The Artists

Abbie Bruff

Aleksandra Druc

Aleksandra Druc is a third year illustration student studying at Leeds Art University. Describing themselves as a multidisciplinary illustrator, they enjoy working in a wide range of media including traditional printmaking, woodworking and knit.

“Following a visit to NHM Tring, I was enamoured with just how wonky and misshaped all of the taxidermies were as I looked at them through the glass. I could sense them watching me as I peered through, my reflection on their fur and beady eyes. What if I let them out?

Being a first time exploration into the process of woodwork carving, I dove straight into the deep end. I set myself the goal to make my own collection of animals after seeing the hundreds on display at the museum. Learning as I went, I slowly started to fall in love with the meditative process of the wooden forms slowly taking shape.”

Andrea Marsh

Andrea Marsh is a multidisciplinary artist from Yorkshire, currently based in East London. Her practice is deeply influenced by her working-class roots and the post-industrial environments of her upbringing.

She works primarily with down to earth, found, and reclaimed materials including discarded wood, metal, cardboard, and household paint. These materials carry embedded histories that inform both the aesthetic and conceptual basis of her work. Through an intuitive, process-led approach, she explores ideas of erosion, memory, and transformation.

The works featured in Ones to Watch explore the remnants of the post-industrial landscapes of South Yorkshire, examining decaying traces of the mining and steel industries that once shaped the region. Andrea is drawn to the lingering presence of these histories, rusted structures, scarred surfaces, and abandoned materials that quietly resist disappearance. Her work seeks to document these spaces through texture, erosion, and material distress, echoing the slow processes of weathering and decay found in the environment.

Anouk Fawcett

Anouk Mary Hope Fawcett is a multidisciplinary artist who works with a range of mediums and techniques to investigate the intricate connection between the mind and the body. Her practice is rooted in an exploration of how a single moment in time can be repressed through mark making, allowing a fleeting experience to be translated into something tangible and enduring. 

Her paintings function as abstracted diary entries – intimate visual records that blur the line between personal reflection and artistic expression. Each piece begins as a written diary entry, often emerging from moments of contemplation, impulse, or emotional turmoil. This awareness of the self in space, both physical and mental, of that moment in time then evolves into layered visual compositions. In this process, the transient becomes concrete, and the ephemeral is held as a lasting object. 

She uses the slow and deliberate buildup of layers, combined with experimental approaches to material, to help reflect the meditative nature of her work. Her paintings not only act as a form of documentation but also one of mental grounding for herself; where emotion, memory, and physical awareness converge into a singular visual language.

Bethany Wilson

Bethany Wilson is a Leeds based artist who explores the world of Fan Culture and how the individual fan adapts from the emotional world of fandom to the rational world of society. She explores these ideas through a variety of methods, including installation and video. During the process of creation, Bethany often takes the place of the Fan and becomes consumed by the world of her work.

“Fan Culture, often referred to as Fandom, resides in an emotional world. My piece Full Circle encapsulates this concept as it is a homage to an episode of Michael Palin Full Circle, in which Michael Palin meets a Fan who wears a shirt declaring their love for him. This moment in time became the perfect representation of the collision of the two worlds where the emotional nature of Fan Culture becomes a physical moment in time.”

Cassy Oliphant

Cassy is a Leeds-based community artist, whose practice moves between painting, textiles, and photographic processes including cyanotype. She uses the symbolic language of animals in myth and folklore as recurring figures through which to explore transformation, migration, and belonging. Folklore sits alongside personal family narratives, allowing imagined and inherited histories to converge. By contrasting Chinese and European stories, her work reflects on how myths shift through translation, distance and retelling, echoing the ways memory alters across generations. 

Embroidery and cyanotype act as material metaphors for exposure and repair. Stitching creates connection to her Peranakan heritage, while the cyanotype’s play of light and shadow mirrors the revealing and obscuring of family memory. These interwoven processes reimagine cultural memory as porous and alive, held between myth, material and personal history. 

Islands, on display in Ones to Watch, is an interdisciplinary work combining cyanotype, Peranakan embroidery and a reclaimed bedsheet as canvas. It maps fragments of family history and inherited memory, tracing the shifting threads of cultural identity. Through cyanotype – where light leaves visual impressions – her work explores how stories are simultaneously preserved, altered or lost across generations. 

Embroidering on a bedsheet evokes the domestic and the dormant, linking private and public memory. Using Peranakan techniques inherited from her Singaporean-Chinese heritage, stitching becomes a tactile form of storytelling that holds both fragility and repair. Threadbare sections and cut-away areas echo the tenderness and instability of remembering. 

Islands is a map and a meditation. A reflection on how we piece together lineage, myth, and identity through what remains and what disappears. It invites viewers to consider their own inherited stories, and the balance between loss and connection that binds them together. 

