Deb Covell is a British artist who redefines painting by treating paint as both surface and structure. Working with peeled, folded, suspended, and dissolved layers of acrylic paint, she creates sculptural and spatial works that engage gravity, materiality, and abstraction as lived, physical experience.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Icons / Objects at the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum, Kyiv (alongside Kazimir Malevich); Altered States, a 50-foot immersive installation presented as part of her mid-career retrospective at Kirkleatham Museum, Teesside; Quicksilver at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), London; and The Expanded Plane at Helm Contemporary, New York. Her work is held in major public and private collections including the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), the Kyiv Non-Objective Art Collection (KNO), and the Foundation of Conceptual Art Germany.

She is represented by Helm Contemporary in New York 

Bobby Benjamin is a Teesside-based artist working across expanded-field painting and installation. Drawing on council estate iconography and lived experience of poverty, his work positions working-class life not as subject matter, but as authorship. Using found materials and spatial interventions, Benjamin develops recurring motifs that sit between tension and play, where fragility and resilience coexist. His practice interrogates inequality, industry voyeurism and cultural hegemony, often from within the very conditions those structures seek to frame. Alongside his studio practice, Benjamin has founded and led artist-led spaces including The House of Blah Blah and Pineapple Black, and is currently director of the community art project Spag North. His work is held in the Middlesbrough Collection at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and he has served as a part-time lecturer at Teesside University.

Katie Tomlinson (b. 1996, Tees Valley) is a painter based in Manchester, represented by Brooke Benington, London. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2021–2023), supported by the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award.

Recent solo exhibitions include Fantasy Girls (2024) at Liminal Gallery, Margate; They Only Want You When You’re Seventeen (2024) at LKIF, Seoul; At Least Buy Me Dinner First (2023) at Brooke Benington, London; and Fight The Moon (2022) at Paradise Works, Manchester.

Through a queer feminist lens, Katie Tomlinson’s paintings depict ambiguous narratives that interrogate heteronormativity, body politics and the exploitative paradigm in which feminine beauty is controlled.

Errol Theunissen is a self-taught painter and illustrator born in Zimbabwe but living and working in the UK. Through his art, Theunissen captures everyday experiences, memories, and interactions, many featuring his children at home and at play. His work centres around the beauty found within individual stories, brought to life with a vibrant colour palette. Often, his work offers glimpses into honest and frank personal moments, and these instances of individual intimacy serve as a vehicle for depicting universal stories and emotions. 

His work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Turner Gallery in Newcastle. Recently, his work was showcased in the ‘Fair Art Fair Curated I’ exhibition in London, and his painting ‘Forbidden Love’ was selected to appear at the Bankley Open in Manchester. 

Sarah Cooney (b.1982 Stockton-on-Tees, UK) received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2008 where she was recipient of the Hugh Dunn Award from the Worshipful Company of Painter Stainers and a Greater London Area NAFADAS Bursary Award. Selected exhibitions include: Working Lives, MIMA, Middlesbrough

Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough (2024); No Last Dance, NCA,

Newcastle-upon-Tyne (2024); Gallery North, Newcastle- upon-Tyne

(2023); From Gesture to Geometry, Platform A Gallery, Middlesbrough

(2022); A Generous Space 2, The New Art Gallery, Walsall (2022); To the Studio, Gallery DODO, Brighton (2022); Your Foot in my Face (curated by Dan Howard-Birt), Kingsgate Project Space, London (2021); Creekside Open Selected by Brian Griffiths, APT Gallery, London

(2018); Beep Painting Prize Exhibition, Swansea College of Arts (2018).

In 2020 her painting ‘Evelina’ was acquired by MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art through the Tees Valley Response Collecting initiative. Her work has received recognition through various awards and nominations, such as being shortlisted for the Abbey Fellowship at the British School in Rome in 2011 and longlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2021 and 2023. In 2024, she was shortlisted for a Tees Valley Artists of the Year Award and longlisted for the Beep Painting Biennial.

KA Bird (b. 1992, Hartlepool) is a queer visual artist based in Newcastle, UK. Using digital media to inform her print-making and painting, her practice is about harnessing the processes and strategies of information circulation, investigating the human in technology, and the technological in the human within the all-out integration of internet and world.

Junior Durrani is a painter based in Eaglescliffe. Born in Peterborough and raised in Stockton-on-Tees, Junior later lived in Middlesbrough, where he studied English Literature at Teesside University. After completing a PGCE in Primary Education at Northumbria University, he worked as a primary school teacher for several years.

Following the passing of his mother, Junior reconnected with his passion for painting and drawing, developing a practice rooted in memory, lived experience and close observation. His recent work explores intimacy, family life and the emotional complexity found within everyday relationships. Alongside his art practice, Junior works as a supply teacher across local schools while balancing studio time with family life.

Sowerby is particularly interested in the abundance of material which deals with the explicitly corporal aspects of the self: spot popping, eating etc, and how these images are simultaneously repulsive and fascinating, communicating a paradoxical need for intimacy and distance.

Phil Gatenby (b. Stockton on Tees) completed the MA Fine Art course at Newcastle Polytechnic in 1990 and retired from his appointment as Head of Fine Art at Teesside University in 2014. Selected exhibitions include: Crossing Borders (installation) Felix the Gallery, Middlesbrough Art Weekender (2017), AIR Residency Exhibition, Das Spectrum, Utrecht, Netherlands (2016) White Noise, Installation, Circulation Recording Studios, Darlington (2001), Rivers Bed, Live-stock.ram/fm web-cast and radio project‚ ARC, Stockton on Tees (2000), Open Art, ‘Against’ acrylic paint and plastic text, Middlesbrough Art Gallery (1995), Open Art, ’Measured and Exposed‚’ digital print, Middlesbrough Art Gallery (1994), Northern Open, London Group, Royal College of Art (1984), Sunderland Arts Centre & Touring Exhibition, Sunderland (1983), London Group, South East London Art Gallery (1981), London Group, Camden Arts Centre (1977) and New Contemporaries, Royal Academy (1977).

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Since retiring from my role as Head of Fine Art in the School of Arts & Media at Teesside University my primary interest remains the singular discipline of painting. With due consideration of the space permitted or denied to sustain its legitimacy I give attention to its advocacy and progression, particularly so in a post 1989 milieu.

Starting out on a new painting idea begins with a ritually imposed tactic: the intent to avoid pictorial narrative, habitual semiotics and populist kitsch, sufficiently so to allow the fluidity of figure and ground to be convincingly stilled. The intrigue for me is all about the act of making and the materiality of paint, favoured for its capacity to be mutable, malleable and eventually yielding. Resolving a work is always about being settled with what the work is saying or doing when subject and object coalesce.

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Nel Hume is an artist based in North Yorkshire. Her practice explores feeling, memory and lived experience through paint, using colour and shape as a visual language for what words cannot always express. Guided by instinct and intuition, she embraces the uncertainty of the creative process, allowing emotion and personal experience to surface through the act of making. Through the layered process of painting, her work reveals both the physical act of creation and the emotional traces beneath it. Nel’s paintings invite viewers to slow down, reflect, and connect with the quiet complexity of human experience.