Azraa Motala

Azraa Motala is a visual artist from Lancashire, her multidisciplinary practice spans large-scale oil painting, photography, video, poetry, and site-specific interventions. Exploring the intersections of identity, culture, and belonging through the lens of her experience as a British South Asian Muslim woman.

Her work is grounded in a critical exploration of empire, history, and the politics of representation. Through a reclamation of space and narrative, she challenges orientalist portrayals of women in art and interrogates the legacies of colonialism that continue to shape contemporary cultural discourse. Increasingly, her practice is concerned with the role of place in shaping identity. Recent work reflects a growing engagement with rural England as a site of both personal reflection and wider historical resonance. Drawing connections between the landscapes of Britain and the diasporic memories of migration, heritage, and displacement, considering how natural environments can hold and reflect layered narratives of exclusion, belonging, and cultural identity.

Motala is committed to socially engaged practice, often working collaboratively with communities to foster dialogue and creative exchange. Her work not only examines what it means to navigate the world as a woman of colour in Britain today, but also contributes to a wider reimagining of British art and landscape traditions from a decolonial perspective.

www.azraamotala.com

@azraamotala

Alina Akbar

Alina Akbar (aka Lean) is a Visual Artist, Writer, Curator and Storyteller: Working in film, photography and installation. Wandering between both digital and analogue mediums.

Using her lens and words to create art from both personal and cultural experiences as a British-born Pakistani. With a particular interest in authentic and ethical working-class representation and issues of diversity in society, shown through her cinematic eye for capturing raw reality intertwined with poetic narratives, often as a self-producing and self-shooting director.

www.alinaakbar.xyz

@lean0161

A Man Called Adam

A Man Called Adam's Drs Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones have been making pioneering electronic music for over three decades. Exploring and assimilating diverse musical influences, the Guardian recently described them as "chillout masters famed for their blissful, sun-dappled sound."

As multi-disciplinary artists they continue to push the boundaries of their practice with commissions, residencies and workshops that expand upon their doctoral research in the fields of sound, technology and lyric form. 

For Middlesbrough Art Week 2025 they will premiere a new audio/visual work, “The Power of 3” at Middlesbrough Town Hall on the opening night of the festival.

Inspired by Redcar's offshore windfarm, the work celebrates the turbines’ sculptural beauty and benign presence as a bridge between Teesside’s industrial past and its sustainable futures. Featuring an ensemble of live musicians and a large-scale triptych of lyrical HD video, the symphonic composition will transpose the wind farm's inherent patterns into musical rhythms and motifs in three distinct movements that weave community narratives, serialist composition and pulsing electronic beats. 

Rodgers says “We love the wind turbines, we see them in all weathers, times of day and different light. There’s a kind of revelation in that repetition, the same but different, endlessly. Life ticks along beside them and when you experience life, love, loss – all the human emotions – alongside a great landmark, that landmark becomes part of your identity, part of the spirit of a place. We wanted to celebrate that and maybe try to evoke that sensation for the viewers and listeners.”  

www.amancalledadam.com

@amancalledadam_hq

Furtherfield

Furtherfield is an artist-led community arts organisation and gallery based in Finsbury Park. They create and support global participatory projects with networks of artists, theorists and activists. Their mission offers a chance for the public to present their own views and enter or alter various art discourses. 

Since late 2020, they have been immersed in the massive Interspecies Treaty LARP as part of their participation in the EU Horizon 2020 funded CreaTures project. All participants advance more-than-human justice by playing the game as other species, representing them in Assemblies to discuss and plan an Interspecies Festival that will celebrate the signing of an Interspecies Treaty of Cooperation in 2025. Treaty was conceived by Ruth and Cade Diem, launched in Finsbury Park, and is now available to be fully adapted and played anywhere. 

We’ve been collaborating with Furtherfield for FiP:ARR (Futures in Play; A Radical Reimagining) a project which aims to empower communities in Middlesbrough by fostering imaginative, participatory, playful spaces where local voices can shape collective futures. 