Charlotte Miles

Charlotte Miles is a Sheffield-based artist. By combining sculpture and painting into three-dimensional moving pieces, she attempts to re-enchant the strangeness embedded in everyday life in an absurdist revolt against mundanity. Humorous scenarios are created by unconventional storytelling, fragmenting an overarching narrative into small vignettes, leaving meaning intentionally ambiguous and open to interpretation.
 
Drawing from Albert Camus’s philosophy of Absurdism and Thomas Nagel’s comedic remedy for meaninglessness, illogical visual imagery serves as both a coping mechanism for a futile existence and a lens through which to question the essence of reality. Fantasy’s literary and visual legacy as an abstract tool to navigate reality makes it an excellent host for Absurdist thought and investigation, heavily influencing Charlotte’s work.

A combinational painting style of realism and pseudo-cubism provides a grounded satire and highlights areas of significance in the pieces, generating intriguing visual contrasts. Subtle recurring movements blur the line between the real and surreal playfully, and nods towards the Sisyphean cycle of repetition. Working from initial cartoons and sketches, Charlotte’s methodology embraces spontaneity and experimentation to develop imagery that is fragmented and painted onto wood, cut out by hand and reassembled into recognisable entities to allow a story to unfold.

Clare Stringer

Clare is a York-based artist currently studying for a BA in 3D Creative Practice at York College. She works in wheel-thrown porcelain, trimming, smoothing and sanding the vessels before a final firing. Her pieces explore the contrasts between silky, pure clay and more earthy decorations.

Her long-held interest in the natural history of Yorkshire, and particularly its more obscure species, has led to this current series of Yorkshire Moss Pots, featuring machine-embroidered versions of various species of moss and lichens.

Ella Brereton

Ella Brereton is in her third year at the University of Leeds, studying Fine Art with Cultural Studies. With a background in painting, her practice explores alternative ways of creating and presenting form, drawing on methods of composition that extend across surface and structure.

Over the past year, her practice has shifted from watercolour and ink mark-making toward sculptural forms informed by her paintings. These two mediums continue to run in parallel, constantly informing one another.

Her works Extended Held by Wall and In the Join investigate the relationship between material and place. The creative process was site-responsive, drawing inspiration from the architectural integrity of her studio space, using latex, muslin cloth, and steel. Latex enables her to preserve both the texture and motion of a space; in doing so, it bridges her painting and sculptural practices, carrying the same sense of gesture into physical form. Centred on material memory, her practice aims to embody the essence of a space through materials that echo its surface while taking on a new form. The two sculptures operate in dialogue with one another, negotiating relationships among the materials, the metal structures, and the studio space.

The works were developed through a method of producing latex sheets that encase fragments of muslin cloth. Once formed, the textiles were suspended within the studio, where the shifting natural light deepened the yellow hues of the latex. The metal fixtures were made using metal-bending techniques, guided by measurements taken from the studio’s spatial parameters, and completed through welding processes.

Endellion Grosvenor

Endellion Grosvenor is a Yorkshire-based sculptor studying Fine Art with History of Art at the University of Leeds. Her sculptural practice began at the King’s Foundation in London, where she was drawn to the initial process of preparing materials for sculptures.

The physical connection to materials allowed for reflection and problem solving. This experience established the core of her practice: a material-guided approach in which craft, labour, and attentive making informed the final sculpture. The works carry visible traces of their creation: texture, structural seams, and impressions of handling all act as records of material investigation.

For all Use and Purpose is a sculptural project that explores themes of craft, consumption, and  materiality. Endellion’s sculptures subverts the mundane by reimagining everyday objects in paper, the works are a deliberate act of material appropriation. Though the objects are paper, they remain functional, inviting use and interaction. This performance introduces a paradox: the act of use leads to their eventual destruction. By reconstructing objects in paper, an impermanent medium, the sculptures have a cyclical existence. Once photographed and documented Endellion shreds and pulps the sculptures into recycled sheets of paper. Through this continuous process of making, unmaking, and remaking, Endellion invites viewers to reconsider the environmental cost of the everyday and the quiet significance of craft in contemporary life.

Ellis Hutton

Ellis Hutton has just completed a BA Honours in Fashion Design with Foundation year at Sheffield Hallam. He specialises in womenswear and knitwear. His inspirations include historical dress, culture, and his disability ADHD, which he was diagnosed with from the age of 16.

One of the symptoms of ADHD is an abstract way of thinking. Ellis uses this to his advantage when it comes to building concepts and creating silhouettes and collections. He hopes to have a successful knitwear or womenswear brand.

“We’re All Mad Here is a knitwear collection that takes inspiration from what it is like living with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The reason I chose this concept was because I was diagnosed with it at the age of sixteen. One of the ways it influenced my collection is how we view things. This includes how we see things differently, such as pattern, texture, shape and line.

