Warp Dressing Machine diagram which features a threading hook. The diagram shows the process of the warp being put on the back beam, before taken to the loom.
Grace Clifford
Grace Clifford works underneath a factory in Sheffield. She is currently working with a range of materials including scrap metal, the body, horses, chocolate and plastic water bottles. In 2023, she was in residence at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, supported by Working Class Creatives. In 2024, she was in residence at Yorkshire Artspace and selected for Blackpool’s Abingdon Studio’s WORK/LEISURE programme, culminating in a 2025 solo show.
Grace views horses as a personal symbol of desire and suffering. She will never own a horse, nor would she want to. If she had a horse, she would not care about them in the way she does. Grace see’s the presence of horses across the spectrum of value she works along, whether it be the horses that worked devotionally alongside us in mines, fields and along the canals, police horses at football matches her dad attended, or the oil painted horses of aristocracy hanging in the gold gilded frames of galleries.
Grace is fascinated with finding similarities between chocolate and metal. She sees this in the processes they both go through, being heated up, poured and cast. The exploitation of the land and human labour to produce the raw material of both. The industrialisation of both chocolate and metal, particularly in Birmingham’s Cadbury factory and purpose-built worker town, Bournville, and the various metalwork industries in the area.
Grace has cast chocolate horses to make her own horse. None of them quite perfect, doomed to melt away and morph into something else if held for long enough.
Isabel Fletcher
Satin Overlap
Isabel Fletcher is a textile artist who lives and works in London. She explores the way overlooked production offcuts can act as portals into the craft of their industry. Reframing disregarded offcuts as glimpses into the craft of making, she aims to increase empathy for possessions and encourage a reduction in consumption and waste.
Isabel’s work promotes a reconnection with materials and celebrates human skill at a time when daily life is becoming increasingly automated and detached from craft.
Working intuitively by responding to the nuanced properties presented by offcuts, Isabel’s sculptural works take on ambiguous forms. She is fascinated by materials and their transformation from 2D to 3D. Stitching, draping, gathering, tensioning, separating, layering, cutting, joining: these are processes Isabel utilises when critically interacting with her materials as she seeks to identify their three-dimensional possibilities. The abstract nature of the work opens space for the imagination, encouraging viewers to think beyond the now-normalised systems of take, make, waste.
Satin Overlap comes from the body of work Industrial Offcuts: Freed of London which is led by the sourcing of production offcuts from the ballet and theatrical shoe manufacturer Freed of London. On visiting the Freed workshop, Isabel was struck by the contrast between the well-worn nature of the workshop and the gleaming beauty of the finished dance shoes. Each craftsperson has perfected their role, their bodies adapting to the rhythm of repetitive processes. The offcuts themselves hold traces of this craftsmanship, each scrap forming a silhouette of the making process.
Satin Overlap is comprised of large swathes of ballet shoe offcuts marking the first stage of production where the main components of the shoes are stamped through dense layers of satin and calico. These hefty, weighted, swathes of textile are both dense and fragile. This references the contrast between the physicality of the material and labour of production with the delicate skill of the maker and lightness of movement which the shoes inevitably provide the dancer.
Isabel transforms these remnants into sculptural forms, through the suspension and presentation of the offcuts. There is endless tension within the material and each offcut mass is different. Some areas are cut so closely that the fabric is held together by a single strand. Other areas are robust, further emphasised by the repeated layering of cloth. Isabel’s use of stitch within the negative spaces highlights the traces of industrial production, not aiming to mend, but to mark a moment in time.
The expanded forms which emerge from the suspended pieces are intended to encourage an observation of materials and processes which can be applied to interactions with our own belongings, with the aim of establishing greater emotional attachment to material possessions.
Isobel Jane Kimberley
Abandoned Intimacies: The Shopping List Quilt
Isobel Jane Kimberley is visual artist with a degree in Fine Art from Leeds University. Her practice is rooted in a sustained exploration of tone and line, with trees serving as a central motif in her work for many years. This ongoing study has honed Isobel’s technical approach to drawing and deepened her understanding of our relationship with the natural world.
