FIRST WAVE OF ARTISTS

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FIRST WAVE OF ARTISTS +

  • Close and Remote are Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter, who frequently collaborate with artists such as Roney Fraser-Munroe and Jon Dovey. They have a national practice working with organisations including the Brigstow Institute, Cabot Institute, Cultural Engine, FACT, and others.

    Their work spans film, performance, VR, drawing, and music, often focusing on climate change, culture, and overlooked or marginal spaces. Key projects include We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (2025), Live Model (2024) – a performance game on Net Zero – and Orchard (2024), exploring the social and ecological role of green spaces.

    From 2024 to 2025, they lead the Personal to the Planetary cohort, a group of artists and activists engaging deeply with the climate emergency. Their approach values co-creation, embraces uncertainty, and sees aesthetics as a vital force in shaping cultural conversations.

  • John B Ledger (b. 1984, Barnsley, South Yorkshire) is a visual artist whose work emerges from lengthy autoethnographic and socio-political assessments. Taking the form of large-scale drawings, maps or films, his practice is deeply informed by the post-industrial landscape and the post-historical culture that defined his formative years. John’s work also looks at our relations to the ‘self’ in late capitalism and an age of social media overload.

  • Kitty McKay is an artist, researcher and DJ from Liverpool and is currently based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Kitty studied a Masters of Fine Art at Newcastle University. While studying Kitty also worked part-time at The New Bridge Project, an artist-led, DIY art and community venue

    Kitty’s interdisciplinary practice embraces the politics of community and encompasses social impact research through moving image, sound, installation, sculpture, collage, live works and writing. They are especially interested in queer and feminist frameworks for exploring space and place. Kitty often works collaboratively to produce live and socially-engaged works.

  • Andrea Hasler is a Swiss artist born in Zurich in 1975. Hasler currently works in London, UK. Hasler studies MA FIne Art at the Chelsea college of Art and Design. Hasler's solo exhibitions include New Greenham Arts, in Newby in the Uk, the Artrepco Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland and GUSFORD, Los Angeles. Hasler’s works have also been featured in the book ‘The language of Mixed - Media and Sculpture’ by Jac Scott written in 2014. Hasler won the 2014 Arts Council England funding and created a large site specific installation which gained much press interest. 


    Hasler’s wax and mixed - media sculptures explore the tension between attraction 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 what happens if you open up those boundaries. Hasler’s work dissects moral ideas generated by the media and deeply entrenched concepts in our society without reassembling the dissected, separated and ornamented pieces into a new or different whole

  • Using fine art as a vehicle for broader philosophical exploration, Carl Truscott’s work engages with fundamental questions about the nature of art itself. What constitutes art? What is it for? How do we understand it?

    Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, his practice addresses the universal challenges of artistic representation, filtered through a personal philosophy that cynically aligns art theory with ‘superstition’ and our human tendency to draw significance from unrelated elements. This notion of ‘magical thinking’ -common within the art world - reveals a compelling phenomenon in both creator and viewer, and opens up a space to examine the tensions between artistic intent and subjective interpretation.

    Carl’s current work explores these tensions by focusing on the role of context in the experience of art. How much of what we perceive in a gallery setting is influenced by surrounding works, curatorial framing, or prior knowledge of the artist? By engaging directly with fellow exhibiting artists, his amalgamate influences, creating a layered, expansive 'art-object' that reflects the exhibition as a whole.

  •  Faye Magkanari’s work stems from a need to explore how Orthodox religion connects to memory, culture, and her experience as a woman. Growing up in Greece, religion was woven into everyday life-shaping how people behaved and what they believed. While she is not especially religious, she remains deeply aware of how faith influences social norms, particularly around gender. Her work reflects on this complex mix of personal belief, tradition, and inherited expectations.

    These themes continue to affect and inspire Magkanari, though she is also curious about where her practice might evolve-exploring ideas not always tied so directly to religion. Broadly, she is interested in the body, especially the female body, and in symbols that are easily recognised and widely accepted, regardless of their form. She works across clay, casting, metal, and wood, though she primarily identifies as a ceramist and secondly as an interdisciplinary artist. Rather than delivering a clear critique or telling a single story, her work seeks to open up space for reflection on what we inherit, what we carry forward, and what we quietly resist. Whether her work makes viewers feel uneasy or understood, she hopes it invites them to sit with the complicated intersections of faith, womanhood, and cultural memory.