The collection also takes inspiration and references from the novel Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I included quotes from the book, such as ‘we’re all mad here’ and also looked at the original illustrations from the book and used these in my silhouette development when I was designing my collection. I also took inspiration from the overall atmosphere of the book, a very whimsical feel, where anything is possible.”

Eve Wright

Eve Wright is an autistic artist from West Yorkshire whose work explores thematic ideologies of domesticity, femininity, and identity through sculptural form. Eve draws upon the raw and organic moments within everyday life and contextualises them into a body of work.

By establishing a feminine narrative, Eve transforms traditionally male associated materials like metal and wood into reimagined embodiments of femininity. She is particularly interested in Jungian Theory and uses this as a starting point for all of her works. 

Most recently, Eve has been exploring her lived experience of pregnancy and how she’s responded to this life altering moment as an autistic individual. The piece of work featured in Ones to Watch, Gestate, is a suspended contemporary poem that displays the emotional journey of pregnancy. Eve explores the beauty and suffering of being a mother and how this has ultimately changed her life forever. By chaining bricks to the poem, she reflects on her feminine foundations that have shifted with time. In Gestate, the artist positions herself as inhabiting the past, present and future all at once.

Eve purposefully amplifies the unspoken suffering of motherhood as opposed to the rejoiced triumph. She shares her reality of pregnancy by being radically transparent with the reader. So, although this piece of art may not be relevant to everyone, Eve believes it’s crucial of humanity to share stories, moments, and experiences with those around us.

Felix Booth

Felix Booth is a Leeds based illustrator studying in their final year at Leeds Arts University. His focus lies within line and texture, exploring identity and expression, largely influenced by the external dynamics that push against freedom, but also by the circle of people that pieced him together into the person they are today.

With delicate line work, illustrated borders, and ink washes that exude softness and intimacy, his work requires you to look inward at the connections you have with the people around you, the way you interact with the binaries in society and the dynamics of influence. 

“Outgrowing began from reflection on my growth and the small niches of queer life. Melancholia is interwoven into my work, through documented poetry written under my lamp in the late evening shadows, coupled with studies of my houseplants, of which I have watched grow – and outgrow – their pots, time and time again. I saw myself in this process, always learning and growing too big for the past, and finding meaning in new and exciting opportunities.

As a queer individual, my work is inherently political, carrying the weight of historic suffering enacted against us, but I am continually lifted higher by the joy and strength exhibited by the queer community. Outgrowing helped me reflect on my place as a queer person, how I navigate the world and the politics of modern society that cause me anguish, but most importantly the meaning and joy I have found despite this, and the power that holds. 

Fraser Cornall

Fraser Cornall is a film-artist, and practical PhD candidate at Lancaster University, based in Farsley. His work is centred around an existential exploration of his memories, researchingthe connections between structural/materialist experimental film and the philosophy.

“Through the usage of structural/materialist film aesthetics (repetition, musical scale, re-processing, overlaying, zooming, cutting, breaking, pushing, etc.) and themes (self-reflexivity, the ontology of the film medium) my work digitally explores the materiality of my memories.

Both films featured in Ones to Watch, Dolphin and An Ode to Bricklaying, explore my working-class upbringing and use experimental film as a practice that explores my dyslexia, using the medium to reprocess my memories and sensations.

This exploration centres on existential philosophy and my own memory insecurity. One of the films is as “real” as a home video, featuring me and brother playing in the Scottish sea, explored as a paradox; there is an image there, though digital materiality presents nothing behind it, no film, no strip, no light, as the film works to a point of digital destruction.

The other work is an ode to my father’s profession, bricklaying, using the Fibonacci scale to organise the sequences, the film works through a back-and-forth montage, presenting the building of my own work from my father’s materials. The Ode was filmed on an old JVC digital camera, harking back to the materiality of my upbringing.

Fraser’s work has been exhibited at Aire Place Studios, Jwllrs Art School, and showcased at several academic conferences.

Grave Armytage

Grave Armytage is a jewellery maker and artist based in Leeds. Born and raised in Yorkshire, Graves’ work takes inspiration from the Medieval history and architecture they grew up around.

Medieval Revival, featured in Ones to Watch, is a necklace piece created by hand using traditional Chainmaille weaving techniques, used throughout Europe during the Medieval period for armour. While no longer used in armoury, Chainmaille serves a new purpose in the modern day to create hand woven, wearable art.

The necklace is made from stainless steel ‘jumprings’ that are woven in strips that are then linked together piece by piece until a sheet is made. Taking a total of 2 days to finish fully, this piece has 5 fasteners at the top that sit around the wearer’s neck like a choker, with the rest of the chainmaille draping down similar to armour worn by those going into battle.