Furtherfield have been co-creating with local communities a speculative role-play game called Chamber LARPs (Live Action Role-Playing scenarios), FiP:ARR will amplify underrepresented voices, explore and experiment with alternative futures, and transform collective agency into pathways for radical reimaginings. The project will consist of a series of workshops, community visits, development of a new and unique LARP game, and public presentations at Middlesbrough Art Week.

www.furtherfield.org

@furtherfield

Andrea Hasler

Andrea Hasler - ‘Perishable Goods’

Andrea Hasler is a Swiss artist who lives and works in London, UK. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design. Selected solo exhibitions include Burdens of Excess (Gusford, Los Angeles/US), Irreducible Complexity (Next Level-Projects, London/UK), Full Fat or Semi-Skinned? (Bon Gallery, Stockholm), and Verbier Time + Space (New York/US). She won the Arts Council England funded Greenham Common Commission, producing a large site-specific installation that received significant press attention. Hasler has been an Artist-in-Residence at Verbier 3D Foundation (Switzerland and USA), Next Level Projects (Bahamas), and Chisenhale (London/UK). She lectures at various institutions, including the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, MA Art & Luxury, London/UK. 

Her work has featured in many group exhibitions, notably Ethics, Excess and Extinction at the El Paso Museum, Texas/US, and Zabludowicz Collection’s Procreate Finalist exhibition in London/UK. Upcoming projects include a site-specific installation in Marfa, Texas/US (Autumn 2026)

Andrea Hasler’s work centres around the emotional body—a site of vulnerability, tension, and transformation. Through immersive installations and site-specific sculptures, she attempts to materialise the intangible: longing, shame, aspiration, and the duality of desire and repulsion. Her work depicts the emotional body, often working with skin as the physical element that divides the Self from the Other, as well as the potential container for both and the threshold where these identities blur.

Rooted in the psychology of the abject—as theorised by Julia Kristeva—Hasler’s work explores the aesthetics of contradiction: the push and pull between attraction and repulsion, glamour and grotesque, surface and exposure. 

Recurring themes include the emotional lure of luxury, the fetishisation of status, and the collective rituals of consumption. These glossy ideals are dissected—sometimes literally—in Hasler’s sculptures and installations, revealing what festers beneath the surface of aspiration. Through visceral textures and uncanny anatomies, her work challenges the myth of perfection and offers a counter-narrative: one of rawness, exposure, and emotional truth.

In an age obsessed with control and curation, Hasler’s work seeks to disrupt—to render visible what we work so hard to hide. The beautifully grotesque. The aspirationally abject. The emotional residue of what it means to be human.

www.andreahasler.com

@andreahasler

Simon poulter

Simon Poulter has an established national profile as both an artist and curator. His recent work has included a series of large-scale commissions working with Minity, as part of the University of East Anglia's Future and Form program. In 2019, he worked on a large-scale Heritage Fund project in Finsbury Park, London. This involved partnerships with the Museum of London, 2NQ and the Friends of Finsbury Park. The project consisted of an exhibition, new research and LIDAR scans of the park.

Poulter’s current focus is on two long-range projects, called the ‘New Normal’, which consists of a series of paintings and online works. ‘New Normal’ has branched out in a number of directions, with over 100 watercolours of the Ukraine war. Poulter started pulling imagery from Reddit groups with ex - military people discussing the conflict videos. Poulter started pulling imagery back from these videos and also adapting paintings from this. A key part of this project is to convey that Poulter intends to slow things down and translate these digital feeds into a physical medium such as watercolour. Also, in the last three years, Simon has taught MA students at the University of Huddersfield, focusing on creative industries.

www.viral.info

@simonviralinfo

Iris Ollier

Iris Ollier is a multi-disciplinary artist working across sculpture, text and imagery. Her practice investigates embodied perception, specifically the corporeal aspect of looking, and the commodification of attention. Graduating from Newcastle University’s BA Fine Art in 2023, Ollier was awarded Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award grant, (Edinburgh 2025), Newcastle Arts Centre’s Brass Tacks grant from Creative Central NCL (2023), shortlisted for the North East Emerging Artist Award (2024), and in 2022 received the Ella Dawson Travel Award. Solo exhibitions include Iris Ollier at Newcastle Arts Centre (2024-5) Iris Ollier: Roving Eye at Shieldfield Art Works (2023). Other notable exhibitions include In the Round at Newcastle Arts Centre (2023) and Thrills at Embassy Gallery (2024).  Iris lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland where she is a director of Votive Gallery, an itinerant artist-run curatorial project. 