  • Rosie Gibbens (b.1993) is a London based sculpture artist. Gibbens studied Ba Performance Designs and Practice at Central Saint Martins in 2015 and then went onto study Ma Contemporary Art Practice performance in 2018. She has had many solo exhibitions and performances that have included, ‘Parabiosis’ , The Bomb Factory, London in 2024, ‘Skin of my Teeth’, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham in 2022 and ‘Carrot and Stick’  at the Somers Gallery in London in 2019. 


    Gibbens makes performances and photographs that use her body. She explores the overlaps between identity, labour and consumer desire. She often makes sculptures that combine household gadgets with sewn body parts. Rosie playfully blends these things to unpack and question the future body as it becomes increasingly ‘optimised’ by technological development.

  • Erin Dickson is a sculptor. She initially studied Architecture at the Architectural Association in London and later went on to complete both her MA and PhD at the University of Sunderland. Dickson’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Glasstress, The National glass centre, The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and FACT in Liverpool. She has received international grants and awards including an Honorary Diploma from the Jutta Cuny Foundation, Germany, and a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England. 

    Dickson explores tongue-in-cheek themes of ‘Britishness,’ particularly in relation to her birthplace in North East England. She works in the space between craft and digital manufacture, operating both physically and virtually to develop systems of correspondence. Through humour, her sculptures, videos, and installations deliberately soften provocative subject matter, including British class systems, AI bias, intimacy, community, and isolation.

  • ︎︎Iris Ollier is a multi - disciplinary artist and curator working a number of mediums such as sculpture, design and image - making. Ollier studied Fine Art at Newcastle University between 2019 and 2023. She went on to exhibit widely across the UK, including in Newcastle Arts Centre in 2024 and Shieldfield Art Works, Newcastle in 2023. 

    Iris Ollier explores embodied perception and the unspoken aspects of human experience through novelty objects. Her work engages with themes of attention, social media, and the physical act of looking, described evasively as art that can manipulate space and perception.

  • A Man Called Adam are a British music duo, Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones. The Duo have been making electronic music since the late 80s. Coming back into the spotlight in 2019 with their album ‘Farmarama’ they have performed live at many festivals including Gilles Peterson’s We Out Here and Kala Festival in Albania. 


    The duo explore diverse musical influences but always sounding recognisably themselves. They avoid defining their style but have produced tracks that are in the genes such as Jazz, Basware and Nu British house. 


  • Charlotte's artist practice focuses on the transformative act of self decoration. She is interested in the relationships connecting pain and glamour. Charlotte's artistic practice involves a process of layering multicultural symbols of power to illustrate a universal recipe to empower oneself. To create her textile pieces Charlotte sources second hand women's clothing to tie her to a female audience, this also aids her work to be more sustainable and unique depending on what she can find. Using textile based arts connects Charlotte to a lineage of women that inspire her work, further allowing the work to be viewed through a feminine lens. As an artist she is drawn to beads and sequins to represent the ‘precious’ objects we layer onto ourselves to cultivate power. The comforting nature of quilting and the brutal mechanical nature of the piercing needle speaks symbolically about her themes exploring the connection between pain and glamour.

    Through her work Charlotte enjoys world-making and storytelling, she combines a blend of history and modern day culture to produce playful narratives where women hold all the power and look fabulous while doing so. Throughout her work the tiger is a continuous symbol of power, prowling alongside fierce female characters in her femme fantasy world.

    Charlotte has recently graduated with a first class honours in Fine Art from Northumbria University, resulting in the opportunity to exhibit her work in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts. Through the New Graduates award with Middlesbrough Art Week she is exploring new ways of working post graduation.

  • Over the past two years, Bethany Dallas has focused on building a clear artist identity, embracing her personal aesthetics to develop a strong connection between herself and her work. This has resulted in a distinctive visual language centered around the color pink. She uses pink as a form of reclamation from misogynistic ideals that label it as weak or unimportant. As a working-class, fat woman, Dallas consistently draws from her lived experience to inform her work. She believes that art can never be truly apolitical, and her practice is rooted in the idea that representation for marginalized groups is vital and deserves a place in art. Much of her work is deeply personal, yet she appreciates when others can feel seen and represented within it.