This piece serves as an ode to a once lost art, now revived into newer forms to be appreciated by a new audience.

Jake Jacobs

Jake Jacobs is an abstract painter currently studying Fine Art with History of Art at the University of Leeds. His practice explores the dynamic relationship between spontaneous mark-making and deliberate compositional control. Working primarily with poured grounds and layered forms, he creates paintings that merge intuitive gesture with moments of clarity and resolution. 

Jake’s paintings emerge from a dialogue between chance and intention. Each work begins with colour poured onto the canvas, where the paint settles and drifts in unpredictable bleeds. These backgrounds form a kind of atmospheric ground, carrying the trace of material behaviour. In response, Jake introduces bold, shifting shapes that appear to hover above the stained fields. These forms emerge through a stream-of-consciousness approach to drawing where he repeatedly sketches and reworks silhouettes until one feels ‘resolved’, a moment when a form holds its own logic without pointing to any fixed representation. 

Layering densely painted colour over these shapes, Jake builds subtle depth within their flatness, creating a tension between surface and solidity. The resulting compositions balance familiarity and ambiguity; the forms seem recognisable without belonging to anything specific. By keeping the imagery open, he invites viewers to respond instinctively to colour, movement and the form created.

Jude Kershaw

Jude Kershaw is a historian, performer and artist based in Leeds, using theatre and visual artforms to challenge historical injustices and hegemonic structures.

Jude is an MA Creative Practice student at Leeds Arts University and a Museum Trustee. Her recent works have explored: local resistance to fascism in the 1930s, women in the Anglo-Saxon Church and exploring her genealogy through land.

Jude’s artist-led project, Run of The Mill History, is dedicated to upholding working class and radical histories; producing immersive theatre, archive projects and community workshops. Jude went viral in 2025 playing an Edwardian Maid who’d stumbled into the 21st century. Jude is a frequent collaborator with photographer Casey Orr, their project “A Year of Jude” explored identity, folklore and heritage through northern landscapes. This project was exhibited as part of Liverpool Independents Biennial 2025.

The images featured in Ones to Watch depict Jude in her work across 2025; The Victorian Music Hall star reduced to playing cabaret, a woman fascist from the 1930s (as depicted in Blackskirts, 2025) and as herself. Blackskirts was a piece of street theatre inspired by an image taken at The Battle of Holbeck Moor, showing an injured young woman fascist being carried away by her non-fascist friends. The Music Hall performer frequently appears at cabaret and drag shows across The North.

Jude’s performance style is influenced by Northern artists, most notably Victoria Wood and British Social Realist cinema, using humour and pathos to create rounded characters.

Jude is determined to show others there are alternate methods to learning history.

Kieren Gill

Kieren Gill is a queer, Bradford-based multidisciplinary artist and Fine Art graduate of Loughborough University. His work explores themes of desire, intimacy, and belonging in personal social and romantic relationships, with particular interest in hidden messages and the esoteric.

In his practice, Kieren repurposes the cyanotype photographic printing process to communicate his figurative drawings and paintings. Through bleaching, he strips the works of their vibrancy, colour, and texture, distancing from both the spectator and from reality, creating a vulnerable and intangible space. This process allows the work to possess control over the image; elements of the original piece are lost or faded, new marks are made, and the paper becomes warped. There is a compromise between the artist and the work.

Kieren negotiates a dialogue between the private and the social. The subtle aesthetic allows the audience to impress their own ideas and visions onto the work, as such, every perception is unique. This process manifested from a personal fear of vulnerability and the societal alienation of queer and nonconforming bodies. Its soft impression opposes the portrayed aggressive agendas of queer beings perpetuated by right-wing media, and instead invites understanding of the emotional, the tender, and the human.

Peach Vibe, featured in Ones to Watch is an intimate scene between Kieren and his partner. It is intended to be viewed for an extended period of time. Drawn from memory and imagination, it is not a space that exists in the physical, but is just as real.

KP Culver

KP Culver is an interdisciplinary artist driven by curiosity. Instead of seeking definitive answers, they create spaces for ongoing possibilities and questioning, attending to how collective and personal narratives are shaped, distorted, and reimagined over time. This approach is deeply informed by an interest in how we come to know and sense the world through embodied practices. Whether through touch, voice, or shared acts of noticing, KP’s works seek out intimate encounters that challenge extractive or binary logics. 

Nightlife, featured in Ones to Watch, is an ongoing photographic series taken at night. KP transforms the act of image-making into an embodied encounter, where the body crawls and observes from new proximities. Bad Gateway draws its title from the internet error message, the idea of a failed connection treats malfunction not as collapse but as a generative opening, creating structures that hover between gate,monuments, and score. Focusing on ideas of access and threat, they invite viewers to consider how bodies, infrastructures, and environments are interdependent yet often in tension. The works propose a space of recalibration: a site of failure, resistance and ecological entanglement.