Renaissance painters imagined the artistic solution to navigating the visible world using linear perspective; representing real space from the viewpoint of a single, static eye. There could not be a less accurate understanding of the mechanics of vision. This attitude is revitalised in the modern day by the ubiquity of photos and, to a lesser extent, videos on screens. We treat photographs as factual although they contain a slight falsehood: we tend to look with two eyes. Vision is predicated by the body's position in space, even as the body itself and the bodies of others enter the visual field. That vision and motion are so extraordinarily enmeshed is a human operation that we give no thought to. We are immersed in the visible by the body, which is itself visible. Or, you kind of always have to look where you’re going. 

Updrop is part of a series of ‘lens-works’ which discuss the physical act of looking (at something). Lenses have an inherent novelty value, the lens defying gravity, rendering the world through itself. They bend light in ways we’re not used to. This particular lens is made of water; many liquids have a similar refractive index to glass and can therefore behave like lenses. What if an object could refract space, repel space, bend and shift the peripheral edges around you or bunch it all up close - look different from every angle.

irisollier.co.uk

@iris_ollier

Petra Szemán

Petra Szemán (b. 1994, based between NE England and Japan, born in Budapest, Hungary)

Petra is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. Their practice focuses on the murky borderlands along the arbitrary line separating real and fictional, and the kind of lives and experiences that are possible there. Using a virtual version of themself as a protagonist journeying through animatic realms, they explore liminal spaces and threshold situations, looking to dissect the ways our memories and selves are constructed within a landscape oversaturated with fiction (both on- and off-screen). Turning away from thinking of cyberspace as a radically ’other’ realm, Petra hopes to walk the line situated between dystopian and utopian frameworks, eyes set on new queer horizons.

Petra is a BA Fine Art graduate from Newcastle University (2013-2017), and has exhibited at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, NTT InterCommunicationCentre in Tokyo, as well as various galleries across England, Continental Europe and East Asia. After spending two years in Japan, developing a body of work as a recipient of a research scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture (2018-2020), Petra is now based between North-East England and Tokyo, Japan. They’re the co-author/editor of WEEB THEORY, a book about the overlapping area between artists’ moving image, games and anime (published by Banner Repeater, London 2023). Petra is a lecturer in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University.

www.petraszeman.com/

@petra.szeman

Jonathan lloyd West

Jonathan Lloyd West is a British artist based in Redcar, working across painting, printmaking, drawing, digital, and mixed media. West studied at Camberwell College of Arts (BA) and the Slade School of Fine Art (MFA). His ongoing series Infinite Scroll uses layered processes to build compositions that refuse a clear beginning or end. These works explore the visual and psychological effects of endlessly scrolling through digital content, inviting moments of reflection and interruption.

West’s recent exhibitions include Studio Response [3] at Saatchi Gallery, London (2022–23); Ancient Mew at Conditions, London (2022); and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Painting in the North East. Now at Newcastle Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne (2022). He was a finalist for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2018.

jlw.kleio.com

@jonathanlloydwest

Linda Cassels

Linda Cassels was born in South Africa and educated in 1970. She came to the UK as a migrant worker and after 30 years in the health sector, she decided to change direction and retrain as an artist at Sheffield Hallam University.

Cassels’ work focuses on history, retelling stories in a manner that is true and objective to her lived experience. Issues pertaining to the black female body and how it was portrayed in history is a subject that she has explored through the media of photography, performance, language, and the object. Cassels has exhibited work online and a solo exhibition at ROAR in 2019.

@lindacasselsgallery