2024-25
Breakthrough Artist Fellows
Untitled Acrylic on deep edge canvas, 60 × 120cm (Rise/Fall #1) — Each of the works in the ongoing AXIOMS series of works are an invitation to consider who and what we are, how we relate to others, what it is to be human and to inspect our everyday interactions.
Dale Hardy
University of Sunderland
Born in Bournemouth in 1974, Dale Hardy is a visual artist based in Sunderland, in the north-east of England. His practice considers and responds to our place and position in the world and draws on a diverse personal and professional history. With painting, photography and the written word playing prominent roles in his practice, Dale tries to consolidate what it is to be human and explores how our relationships shape us as people.
Dale graduated from The University of Sunderland with a first-class honours degree in photography, video, and digital imaging in 2022, where he received that years outstanding studentship award. He achieved a master’s degree in visual practice (contemporary fine art) in 2023 with a distinction and received a Sunderland Selects award with his work on loan in the university’s executive offices collection.
In addition to his artistic practice, Dale founded and runs Sunderland Arts and Culture Trail, bringing new opportunities to local artists, businesses, and cultural organisations. Dale exhibits and sells his work in the northeast and is the curator of popup gallery, Vagabond.
Untitled, I Peel into Other Vessels (2024)
Ink on bacterial cellulose paper, 12.5 × 16cm
—
This piece explores themes surrounding impermanence, intertwined networks and ecology
Lauren Pitson
Swansea College of Art
Lauren Pitson is a multi-disciplinary artist based in South Wales. Her practice and research are predominantly influenced by thoughts surrounding impermanence, ecology and the form. Her work often combines photography with alternative processes by collecting, deconstructing and reprocessing materials in order to document and explore these connection.
I Peel into Other Vessels explores the concept that everything is intertwined in a continuous network of regenesis. By investigating the idea that all human and non-human life are connected in an ecological entanglement.
The work seeks to combine bio and eco materials such as the incorporation and production of bacterial cellulose (SCOBY). The SCOBY is propagated, monitored, dried and rehydrated continuously to later be interwoven with images of specimens undergoing stages of decay. By embedding the specimens within a living organism with a continuous reproductive cycle, this acts as a reminder of intertwined networks and organisms perpetually replenishing each other.
Her work was recently showcased in The World Without Us, at Ffotogallery, Cardiff. An exhibition that focused closely on our relationship with the natural environment and the growing climate crisis.
Close up of a singular block “Okutama” (June 2024) Gouache and printed photo on MDF, 3.5 × 5 × 1.2cm
—
Singular block which was displayed among three hundred, colour-matched photographs in which fleeting moments were made into permanent objects
Lily Rees
Loughborough University
I am a multimedia artist exploring both physical and symbolic structures — such as buildings, streets,and routines — and how they shape our daily lives. My work is based on a profound sense of being lost within a world defined by structure, turning these emotions into a shared, tangible reality. By decoding and recontextualising different frameworks, I investigate how the unassuming details in our environments reflect the nuances of our lives.
My practice includes creating installations that combine painting, photography, and sound to explore the evolution of urban landscapes and their impact on human experiences including the fleeting nature of time. I am passionate about interdisciplinary collaborations with architects, historians, and other artists to foster dialogue that enriches both my work and the broader community, promoting a deeper understanding of how our surroundings shape our identities.
I have completed a foundation at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, a degree in Fine Art at Loughborough University (where I will be undertaking the fellowship), and a course in Art for Healing at Joshibi University of Art and Design in Tokyo.
Concrete, steel fabrication, wood, 157 × 290 × 10cm —
All one installation: post-industrial bird feeder
“A hand held, slumped at the corner of a room in which we once played. He was a marathon runner. Building concrete forts with bare hands as a child the skin was left new, eroding older layers. Memory acts as a springboard to lives we no longer recognise, replaced by new ones embodied within objects of determined importance.”
Mia Roberts
Cardiff School of Art and design
I am concerned with the notion of memory and the imprints left on a place. Exploring how a ‘place’ is built from the remnants of intersecting parties, recycling history through the lived experience of new generations. This cycle of impact between person, action and landscape is something I explore. Taking placeholders of memory and representing them through a visual language of ‘manipulated appropriation’ in that I take objects from specific settings, adapting them within the studio to create work that has deeply personal resonance.
This I see this as trying to replicate the interplay between human and landscape. In a sense it's a form of carving of a name into a tree with a penknife. There is an application of self-history onto something with its own. My interest resultantly discusses the nature of ‘space and place’ and uses the dynamic of history and its effect on the landscape. Not only in an aesthetic sense but in the broader notion of social connection or what ‘home’ constitutes. My exploration into this topic comes at a time where my previously established local identity has been shaken by the destruction of a local landmark and the death of family.
Memory displaces the notion of permanence and through a slow erosion recycles itself. Concrete foundations being left instead.
Drudenhaus (2024) Mixed media, latex, found material, embroidery, fur, modroc
—
A mixed media installation with links to the domestic and feminine imagery
Niamh Tam
Liverpool Hope University
Niamh Tam (b.2001) is an inter-disciplinary artist from Liverpool, working across a range of mediums such as sculpture, painting, performance and installation.
Niamh explores the use of latex as medium, a metaphor for the skin, investigating how this material can encapsulate the vulnerabilities and complexities of understanding the self and inhabiting the body.
Central to her practice is the exploration of trauma and phenomenological experiences of love, loss and loneliness within the scope of the aesthetic of the grotesque.
Using corporeal imagery and concepts within their most raw, visceral and complex forms, Niamh delves into the depths of the psyche and emotional tumult associated with the growth into womanhood. By confronting discomfort, she aims to create spaces for introspection and dialogue surrounding the body and the idea of being.