Culver has recently graduated from the Contemporary Art MA at the Royal College of Art, 2025. They have been awarded the AA2A residency and exhibited/ performed at; Humber Street Gallery (2026) Museu Tàpies (2025), Cubitt Gallery (2025), Somerset House (2025),  Montez Press Radio (2025), Gloam Gallery (2024), Leeds Art Gallery (2023) and FieldNotes Journal (2022). 

Louie Haslam-Chance

Mucky Beck is a poetic photographic exploration of the Bradford Beck and its surrounding tributaries. Using analogue photography and ecofriendly processes, including developing film with water from the beck itself, the project unearths the complex history and quiet beauty of a river often overlooked. Once vital to Bradford’s industrial power and now largely hidden or polluted, the Beck becomes a site for memory and reflection. 

The process-based approach invites us to reconnect with the landscape through tactile imagery. Mucky Beck encourages us to consider how we relate to the places we pass every day, blending photography, ecology, and storytelling to create a multi-layered portrait of the Beck and its ongoing transformation. It is an invitation to look closer and explore a neglected but essential part of Bradford’s story.

Lucy Bennett

Lucy Bennett is an emerging artist who was born and raised in Leeds. She is a 2025 graduate of Fine Art at Newcastle University, and prior to that studied a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at Leeds Arts University. Her interest lies in the institution, in examining the systems that define our lives and using art and humour to reveal the prejudices and assumptions baked into spaces that many often take for granted. In regards to medium, her work spans a wide range of techniques, from drawing to photography to sculpture. 

gown II is part of Lucy’s ongoing exploration of the medical institution. The photo documents a performance given by Lucy that explored the idea of sterility. It has been mounted on a blue background, the colour chosen to invoke the blues of the doctor’s office. By taking a gowned patient out of the institution and placing them into a wild, messy landscape, Lucy aims to reveal the strangeness of the situation.

“Within the medical institution, we as patients often overlook or choose to ignore just how unusual the reality of medical treatment can be. Removing the blank institutional background humanises the patient, highlighting their vulnerability and isolating them from the performance and drama of a hospital. The piece also grapples with the experience of having a female body in a medical setting, and having to contend with historic gendered medical injustices as well as your own illness.”

Martha Hinde

Martha Hinde is a third-year illustration student at Leeds Arts University. Her research-based practice blends the use of traditional and digital mediums, aiming to bridge the gap between the historical and the contemporary.

Medieval monsters and marginalia are known for being strange and humorous, but they look so because the artists creating them were drawing from second hand sources, or distorting and altering the animal’s appearance to convey religious messages/ideals. Today, marginalised groups of people often find their identities distorted in a similar way. Marginalised groups are made grotesque, satirised by people ignorant to their experience in order to support a rhetoric, or confirm a bias. They are sidelined – they are pushed to the margins.

In this series of prints, Martha brings these medieval beasts back to the present, capturing them as they proudly stand out against moments of everyday life. By doing so, marginalia and the marginalised become one in a way which is empathetic, defiant and honest. Through them, she asks the audience to confront their biases, encouraging them to rethink how we view the outsider and embrace the different, rather than reject it.

The prints were made in drypoint intaglio plates then digitally scanned to create the final pieces.

Michael Campbell

Michael Campbell is a painter who works into nontraditional surfaces. A recent graduate from York St John University with a BA(Hons) in Fine Art, Michael made the move to Leeds to continue his studies at Master’s level. Dedicated to the significance of everyday engagements with animals, with an unashamed bias for our feline friends, Michael’s work captures heartfelt moments and celebrates the individuality of each subject.

Forever drawn to the natural world and the animals which reside within it, Michael’s subjects are taken from his lived experience and help navigate questions through their presence in his work.

“Taken from Donna Haraway’s concept of Companion Species, the title of this work refers to the interdependent relationship between humans and animals. Companionship is a key point of research within my work, and Companion, featured in Ones to Watch, navigates the deeply personal connection I hold with the subject, my cat Misty. Duplicated within this piece, Misty is a motif within my practice and drives my research of interspecies connections and exchanges.

As an individual with autism, I take great notice of the animals we see every day in our urban environments, and I use this within my practice to create an informal archive of these often-unnoticed individuals. Working with a desire to simulate the joys of being surrounded by animal companions, whilst investigating how the spaces we share invites an inherent unseen entanglement of our cells, this work encapsulates the love felt for a pet and the secret wish to be able to clone one’s furry friend.”

Pooja Mistry

Rebecca O'Hooley

Rebecca O’Hooley is an oil painter who focuses on intimacy, human relationships, gestures, and the peculiarities of her unique family interactions. Rebecca conveys themes of unacknowledged acts of care and unseen acts of abuse in residential care facilities by using the landscape as a metaphor.