“My recent practice has begun to expand into more conceptual territory, while remaining grounded in representational drawing. This duality-between the observational and the conceptual-has opened up exciting new directions in my work, allowing for more layered and intuitive exploration.
This is a thrilling stage in my practice, as I navigate the space between observation and idea, representation and interpretation – seeking new ways to connect with others through the act of drawing.”
Abandoned Intimacies is the result of over a decade of quiet collection, sustained attention, and intimate making. At its core is the deceptively ordinary object of the shopping list. Often dismissed as a throwaway item—a tool of function, not feeling—it becomes, in this work, a site of quiet emotional resonance. Each list is seen as an unconscious record of care, love, duty, or routine. It captures a moment in someone’s life: their needs, habits, handwriting, and priorities. In this way, the shopping list becomes a form of self-portraiture.
The Shopping List Quilt reframes these fragments of domestic life through hand embroidery. Each list has been carefully stitched using a single reel of fine linen thread onto layers of translucent and transparent fabric, ranging from natural fibres to synthetics. The variety of materials speaks to the layers of memory, the fragility of the original paper, and the passing of time. Through embroidery, these ephemeral texts are elevated, inviting close looking and deeper reflection on the everyday.
The work is as much about labour as it is about love. Embroidery—traditionally associated with domestic craft and the feminine sphere—is used here to consider the emotional labour embedded in acts of care. Each stitch becomes a quiet form of honouring. Isobel’s mother, Carol Morris, also contributed her embroidery skills throughout the making of the quilt, further embedding the work with shared experience and generational intimacy.
Abandoned Intimacies offers a meditation on the invisible gestures that support daily life. It celebrates the overlooked beauty of the ordinary, the quiet dignity of the domestic, and the enduring power of touch—across time, material, and relationship.
Jo Pond
Born in London, Jo Pond is now based in rural Derbyshire. After lecturing at the School of Jewellery in Birmingham for fourteen years and becoming a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, she now works full-time as a studio jeweller.
Discovering jewellery during her formative years, Jo Pond studied at Loughborough College of Art & Design, and established her design process several years later, during her Master’s at the School of Jewellery in Birmingham. She was awarded for her Narrative Jewellery Collection, winning the 2005 BDI Industry & Genius Awards in the category of Products and Genius.
Digging up metal-detector finds as a child formed the foundation of Jo’s passion for objects that others may not necessarily interpret as beautiful. Re-framing elements of these finds, and employing symbolic references through form, material, and technique, Jo explores the potential for wearable items to become vehicles for communication—whether through sense, nostalgia, or knowledge.
Descended from generations of habitual collectors, Jo embraces her legacy, working with misplaced memories to create jewellery and objects that pass on something indefinable—just as the women before her passed on genes, mannerisms, and traits.
Objects such as vintage bakeware, tins, and thimbles serve as visual references for the feminine domestic. Leather from old wallets and worn bone tokens evoke ideas of ‘worth’ in the pre-decimal sense. Materials that no longer hold value beyond their collectability are re-framed to provide narrative; they become objects with which to tell stories.
Drawing on evocative artefacts, Jo crafts her own heirlooms. Almost in spite of themselves, each static and inanimate object comes to embody the thoughts and energy of the artist, drawing the viewer in. Recognition may bring about physical, emotional, or intellectual engagement. Yet the interpretation of these pieces is left open, and Jo embraces the potential for her creations to elicit a broad range of responses—from visitors of all generations.
Megan Preston-Davies
I will write again tomorrow & Cheerio HMS Ark Royal
Megan Preston-Davies is a London-based artist whose practice is rooted in sculpture. Her work investigates themes of grief and memory, with a particular emphasis on consequence and its emotional residue. Through a considered interplay between form and material, she engages with both personal and collective histories, often drawing upon references to childhood and the domestic sphere.
Archival family photographs and fragments of text frequently appear on her work, revealing handwritten messages addressed to unnamed recipients and images of anonymous figures from the past. These remnants form partial histories, inviting reflection on the elusive nature of memory.