    Dallas’s practice is not fixed to a single medium; she begins with a theme or concept she wants to explore and then selects the medium best suited to express the idea, whether through photography, painting, or, most recently, fabric-based sculpture. This flexible approach allows her to remain experimental while maintaining the core themes present throughout her work.

  • Darren Cullen is a satirical artist, activist,  illustrator and writer. He was born in Leeds to Irish immigrant parents and is currently based in London. Cullen studied advertising at Leeds college of art, where he learnt the techniques and language of the medium but changed direction when he learnt about the ethical implication involved in this career path after moving away from advertising, Cullen moved on to study fine art at Glasgow School of Art.

    In his work, Cullen used the language of advertising to communicate the empty promises of consumerism and the lies of military recruiters. Cullen has gone on to publish several comics releasing his first one in 2013 called ‘Join the army’. Cullen has also written a series of short films called "Action Man: Battlefield", to draw attention to the way the Ministry of Defence targets children as young as five with its official toy range,which includes an RAF Drone Playset.

  • 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.

  • 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 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 Poulters intention is 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.

  • Demdike Stare is an English dark ambient and electronic music duo based in Manchester. The project was formed by DJ Sean Canty and producer Miles Whittaker in 2009. Their mixtapes and albums blend a wide range of genres including Jazz, Library music and industrial. The duo have developed their sound throughout the journey of the project. 

  • Elen Murgasova’s recent work focuses on themes of trauma and its lasting effects over time, particularly exploring the transition from childhood to adulthood and the behavioural changes that emerge from this shift. Her practice examines how social and environmental factors influence the development of character, revealing the often unseen forces that shape identity.

    Much of Murgasova’s work to date has centred around her older brother as a point of personal and emotional reference, but she is now expanding this exploration to include a broader range of individuals and communities. She believes in the importance of confronting the raw, unfiltered realities of life-recognising that painful or difficult experiences play a vital role in shaping who we become. Through her work, Murgasova aims to encourage viewers to reflect on their own life journeys, inviting a deeper understanding of how personal challenges contribute to growth and resilience.

  • Elliot Kitchener is a visual artist and graduate of Northumbria University, where he refined his draughting skills and developed a strong foundation in the arts. During his studies, he gained valuable experience by exhibiting his work at the Baltic as part of his cohort’s degree show and working as an invigilator in local galleries, experiences that deepened both his technical abilities and his understanding of the art world. Elliot’s practice is an ongoing investigation into modernist design, with a particular interest in the movement’s ideas around reduction and the essential role of drawing and sculpture in generating abstraction. His work begins with imaginative, almost automatic sketching, from which reduced modernist structures emerge. Over time, he has developed a variety of recurring motifs - often inspired by the forms of animal skulls - which he experiments with through loose, iterative drawing. Selected forms are then further developed into more refined, often larger-scale renderings that evoke a tangible sense of presence. Deeply influenced by Henry Moore, Elliot draws upon Moore’s approach to automatism and selective development, using it as a framework for his own process. The resulting drawings are sculptural in nature - simulations of unrealised objects that sit at the intersection of concept and form.

  • Lily-Grace Dawson’s practice is rooted in a deep curiosity about her own perception and how memory, identity, and neurodivergence influence the realities she creates throughout her work. This physical manifestation of her internal reality offers an in-depth understanding of the unconscious mind and its emotional and psychological performance within her artwork. She works across drawing, oil painting, and fibre arts, often reusing materials such as old canvas, plywood, and cardboard as foundations for her pieces. She prefers these found materials, believing they add a raw nuance to the finished work.

    Dawson is drawn to oddities, chaos, and the study of nudity - recurring themes in her work that often evoke feelings of disturbance or confusion in viewers. Currently, her main focus is on exploring her perception of relationships through soft plush toys, creating a contrast with nudity and angsty imagery. She envisions her creative space as a home where vulnerability and experimentation coexist. Valuing small details, complex thought processes, and personal truths, Dawson approaches both her artistic practice and her interactions with others with this mindset. Her artwork has become a kind of diary, sharing personal questions and reflections with her audience.