Rebecca’s work is fundamentally autobiographical, and while it is personal to her, it is not necessarily intended for the viewer to understand her story; rather, she merely hopes that someone will be able to relate to one small aspect of the image.

These semi-abstract, autobiographical landscape oil paintings were inspired by a real-life personal family situation. Rather than being a direct reaction, they were painted instinctively as mother to son and as a personal reminder of life’s frailty and the importance of advocacy.

Using brushes and palette knives, oil paint was applied to linen, scraped back, and then reapplied before being framed on a light grey green wooden frame.

Reece Kelly

Reece Kelly is a Leeds-based fine artist whose practice explores the complexities of identity and human connection, particularly focused around themes of gender identity and expression. They stress the importance of community and support, especially in times such as these, where there is a rise in prejudice and oppression.

The Beholder, featured in Ones to Watch, was built from a series of public workshops where participants create charms and submit pictures of loved ones to be painted onto pre-made charms. Using recycled materials like old canvas, fabric scraps and old beads, to create something unique and personal to them, like the eyes captured.

Reece invites you to touch and hold the charms. Carry them around, imagine whose eye you would choose to rest inside the charm. Once you are finished pondering, pin them up on the canopy for others to see. The sheer fabric allows the charms to be admired from all angles so that you can see each stitch, bead and paint stroke, creating an intimate experience.

Ultimately Reece is using the charms as a form of archiving the gaze of those we love. By removing names and faces, the charms and the eyes themselves remain completely anonymous, only known by the participants and the artist. Empowering the people’s gaze, perhaps chosen for similar reasons, a pet you loved, a friend who always has your back or just someone who loves you unconditionally.

Ria Lake

Ria Lake is Leeds-based multimedia artist working across a range of art forms including screen printing, mono printing, photography, ceramics, painting and textiles.

“My art is about my experiences of disability and growing up in the care system in Leeds. It explores identity, breaks boundaries and tackles issues about society.

I create large scale pieces which have a distinct, recognisable colour palette. I like to use bold, contrasting colours to create layers of images and text that encourage the viewer to look at the world around them differently. I’ve combined research, photography and screen-printing in the banner featured in Ones to Watch.

I find the word ‘integrated’ very interesting. I like the idea of lots of different people living together and everyone being equal. For this artwork, I’m thinking about integration where I live, as well as in society as a whole.

I live in a converted textile mill. There are disabled and neurodivergent people living in the building as well as other residents. Textile mills have always been places of integration, where disabled people worked alongside others. This might not have been taken into account by mill owners of the past, or by the companies who renovated my building, but still integration continues.

The piece was originally in an exhibition that took place in Leeds Industrial Museum, Any Work That Wanted Doing – part of Leeds 2023 City of Culture. The exhibition, curated by Gill Crawshaw, brought disabled people’s voices from the past and present together, highlighting their contributions to heritage and contemporary culture. Artworks created in response to the hidden histories of disabled mill workers were displayed amongst Leeds Industrial Museum’s collection of textile machinery.”

Rio Darwin

Rio Darwin is a sculptural ceramicist, translating the ephemerality of place into tangible forms. Rooted in the shifting landscapes of The Holderness Coast, Rio’s phenomenological approach to the land manifests as organic sculptures that envision the evolving coastlines of our future ecology.

Clay, in its malleable state, exists as both a physical and conceptual medium, mirroring the unstable and impressionable qualities of coastal terrain; each contour, ridge and crack, a preservation of touch. Rio explores the reactive and adaptive potential of glaze, utilising the process to memorialise fluidity within inanimate forms.

Through constructing delicate, tiered works, Rio’s practice honours the tension between vulnerability and resilience. These grounded forms allude to something ever-growing; something that exists in a continual state of becoming. Rio speculates what it means to exist upon a turbulent, everchanging landscape, sculpting works that feel familiar yet strangely detached from time or place.

Scarlett Foster

Scarlett Foster is a third year Fine Art student at Leeds Beckett University. Her work centers around traditional craft and folk art.

Scarlett works primarily with filet crochet and lace, drawing from her Irish and Romani heritage. She focuses on the undervaluing of domestic and emotional labour, where each stitch carries the weight of hours of unseen, unmonetised effort.

Scarlett is interested in labour not as a means to a productive end, but as a ritual of presence, care, and connection. In a culture shaped by mass production, instant gratification, and increasing isolation, her work offers a moment of slowing down, a return to the tactile and the intimate.

GRANT ME THE SERENITY is a tapestry composed of reworked doilies and filet crochet. This is an ode to the women in Scarlett’s life – the techniques used were taught to her by her grandmother and the serenity prayer is a mantra her mother uses in AA. Although she isn’t religious, the act of repeating the mantra helps to refocus and recentre, mirroring the process of the work itself, hours of delicate, rhythmic stitching.