Replication and reproduction of the photograph are a key focus in Megan’s work. The images she sources appear on her work through methods of engraving and firing. These intense processes create a dynamic performance between machine and material, resulting in fragmented outcomes.
By reimagining familiar objects in sculptural forms, Megan disrupts their historical associations through the distortion of their scale and materiality. This act of transformation serves to question the permanence of memory and the stability of meaning.
The works presented in Broken//Makeshift act as a culmination of the artist’s ongoing exploration into the interplay between memory and material.
I will write again tomorrow takes the form of a large-scale rocking horse sculpture. The body is a stained and engraved wooden structure with a ceramic head. The nostalgic form of the rocking horse and its historical associations to childhood contrasts against its larger size. An uncomfortable connection between memory is formed when the audience are confronted with the themes of loss and grief, compared to happier childhood memories typically attached to the widely loved toy.
Cheerio HMS Ark Royal is a small-scale ‘rocking-boat’, inspired by the build of the rocking horse. Its wooden surface and delicate paper sails are engraved with images and writings sourced from Megan’s family history. The narratives presented transform the sculpture into a vessel of memory – one that invites activation through the gentle interaction of a viewer.
Molly Rooke
Ben’s Darned Jumper & Jan’s Darned Cardigan
Molly Rooke is a multidisciplinary artist, printmaker and educator based on Dartmoor in Devon. Holding a Fine Art degree from Cardiff School of Art and Design and an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art, she explores themes of preservation, heritage, and restoration – often through reinterpreting archives, postcards, and souvenirs in her art.
Since March 2022, she has run Darn Good Studio, a creative clothing repairs initiative inspired by visible mending and slow fashion principles offering bespoke knitwear and denim repairs and teaching workshops across Devon. Through this, she celebrates clothing longevity and sustainable practices.
Molly’s practice in visible mending explores the act of repair as a form of creative resistance against disposability. Through needle and thread, she considers clothing not as temporary or replaceable, but as living objects that accumulate histories of use, wear, and care. Each mend becomes both functional and symbolic: a gesture of preservation, a trace of time, and an affirmation of value. By allowing repairs to remain visible, she challenges the idea that damage is a flaw to be hidden, instead reframing it as an opportunity for renewal and transformation.
The two repaired garments featured in Broken//Makeshift – a jumper and a cardigan – embody Molly’s ongoing exploration of repair as both a practical act and an artistic gesture. Working with well-loved and much-worn clothing, she approaches each piece not simply as fabric to be fixed, but as a material archive carrying traces of daily life, memory, and touch.
The jumper bears evidence of its history from its previous owner, a carpenter, with nicked stitches and tears, now reinforced with visible darning that highlights, rather than conceals, the process of mending. The cardigan, owned by her mother, was chewed by her puppy. With its punctured elbows and gnawed holes, the item has been patched with contrasting textures and colours, creating a dialogue between loss and renewal.
In both works, repair becomes a form of drawing – lines of thread marking time and care. The interventions are not attempts to restore an ideal of ‘newness’, but to extend the life of the garments, giving weight to imperfection and resilience. By making these mends visible, Molly invites the viewer to consider the aesthetics of repair, the value of clothing, and the quiet radicalism of choosing restoration over replacement.
“Only the beautiful shows, only the smallest part, while underneath is a cross-hatching of labour and skill and frustration and sweat” – Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet
Polite Rebellion
Iconic Fatigue
Creative Team
Lead Artist: Ellie Harrison
Designer: Bethany Wells
Textile Designer: Hester Simpson
Sound artist: James Cooper
Photography and Access Support: Matt Rogers
Academic researcher: Dr. Lucy Prodgers
Polite Rebellion
“Polite Rebellion is a disabled-led company facilitating the practice of Leeds-based artist Ellie Harrison. Polite Rebellion is radically gentle. Playfully subversive. In an age of relentless noise it dares to be boldly quiet. It needs to be both beautiful and useful.