  • Petra Szeman is a moving image artist working between the North East of England and Japan. Their practice centers on animation and game-like landscapes, blending the aesthetics of digital environments with narrative exploration. Petra studied Fine Art at Newcastle University from 2013 to 2017 and has since exhibited widely, including at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, and various galleries across England, continental Europe, and East Asia.

    Petra’s work explores the boundaries between the real and the fictional. Through a virtual self that acts as a main character in animated, dreamlike worlds, they investigate liminal spaces and transitional states. Their practice examines how identity and memory are shaped in a reality saturated with both digital and physical fictions. Rather than viewing cyberspace as an alien or detached domain, Petra embraces it as a space of possibility - navigating the tension between dystopia and utopia while envisioning new queer futures.

  • Sigita Silina is a visual artist with the focus on socio-cultural nuances. She merges the

    boundaries of art, science, and philosophy, inviting viewers to explore the interplay between technology, visual culture, and the depths of human consciousness. With her thought- provoking works, Sigita invites us to contemplate the multifaceted nature of our perception and the profound influence of images and technology on human psyche, looking into how those shape our understanding of the world. She often isolates an individual from the crowd and places them in a calm, cinematic landscape, in order for them to face up to their own inner-turmoil and solitude. With all her work, she creates spaces that are both illusionary and hyper-real – where one can enter the mind and the physical body at the same time.

  • Clare is a visual artist whose practice celebrates colour through a playful, improvisational approach to the grid and geometric abstraction. Her work often exists in the space between painting and sculpture, where structured frameworks are used as launching points for emotional and intuitive exploration. Clare graduated with First Class Honours in Fine Art from The Northern School of Art in 2025 and will continue her studies there as an alumna on the MA Art Practice programme. She lives and works in the North East with her daughter.

    Her practice blends carefully constructed compositions with expressive colour choices, sometimes executed with precision, and at other times with spontaneity. Often working from smaller paper studies, Clare explores the tension and potential within repeated geometric structures—grids, stripes, and forms—balancing clarity with complexity. Mixed materials occasionally feature in her work, creating dynamic surfaces that oscillate between depth and flatness. Guided by personal emotion and intuition, Clare’s compositions are frequently titled with reflective, sentimental phrases that gesture toward their emotional core while still inviting open interpretation. Her work is ultimately a meditation on change, presence, and life’s rich visual and emotional terrain.

    Clare has exhibited in several group shows including SMUG in Stockton (2024), Ferens Gallery’s Open Call Exhibition in Hull (2024), the Bishop Auckland Town Hall Open Call (2024), and the Redcar Summer Exhibition, a group show linked to The Northern School of Art. During her undergraduate studies, she was the recipient of multiple awards: the Joe Cole Award for Creative Achievement (2025), the Consistent Excellence Award (2025), and the New Graduate Award from Auxiliary in Middlesbrough.

  • Laura Shilling’s themes include transformation, memory, decay, and preservation. She uses discarded objects, often vessels for more desirable acts or purposes - packing materials, old rendering, insulation, upholstery foam, cardboard boxes. She collects discarded objects that are usually widely manufactured or objects that take up the ‘negative space’ on either side of a more desirable object. She often refers to them as vessels. The objects are initially familiar to the viewer, yet through modification Shilling reframes them to create a space of discovery. She transforms the objects in various ways such as latex castings, constructing metal frames and photo transfer.

    By using objects that were destined for landfill, this speaks of the endless churn of material production, consumption and depletion that characterises this current era. Shilling also incorporates elements of personal memory, contrasting sentimentality with objects that carry no emotional value. She finds it interesting that people think she has bought or even made some of her found material, highlighting the power of transformation through these fabricated processes. The found objects hold the same weight within the sculptures as their crafted counterparts, blurring the line between found and fabricated. Shilling thinks that today’s readymades are often about reclaiming and reusing, not just recontextualising objects. In a world facing climate crisis and resource scarcity, using waste materials can be seen as a form of resistance or healing.