IDLE HANDS is an installation featuring a television screen encased in filet crochet. On the screen, a video of Scarlett crocheting plays on loop with a repeated projection on the backdrop, shifting focus to the act of creation itself. This piece examines how productivity is understood in contemporary culture – rigid, extractive and measured purely by output. The video never reaches a point of completion to show the value of attentive, generative labour that is resisting finality.

Simon Baker

Simon Baker was born in 1999 in Leeds and grew up drawing with the encouragement of his mum and dad. Simon is a self-taught painter and has been making paintings outside of work, and as a response to challenges with his mental and physical health for three years now.

For Simon, art functions primarily as a therapy and method of processing experiences and emotions. All of his paintings relate directly to his life – people, places, and things, mostly in and around Leeds. Simon is interested in art as a means of preserving the individual attitudes, interests, and outlooks of humans throughout time.

“This painting was created on a hot day – I don’t like heat and had cooped myself up inside to hide from the sun. It was painted in my bedroom in front of my bookcase and a mirror. On the table, there is a banana, a bottle of water, and my watch. Bananas and plastic bottles of water are motifs that feature often in my work but were particularly necessary in this especially sweaty context. The books are those of a few artists whose work inspires me: Alice Neel, Jean Michel Basquiat, Gauguin, Picasso.

The frame itself is recycled and the acrylic was painted directly onto the cardboard backing. I gorilla glued the glass into the frame to prevent it from squashing any raised paint; but the glue created an unintentional ‘melting’-like effect which fit the context of the painting! A happy accident.”

Skyla Isabella West

Skyla Isabella West is a Leeds-based experimental printmaker from Pontefract and recent graduate of BA Fine Art at the University of Leeds.

“My practice combines photography, digital photomontage, print, and sculpture to materialise thoughts and investigations into nostalgia, the passage of time, and mindfulness.

Using a childhood digital camera, I gather documentary-style images of everyday moments and wait for nostalgia to surface. From these, I select the most symbolic imagery relating to connection and place, digitally montaging them into ambiguous, metaphorical compositions that form a private language of vulnerability and personal experience.

These photomontages are printed through a combination of chemical etching and screen-printing techniques. Chemicals corrode and oxidise the images into and onto metal, creating an experimental form of image-making inspired by industrial textures. Observing how rust forms and transforms on these surfaces, carrying its own sense of time, becomes integral to the work. This holistic process connects memories, present experiences, and imagined futures, encouraging me to value the spaces between moments and embrace the discomfort of yearning and reflection.

Here, While There, featured in Ones to Watch, is a resist screen print of a photomontage using stop-out varnish and copper sulphate on four mild-steel panels. Composed of five blended images taken across two years, it bridges the tension between anticipating the future and looking back longingly. As the copper sulphate reacts with the steel, the image becomes faint and shifting, fluctuating between abstraction and representation while concealing and revealing symbols of experience.

Skyla has exhibited work at There Is Not A Fashion, Hyde Park Art Club (Leeds, 2025); Art Materiality: Edition One, No Place, The Handbag Factory (Vauxhall, London, 2025); and Make No Bones (Leeds, 2025). She is currently undertaking a graduate residency with Serf Studios, Leeds.

Stanley Goretzki

Stanley Goretzki is a final year Illustration student at Leeds Arts University. His practice frequently features relationships between people and place and branches into the concept of biophilia (the innate human tendency to seek connection with nature).

Since moving to study in Leeds, the local landscapes of the Yorkshire Moors and Dales have heavily influenced his practice through extensive exploration. Currently focusing on progressing his own printmaking process, Stanley is influenced by the masterful work of contemporary printmakers, particularly the work of Matsubara Naoko.

The pieces featured in Ones to Watch, I Feel Extremely Safe In This Forest and Leaving For The Skies, are part of a recent series of work exploring Stanley’s own intimate relationship with the landscapes of Yorkshire through a lens of health and recovery.

The works were produced using both collagraph and lino printing processes, enabling a contrast of bold block colour and softer midtone detail.

The series confronts feelings of grief and difficulties relating to both emotional and physical health through abstracted forms of nature. Inspired by introspective experiences whilst journeying the Dales, theory surrounding the process of walking in natural landscapes has also greatly impressed upon the work, such as the Japanese way of ‘Shinrin-yoku’ (loosely translated as forest bathing).

Susan Hare

Sue Hare lives and studies in Sheffield. After a successful career in children and family services, she began exploring her artistic life by studying Art Foundation (Chesterfield College) and completing her BA Hons Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University where she is now studying for a MA in Fine Art.