Led by Artistic Director Ellie Harrison, we create spaces to listen to untold stories and amplify people’s voices. We see creating beautiful spaces as being an emotional accessibility ramp into difficult conversations that bear witness to people’s lived experiences. We push back against the hurry sickness of contemporary culture to go slow, notice the detail and recognise that rest can be an act of protest.
Polite Rebellion grows out of Ellie’s most significant adventure making The Grief Series; a 13 year body of work encompassing 7 interdisciplinary projects as well as a whole host of other activities from publishing articles, running international conferences in unusual spaces, workshops with schools, digital pilgrimages and meals. You can find out more about The Grief Series at www.Griefseries.co.uk”
Iconic Fatigue
Lie down. Listen. Immerse yourself.
Iconic Fatigue is a new project by award winning duo disabled artist Ellie Harrison and designer Bethany Wells in collaboration with print designer Hester Simpson. The project uses print design to boldly occupy the space in contemporary society that people with chronic illness are often excluded from.
This bed explores Ellie’s lived experience of Chronic Fatigue: Illusive flashes of energy that appear and disappear like fish swimming by, a nervous system flipping between exhaustion and anxiety and a feeling of weight as the water separates her from the outside world.
This textile artwork is a pilot before expanding to work with more beds, designers and participants for a national touring exhibition in 2026 and beyond.
The wider project will see Ellie work with a range of people who have lived experience of fatigue to create unique fabric designs imbued with their stories. This fabric holds space within the gallery as bed linen that makes visible their illness.
Iconic Fatigue is led by and works with people with lived experience of Chronic Fatigue, Long Covid and other energy limiting conditions. It is underpinned by academic research, and developed in collaboration with Dr. Lucy Prodgers from the School of Medicine at University of Leeds, supported by Leeds Cultural Institute.
In 1892 Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell received a horror story called The Yellow Wallpaper about the impact of isolation on people being treated for Chronic Illness. It was from former patient Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and it tore to shreds his pioneering approach to treating nervous system conditions. Although the doctor never apologised, he confided in colleagues he had changed his methods because of it: art by patients changing health practices. It is now considered an important work of feminist literature.
Fast forward over a hundred years from 1892 to 1993, and 11 year old Ellie has unexplained symptoms that no one knows what to do with. She aches. She’s tired all the time. Doctors can’t work it out. Is it real? Is she acting? Chronic Fatigue is still referred to as ‘Yuppie Flu’ and common consensus is that it doesn’t exist.
Ellie has lived with Chronic Fatigue since the age of 11. When her school didn’t enter her for maths GCSE for fear of hurting their league tables, she was left at home to educate herself. She didn’t have teachers but she did have a load of art and design books: William Morris, Frida Kahlo, Elizabeth Siddal. These voices turning trauma into beauty and valuing slowness spoke to her. In contemporary society the experience of people living with Chronic Fatigue, Long Covid and other often invisible illnesses is not as far away from Gilman’s horror story as we would hope.
Gaslighting from doctors, work colleagues, friends and family persists, particularly for women and people with marginalised voices. Campaigns like #MillionsMissing aim to highlight how those living with chronic illness are often missing and isolated from our community and public spaces, with nothing but the 4 walls of their bedrooms for company.
“I do not want art for a few;
any more than education for a few;
or freedom for a few.”
– William Morris
Iconic Fatigue is funded by Arts Council England, Leeds cultural investment programme through Leeds City Council, Unlimited Theatre through the Unlock scheme, University of Leeds and The Cultural Institute through the Ignite fund, Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society and Polite Rebellion.
Ellie Harrison
Ellie is a disabled interdisciplinary artist living in Leeds and working internationally. She is artistic director of Polite Rebellion and the acclaimed Grief Series, a sequence of seven arts projects that open up spaces to talk about bereavement and end of life. She creates a range of collaborative performance and installation work for studios, galleries, found and public spaces. Participation is at the heart of all of her work as a performer, facilitator and mentor. Ellie specialises in embedding care and ethical participation both in her own practice and offering consultancy to other artists and organisations. Her work is often characterised by a playful and provocative approach to difficult topics, encouraging audiences to make decisions and participate.
