2025 Artists

Anne-Marie Atkinson | annemarieatkinson.co.uk

Anne-Marie Atkinson’s interdisciplinary practice spans lens-based and digital media, installation, drawing, and collage, often with a socially engaged focus. In community settings, she creates values-led, situated projects with embedded accessibility to support meaningful co-production with diverse collaborators. In her studio, Anne-Marie works experimentally across media with strategies including layering and deletion to create unfixed, continually evolving works. At its core, her practice explores shifting power relations and points of encounter – between people, materials, environments, and ideas. Through both collaboration and studio experimentation, Anne-Marie uses art to open up alternative narratives and speculate on new futures.

Anne-Marie Atkinson holds a BA (Hons) in Photography, a PGCert in Inclusive Arts Practice, and an MFA in Collaborative Practices. She is in the final stages of her practice-led PhD project, which was funded by a VC scholarship in partnership with Venture Arts, exploring collaboration with learning disabled artists. She is a Fine Art Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and a trustee at Pyramid of Arts in Leeds, leading on artistic programming. She is also a studio-holder at Assembly House, Leeds, and a member of two artist collectives: Proximity, interested in the social and spatial dimensions of art practice-research; and Watermarks, who explore drawing with water.

Carolyn Black | www.carolynblackart.com

Carolyn Black employs a wide range of media to make works that relate to future flooding of the River Severn. The works are about this fragile landscape. Her challenge is to depict a prospective flooded landscape – a view that doesn’t currently exist, but will in around 20 years time. How will melting ice caps and rising seas affect the view from Newnham to Arlingham, when the hills become islands? What might the Severn look like then?
Her works are informed by research into geology, maps and flood projections, to re-imagine the place she knows so well, through the lenses of landscape and cameras.

Carolyn Black has an MA in Fine Art from Cardiff UWIC and BA from Bristol UWE, and a post graduate diploma in printmaking. She has a long track record as a Public Art Producer; an artist, writer and artist video film-maker. In recent years these disciplines have merged in varioius ways, combining drawing with video, experimenting with film and printmaking, mark making with ice and weather.

Dave Gowers | instagram.com/crocwells

Dave Gowers produces multi-media work that explores some of the wide and varied responses of serious ill health. He seeks to investigate both the banality of – and his rich curiosity about – the medical experience and sensations of sickness and its treatment. Using souvenirs and memorabilia Dave seeks to investigate and portray a complex and intertwined relationship between illness and memory. In his recent work the artist plays with the notion of what serious illness is, or is often assumed to be.

Elaine Mullings | elainemullingsart.com

Interrogating the shifting value of ‘things’ is a recurring theme in Elaine Mullings’ practice. She creates sculpture and installations using a range of materials from tissue paper and plastic bags to copper pipe and broken glass – disparate ‘things’ that hover like residual low-level noise in the everyday. Combining and re contextualising these ‘things’ enables Mullings to consider complex or difficult subjects such as disposability, exploitation and prejudice. She probes the emotions and sensations that seemingly ‘low value’, ephemeral material can provoke to continually raise questions, to unsettle our understanding of the familiar and to provoke our responses to the ‘strange’.

Elaine Mullings is a visual artist living and working in East Sussex. Following her success as a television producer and director at the BBC, she left broadcasting in 2005 for a career in visual art. Mullings graduated in Fine Art Drawing at Camberwell in 2009, before going on to complete an MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2011. While there, she won the Red Mansion Art Foundation Prize. The resulting residency in Beijing, PRC has had a lasting impact on her work. Mullings has exhibited work nationally and won several national and international commissions. In 2016 for example, she won a large sculpture commission in Stockholm, Sweden which she completed in 2018. Following a long break precipitated by the global pandemic, Mullings set up a new studio in 2022. She cemented the return to her practice in 2023 with two new, large-scale artworks for We Out Here, an exhibition showcasing the work of six Black artists of Caribbean heritage at the Hastings Contemporary, Hastings.

Louise Frances Smith | louisefrancessmith.co.uk

Louise Frances Smith lives and works in Ramsgate, Kent (UK). Louise’s practice spans sculpture, installation and works on paper. Working with an array of materials including clay, seaweed and bioplastic, Louise creates highly textured surfaces to bring attention to the patterns and textures created by nature, magnifying micro details alongside man-made interventions. By collecting materials from her local coastline to use as materials in her work, Louise’s works are conceptually and physically linked to her local landscape where she takes her inspiration.

Louise Frances Smith graduated from CityLit with a Ceramics Diploma (2019) and from Kingston University with a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree (2009). In 2021 Louise received Arts Council England funding to research the use of local materials in her work. Recent exhibitions include Entangled, Saatchi Gallery, London; Living Materials, Aspex Portsmouth; It gathered here, Liminal Gallery, Margate; Ingram Prize 2023, Pavilion Gallery, London & Collect Open 2023, Somerset House, London.

Sarah Williams

Sarah Williams is a self-taught fine artist originally from the West Midlands, now based in Bristol. She has been creating artworks from childhood and has over 20 years’ experience working across a wide range of mediums, including acrylic, oil, watercolour, clay, pencil, charcoal, and digital media. Sarah graduated with a university degree in Neuroscience, inspired by her brother’s experience with epilepsy, but her passion for art has remained central to her life. In addition to her own creative practice, she has also taught community art classes.

Sarah brings a diverse range of subjects to life. Fascinated by form, expression, and storytelling, she explores the balance between abstract styles and realism. Driven by a deep passion for creation, Sarah’s work aims to spark curiosity and a greater appreciation for the subjects she depicts.