Sue’s practice is multi-disciplinary, embracing sculpture, installation, exploration of materials, collaborations, and curation. She is inspired “when rubbing up against something that demands more understanding, exploration, research and challenge”. Sue is interested in how history is told over time, especially what is omitted, revealed, and emphasised, shifting our view of the world.

In her work featured in Ones to Watch, she focuses on the hardships of the Scottish Herring Girls who followed fishing vessels along the British coast to gut the catch. Risking injury and infection from knives and salt wounds, some developed arthritic clawed fingers. They were pioneers, unconsciously feminist, stepping out into the world of men when most women and girls are confined to domestic life.

There is an irony that they were finding freedom whilst supporting the West Indies slave trade (18th century) through the export of fish to feed slaves.

Sue’s archival approach to research was complemented by embodied research methods. She wrapped her fingers to protect them from knives and gutted herring so experiencing the visceral nature of the work. This enabled her to make connections between the artist’s hands and those of the herring girls.

Her interest in materials and how they have capacity to make gestures across time led to wrapping the fingers of fellow artists and sand-casting them hands in choosing aluminium for its cold aesthetic, its quiet monumentality and touch-ability.

Tess Hardy

Tess Hardy is an oil painter based between Leeds and Birmingham. Her work documents the beauty in every-day spaces, notably focusing on the interaction between interiors and natural light. Studying fine art at the University of Leeds, Tess is excited to develop her practice in more professional spaces.

“In my practice, I explore the question, ‘What happens when nothing happens?’. When I stare into space and sit with this question, I notice spaces I have overlooked or seen in a limited way.

I want my work to draw people into a moment of experience, in the hope that my being present invites you to be present in the act of seeing what hangs on the wall. Corners, the series featured in Ones to Watch, demonstrates the ability of light to dissect ordinary walls into an inexhaustible display of shapes and colours.

My painting of interior structures and forms examines whether the knowledge or experience of physical existence of a space affects how it is perceived. Perspective may be rendered so that it is possible to see an interior but hard to gain a sense of scale or even orientation. I am attracted to unconventional play on space, and how we may be tricked into believing in a non-existent or heavily distorted space.”

Tom Hardwick

Tom Hardwick is a Leeds-based artist studying an MFA at York St John University. Their practice interrogates the material frameworks of memory and knowledge in the Digital Age, reconsidering the conventions of the document through the medium of textiles.

Through hand-weaving, Tom re-materialises and re-humanises the act of data processing, exposing the limitations of digital technology and demonstrating a resistant approach to knowledge that is deliberately slow, soft, tactile, terrestrial and laborious.

Continuing to contend with the digitisation of the archive, Our Libraries Will Not Burn, They Will Disappear Without A Trace, featured in Ones to Watch, addresses the family photograph, encouraging audiences to consider the personal implications of the digitised archive, and their own role in the ongoing mass accumulation of digital data.

This pair of handwoven tapestries combine the rigid and formulaic structure of the digital image with the softness and fluidity of textile, exemplifying the fragility of the digital image while forcing Tom to take agency in the preservation of their own personal photographs. Where digital technology has allowed individuals to document their lives with an immense velocity and abundance, and store this data within a seemingly infinite virtual realm, the process of hand weaving slows information to a human pace, and allows these preserved memories to take up physical space in Tom’s life.

Through works that evoke corruption, system failure and digital decay, Tom brings into question the supposed superiority of digital technology, and the trust we place in digital storage to preserve our cherished memories.

Yvonne Pethullis

Yvonne Pethullis is an artist living on the East Yorkshire coast. She has completed a BA (Hons) in Creative Arts and recently completed a MA in Fine Art with distinction. Yvonne’s practice encompasses a range of  media and techniques. She has been painting and making all her life.

The making begins from an initial idea but allows the material to follow its own direction, to work with it, not against it. Yvonne considers some of her work to be transient, focusing on the process. This work is ephemeral and engages the viewer through tangible reality to make connections to their lived experiences.

The main concept for her current body of work is the idea that from nothing, something can be created. It is to elevate these banal objects that are either found or re-purposed to show that they too have agency and worth. To give the viewer a new perspective and understanding of the overlooked and undervalued and to show that repetition can make us focus as we search for the difference in the familiar. Challenging perceptions with items from our everyday life and creating new narratives to raise these objects from the threshold of invisibility.

This body of work engages with mindfulness through the slow process of making, and sustainability in the re-purposing of cardboard packaging through the exploration of materiality, allowing the found or re-purposed material speak for itself and be used in a direct and physical way.

Zine Library

Find the artists featured in our Ones to Watch Zine Library.

Amina Naheem / Amy Paver / Anna Richardson / Blablablacrafts / Bombaya (Alona Dovgan) / Daniel Jefferies / Ellie Waters / Heather / Hobie Smith / Joe Bundock / Julia Pluta  / NSCD Zine Society / Summer Shepherd / Tilly Buckton