Ellie lectures on her practice, writing articles, giving talks, performances and workshops at universities internationally including University of the arts London, Sorbonne Paris and UAM
Mexico City.
Bethany Wells
Bethany is an award winning performance designer working across dance, theatre and installation, with a particular interest in site-specific and devised performance. Trained in Architecture at the Bartlett + Royal College of Art, she brings technical rigour, clarity and ambition to everything she does and sees all her work as a form of spatial, social + sensory activism.
She is a regular collaborator with Polite Rebellion, Claire Cunningham and Associate Artist with Middle Child and The Bare Project. Alongside her work in performance design, she has a solo electronic music practice, Artists’ Child, and is the founder of WARMTH Community Sauna.
Hester Simpson
Hester is a mixed media surface pattern designer living in Bristol. With over 10 years experience working as a print designer, Hester has been involved in projects within the fields of Fashion, Interiors and Homeware. Working for some of the world’s leading brands within Womenswear, Menswear, Home, Interiors and Beauty. Some of her clients include: Asos, Damson Madder, Anthropologie, Made.com, House of Hackney, Warehouse, Jigsaw, Urban Outfitters.
James Cooper
Jim is a Sheffield-based sound designer and engineer working in theatre, live music, and installation art. For around a decade his primary work has been within the South Yorkshire music scene as a sound engineer and, on rare occasions, performer. In more recent years, however, his work has increasingly featured sound design for theatre and community arts, creating immersive soundscapes for projects that emphasise interconnectedness and make room for trust and optimism. He has toured with The People’s Palace of Possibility with Sheffield’s The Bare Project, and has created soundscapes for Ellie Harrison’s The Grief Series, Paperfinch Theatre’s The Furnace, and productions at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre.
Matt Rogers
Matt is a multidisciplinary artist specialising in performance and lens based work. Specialising in the use of the combination of striking visuals comedy and interactive, game based performance. Since 2006 he has produced award winning work through the theatre companies that he co-founded; Chotto Ookii and Uncanny Theatre, as well as being a freelance performer, director, dramaturg, lecturer, photographer and creative mentor. He has been an invaluable friend to Polite Rebellion having collaborated on many Grief Series projects providing an outside eye, promo photography, documentation, and access support.
Dr. Lucy Prodgers
Lucy Prodgers is a chartered psychologist and lecturer in psychological and social medicine at the University of Leeds. Her research centres on the lived experiences of individuals with chronic illness, with a particular focus on “invisible” or unseen conditions. Having studied English originally, she brings to her work a fascination with the stories people tell of their lives with illness, exploring how people use them to make sense of themselves, their symptoms and their changing identities. Following her own diagnosis of Crohn’s disease and psoriatic arthritis over 20 years ago, the patient experience is at the heart of what Lucy does. She is dedicated to developing collaborative research which is as meaningful and beneficial for those that take part as it is for the researchers themselves. By focusing on creative, compassionate and transformative practice, she aims to gain deeper insights into others’ experiences to find a space for mutual understanding and drive forward meaningful change.
Rachel Anzalone
Famiglia
Rachel Anzalone was born in Inwood, New York, and raised in Manahawkin, New Jersey. She obtained a BFA degree from Stockton University in 2014 and an MFA degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2019.
Rachel’s ongoing practice is a visual archive that captures specific relationships to placement, family, and the uncertainty of memory. Through conversation with relatives and translating family materials from Italian to English, Rachel wonders about distance and location based on the belief of what defines home.
A repetitive task of layering transparent images through painting, drawing, and collage becomes an act of what she can recall from her past. Those layers are memories that will continue to muddle through time. Currently, Rachel resides in Kentville, Nova Scotia.
“My grandfather Aniello was the first person in our family to immigrate to the United States in the late 1950s. With no English and little money, he set out to make a better life for his family. Enticed by the promise of what the United States promoted, Aniello sought stability and prosperity, which his home, a small farming village in Southern Italy, could not provide.
