Catherine Bertola is an artist, whose work involves creating site-specific installations, drawings and films that address the invisible histories of women, whose roles and contributions to society are overlooked and undervalued. The work gives voice to untold narratives, excavating the past to confront contemporary inequalities that women continue to face. Catherine is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and Course Leader for BA Fine Art.

Her work is led by research, out of which ideas emerge as connections are made between unearthed narratives, imagery, site and materials, as well as drawing from her own personal experience. Past work has often been precarious, with installations made from materials such as dust, disappearing almost as quickly as they were made; this temporality is an integral part of the work.

Catherine has 25 years experience of working with internationally recognised commissioners and galleries such as; V&A, National Trust, Crafts Council, National Museum Wales, Government Art Collection, Leeds Museums and Galleries, Arts&Heritage and Museum of Arts & Design (New York).

Izzie Beirne (b.1996) is a UK, London based artist from Newcastle Upon Tyne. Beirne studied her BA (Hons) Fine Art at Leeds Arts University (2019) and her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University in London (2023). Beirne was recipient of The Almacantar Award and studio residency (2023) and has been shortlisted for several other awards including the

Mosaic Award (2025), Robert Walters Prize (2023) and Acme Award (2023). Beirne has exhibited in the UK and internationally with galleries including The Second Act Gallery, Guts Gallery, Twilight Contemporary, OHSH projects and Plan X gallery.

Beirne primarily works with painting, but has also presented works in ceramics, sound and film. Film is deeply rooted in the process of Beirne’s practice, through her manipulation of cinematic imagery. Recent work takes reference from the The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) by Peter Greenaway. Beirne utilises the film’s graphic, violent plot to work through feminist themes of sexual violence, societal ills and imbalances of power.

 Bodies when painted are sliced and cropped, leaving frenzied hands and ghostly figures sweeping across the canvas. Beirne views this series of paintings as a way to build narrative, each piece adding to the larger puzzle at play. Depicted are the remnants of social settings; glasses discarded, doors left ajar with darkness beckoning and alluding to tropes in horror. Beirne’s painting technique plays into these narratives, using heavily blurred paint to create a dreamlike, nightmarish state. This distortion brings the paintings full circle, creating a painted lens through which scenes are viewed, harking back to the medium of cinema from which the paintings take reference.

Mia Wilkinson (b. County Durham, UK) is a London-based artist working across painting and sculpture. Raised in a working-class, single-parent household in the North East of England, her practice explores the intersections of gender, class, labour and racial identity through the body and the domestic. Drawing on autobiography, art history and popular culture, Wilkinson creates densely layered paintings and sculptures where grotesque figuration, theatricality and humour disrupt inherited ideas of femininity, care and power. Working between London and the cultural influence of the North East, her titles frequently employ regional slang and double meanings, using wit to expose the contradictions embedded within domestic life and social expectation. Through excess, self-representation and psychological narrative, Wilkinson reclaims the domestic as a site of pleasure, resistance and transformation, challenging the social and art historical conventions that continue to shape who is seen, how they are represented, and whose stories are afforded cultural value.

Sue Loughlin is a visual artist whose tactile sculptural work utilises contrasting materials to evoke visceral sensations and create narratives. Her work invites contemplation of the wider impact of political, ideological and socio-economic shifts upon women's autonomy. Works regularly reference the female body and the systemic failings which frame it as a fallible, disposable machine.

 Motherhood, and the mental, physical and societal implications of this state have become recurring themes since Sue founded MOTHEROTHER in 2023. This Arts Council England funded research, curatorial and social practice project has become a methodology through which she navigates the unfavourable art world conditions experienced by artist parents and carers, supporting others to do the same.

 Based in Newcastle upon Tyne, Sue has exhibited regionally and nationally including at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle Contemporary Art, The NewBridge Project, The Atkinson Gallery, The Whitestone Gallery, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the University of Sunderland, where she was AA2A artist in residence 2024-2026.

Rachel Deakin is an artist based in Middlesbrough whose practice draws inspiration from her immediate surroundings. Working across photography, moving image, collage, and elements of the everyday, she explores the subtle intersections between landscape and memory.

Through paired photographic works, Rachel captures layered narratives embedded within post-industrial environments. Her work reflects on environmental fragility and the quiet persistence of change, inviting viewers to consider how we structure the landscape.

In 2025 she was the recipient of an Arts Council England DYCP grant and was selected for the AA2A residency at Sunderland University. Her work was recently included in the exhibition The Secret Lives of Bottle of Notes at MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, as part of a collaboration with sound artist Nell Catchpole. Her solo exhibition, A Monday Night in Middlesbrough which opened in January 2025 before travelling to Village Books, Manchester in March. Her latest work will be included in Relay [1] opening November 2025 at GLOAM Gallery Sheffield, with a limited print edition to coincide with the exhibition released by hardcopy*.