Eventually, Aniello settled in Far Rockaway, New York, which is a vibrant multicultural borough in Queens. He worked hard as a tailor in Manhattan, using his hands to measure and mend clothing for customers. All of his earnings were saved to pay for boat tickets to bring my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins to New York City. When the family finally arrived,
my grandfather stood on the same dock where he had landed, waiting to welcome them.
My current art exploration is called Famiglia. Over the last three years, Famiglia has become a series of poetic works that were created in a response to the notion of memory, permanency, and language.
Famiglia reflects the struggles and perseverance of myself being new to Canada, along with my Italian family’s history of immigrating to the United States.
Through conversations with family, I am learning about their past and exploring this history through a multimedia creative process. I collage fragmented stories and dissolve old family photographs into paintings; I hand-draw animations; and I make small sculptures that reference objects of nostalgia. Subjects are physically layered on paintings, which include frosted mylar and tracing paper. These materials cover each surface and cloud the images, while providing a small preview of what is underneath.
As my famiglia’s memories begin to dissolve with time’s passage, I worry about loss: for my family’s history and their language being forgotten. Still, I trust through the process of creation, that disconnected moments will be reconnected once again.”
Rosie Vohra
Rosie Vohra is a multidisciplinary artist based in Leeds. Rosie studied on The Drawing Year at The Royal Drawing School in 2014 where she was awarded The Sir Denis Mahon Award 2013. Prior to this, she studied Fine Art at Leeds Arts University from 2010-13.
Rosie’s practice is rooted in drawing and collage, extending into other forms of making such as painting, welding, sewing, and ceramics. Her work celebrates the transient nature of found imagery, engaging in acts of collecting, cutting, and combining materials to construct non-linear narratives.
Responding to the overwhelm of information in the digital age, Rosie treats the processes of making to navigate, reconfigure, and generate meaning from excess. Her works become sites where fragments coalesce into open-ended stories, resisting linear resolution.
Rosie is particularly interested in modes of mapping, root systems, and rhizomatic structures, using them as conceptual frameworks to depart from fixed sources and extend drawing and context in non-hierarchical ways. Through these strategies, she interweaves multiple modes of knowledge, creating spaces where interpretation is in motion and new connections continually emerge.
Zoë Hillyard
Ceramic Patchwork & Kiln Cracked
Zoë is a Birmingham-based textile artist who works across the disciplines of textiles and ceramics to create work that explores our relationship to possessions and the environment.
Zoë is a member of the Contemporary Applied Arts and the Society of Designer Craftsman. Zoë originally completed a degree in Textile Design at Nottingham Trent University and her career has previous chapters designing tailored knitwear and being a VSO design volunteer in Mongolia. She has over 25 years of textile design lecturing experience in both national and international contexts and is currently a Senior Lecturer at Birmingham City University.
Ceramic patchwork is Zoë’s creative solution to the challenge of post-consumer waste, applying the textile tradition of hand-stitched patchwork to the mending of broken ceramics. It was inspired by the material resourcefulness of nomadic life in Mongolia and seeking to capture the uncontrived beauty of its visual culture.
Ceramic patchwork pieces, like Stormy Bowl, represent a unique journey of discovery, responding to individual material properties and working with the serendipity of how a vessel breaks. Stitch becomes the scaffolding that wraps individual shards with fabric, and then re-joins them. Working intuitively with textiles, a rich exterior surface quality is created – a textile glaze – whilst the criss-crossing stitching of construction remains visible inside.
The sudden force that initially breaks the vessel is balanced by the slow act of hand-stitched mending. Rebuilding from the base upwards, the personality of a piece emerges and is strengthened with each fragment added. Missing fragments and chips create an absorbing imperfect landscape.
The resulting reincarnation is fragile but resilient, with properties that require respect and a mindful way of handling. Ceramic patchwork references the Japanese art of ‘Kintsugi’- a ceramic mending tradition that honours the misfortune of vessels with visible seams.
Celadon Vase has been inspired by the serene beauty of ancient Korean ceramics and is the largest vase Zoë has constructed to date.
Normally Zoë re-works ‘ready-mades’, enjoying reviving the fortunes of discarded mass-produced ceramics. In her Kiln Cracked series, she works instead with ‘casualties’ donated by contemporary ceramicists. Horrified to learn that many beautiful pieces, found to be flawed once fired are thrown away, she reached out to makers whose work she admired, inspiring a series of collaborations. Katharina Klug Kimono Bowl is a beautiful example. Arriving initially with a small hair-line fracture, the elegant silhouette of this hand-thrown vessel has been revived using a vintage Japanese fabric, blending the aesthetics of both makers involved.
Zoë’s work with biomaterials looks at her craft practice holistically, making biodegradable work based on circular design principles.
Stone Circle is a site-specific work originally exhibited at Cairn Hill, a garden near Bordeaux, France. Each vessel contains a combination of natural pigments created by grinding stones from the garden. Susceptible to weather conditions, their lifespans and material journeys are unpredictable when exhibited outside. The work explores the letting go of control, permanence and possession.
Zoe Phillips
If I gave you a bowl… & The ways we heal
Zoe Phillips is a mixed media artist who explores our connections with objects and the narratives they hold. Her work invites conversation about how we view and interact with the world and each other. With a focus on wellbeing and mental health, Zoe’s work sparks conversations about disability, neurodiversity and inclusion. Influenced by nature, she realises many of her pieces in sculptural form, blending ceramics, brass and leather. Her pieces serve as vessels for storytelling and connection.
Zoe is a trained prop maker, with a degree in Technical Arts and a Master’s degree in Creative Practice. She has worked in theatre for over 20 years as a theatrical armourer, and delivers workshops that take backstage skills to the public.
Throughout her career, Zoe has worked with many incredible crafts people, her aspiration always to hone her skills to these levels. The ‘in the moment’ nature of theatre, develops a bespoke set of skills, responsive and dynamic to others needs and visions.
As Zoe began to reconnect with her own ideas and creations, her style emerged as immediate and urgent, trying to balance making alongside the needs of her children. Zoe works across mediums, often starting in blue biro and then with inks and pencils to rough out ideas before moving onto elaborate 3D maquettes. Inspired by true craftspeople, Zoe forges ahead (when she can grab the time) with the highest of intentions, fuelled with passion and a need to make.
At first, once each piece was finished, or her energy had transferred to the next idea, Zoe was frustrated that her work did not hold the finesse she had initially envisioned. But over time she has begun to value the raw and vulnerable honestly in her work. It may not be perfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s of no value.
Zoe’s work embodies the hurdles and challenges we face in life, the expectations we and others place on ourselves. It challenges the judgement and criticism, it invites conversations about topics we might be scared to address.
As she continues to evolve as an artist, her voice whilst still fragile around personal content, is becoming stronger. Recent works explore the concept of being seen as ‘broken’ because you might be ‘different’ from the ‘norm’. Her work asks you to consider reframing this and seeing things from another perspective.
If I gave you bowl… explores the concept of ‘useless’ and ‘broken’.
The ways we heal celebrates the imperfect beauty of the journeys we take. Both harsh and fragile, beautiful yet rugged, this piece houses all the juxtapositions we find ourselves facing in life.
These pieces seem to sit quietly and apologetically for not being perfect, but it’s through this vulnerability and honesty that they advocate loudly for those who may feel ‘broken’ or have been broken by society. It holds the space for us to coexist as human to human, in all our messy and complicated ways.
Zoe’s work asks you to pause for a moment and consider the simple beauty of the world around us and the precious connections between one human and another. It’s ok to be a work in progress, after all, aren’t we all just making it up as we go along?
THE ZINE LIBRARY
Find the artists featured in our Broken // Makeshift Zine Library.
Izzie May / Faye Stevens / Gill Crawshaw / Common Threads Press / Bricolage Kitchen / Studio Sōl Jewellery / Emily Robbins / Kat Rose / Polly Palmerini / Jenny Pilkington / BatMakes / Carina Low / Andrew Shaw / David Kenney / LJ Furner / Wendy Ward / Joanna Rucklidge
