Artist biographies
Mike Bamgbala (he/him)
Mike Bamgbala loves to create, particularly if it involves illustration or painting. Offering escape from the constraints of modern society we are all subjected to, Mike’s creative practice is influenced by music and animation.
Eskild Beck (he/him)
Eskild Bec has been working with art since he was a teenager. Trained as a graphic designer in Copenhagen, and later in restoration, Beck has worked professionally in museum settings on design, curation, and collection care alongside his own creative practice.
Uma Breakdown (they/them)
Uma Breakdown is a disabled artist, writer, and award-winning game designer living in Gateshead, UK and interested in animals, horror, and queer feminist literature. Everything they make is about some combination of love, grief, hallucination, and an excess of joy. With artist Belladonna Paloma, Uma makes video games about the divine and occult providence of transfemme existence.
Recent projects include The Speculative Dismemberment of Agent Leon Kennedy for Market Gallery (Glasgow, 2022), Hinterlands at Baltic (Gateshead 2022), The Joy of Destruction for Backlit (Nottingham, 2023), and Uma’s first solo exhibition Earth A.D. co-commissioned by and touring across Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge, 2022), FACT (Liverpool, 2023), and Quad (Derby, 2024).
Emmy Clarke (they/them)
Emmy Clarke is a queer, autistic writer and poet based in rural Shropshire. Their work has been featured in publications such as Lucent Dreaming, Bent Key’s ‘Ey Up Again’ and VAINE Magazine. In 2022 they founded children’s magazine Changeling, which features solely neurodivergent artists and writers.
Fatma Durmush (she/her)
Fatma Durmush lives and works near Peckham, London. She has supported her creative practice with manual labour, catering, and retail work, a busy and tiring lifestyle which abruptly halted when Fatma was stabbed. Following this incident, Fatma decided to direct her usual graft toward a Bachelor’s Degree and subsequently a Master’s, affording her time and space to expand her artistic work.
Yasmeen Fathima Thantrey (she/her/they)
Yasmeen Fathima Thantrey is an emerging artist and recent graduate from the Royal College of Art, where she pursued her MA in Contemporary Art Practice: Public Sphere. With a passion for exploring identity, the body, and diaspora, their art aims to navigate these complex themes through an intersectional lens. Drawing upon critical race and feminist theories, she situates her lived experiences within a broader societal context, inviting viewers to engage in a dialogue that transcends cultural boundaries. A firm believer in the lived experience as research, their practice encapsulates a desire to understand the complexities of the self and its interconnectedness with the broader world.
Charlie Fitz (she/her/they)
Charlie Fitz is a sick and disabled socially-engaged artist, interdisciplinary creative, and medical humanities postgraduate researcher. She is a co-founding member of Resting Up Collective and a co-director of the remote artist studio TRIAD³.
Fitz’s work is rooted in narratives and representations of illness, disability, and trauma. She explores tactile materials such as paint, textiles, and clay, as well as digital elements like digital collage, drawing, film, and photography.
Since 2019, her work has been exhibited in eleven group shows in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cincinnati, and online. In 2023, she was the artist-in-residence at Wigwell Lodge for Photoworks and Ampersand Foundation. The same year, she received an Unlimited development grant and was commissioned by Unlimited and Doorstep Arts as part of the collaborative touring network to create a film piece for Touretteshero’s Burnt Out In Biscuit Land tour.
Paul Fletcher (he/him)
Paul Fletcher first discovered photography after ending his career as an architect. In 2016 he’d reached an impasse: surrender to the culture of property-for-profit, abandoning his belief in an architecture-for-people, or end his practice. Paul sacrificed his professional status, not his beliefs, ending his career, with no idea what to do next.
He began walking London with a camera, coming to terms with the end of career and a worsening chronic mental health disorder. He shot every day from summer 2016 to early 2017. He resumed daily photowalks during the 2020 lockdowns and began to understand photography as a medium for visual storytelling and a way to cope and live with a bipolar disorder.
Paul does not consider himself either artist or photographer. Just someone who wanders, camera in hand, led by an innate and insatiable curiosity. Capturing happenstance moments along the way.
Lan “Florence” Yee (they/them)
Lan “Florence” Yee is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto & Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), the Textile Museum of Canada (2020), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), among others. They co-founded the Institute of Institutional Critique with Mattia Zylak in 2019 and the Chinatown Biennial with Arezu Salamzadeh in 2020. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U. Lan has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Council for the Arts, and the Toronto Arts Council. They are a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2023).
Yarden Fudim (she/her)
Yarden Fudim is an artist based in London, currently in her final year of BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, UAL. Fudim draws inspiration from the activities and experiences of everyday life. Employing painting, drawing, and sculpture as her chosen mediums, Fudim investigates the delicate balance between ordinary existence and the unsettling concept of a world in turmoil.
Fudim’s work serves as a reflective mirror, capturing the intricacies of the human experience. This extends an invitation to viewers to contemplate the intricate web of emotions, relationships, and desires within the context of the contemporary socio-economic and political era.
Through art, Fudim encourages the audience to question, reflect, and discover a glimmer of hope amidst the prevailing chaos.
Carole Lee (she/her)
Carole Lee is an artist who has worked in the Project Ability ReConnect studios for over fifteen years. Project Ability is a support studio in the city centre of Glasgow. Carole’s aesthetic focuses on pattern and line, creating compositions saturated with the motion of life and people.
Carole’s paintings and drawings can take months to complete and are densely filled with characters from all walks of life. Her work captures the hustle of city life and the many personalities that make up our diverse society. They show the social side of a cosmopolitan city like Glasgow, and highlight the busyness and closeness one finds themselves surrounded by. She paints scenes of Glasgow but they could be from anywhere.
Oliver McConnie (he/him)
Oliver McConnie’s work explores the contemporary subversive potential of printmaking, which is traditionally associated with satire and political commentary. As such, his prints employ the grotesque, historical symbolism, and modern social mores to form a critique of the contemporary political environment. Etchings, in their scale and intensity, create a strong sense of looking into something, a cave, another world; this fits with the origin of the term grotesque which is ‘looking into the grotto’. Drawing on this quality and without employing reductive irony McConnie wishes to produce parodic prophecies of the immediate present and future.
Tracey Payne (she/her)
Tracey Payne works in sculpture, installation, and video. She is interested in making objects and filling spaces where people will be alarmed and will laugh. Payne’s work is concerned with slapstick, silliness, accidents, surprises, standing up, and falling down – knowing how and who to trust. Around the edges and in the gaps is where she believes we live our lives. For Tracey, it all seems so permanent, monolithic, unshiftable, until things start to move, from without substance.
Jamila Prowse (she/her)
Jamila Prowse is an artist and writer, propelled by curiosity and a desire to understand herself through making. Informed by her lived experience of disability, mixed race ancestry, and the loss of her father at a young age; her work is research driven and indebted to Black feminist and crip scholars. She is an active participant in a rich and growing contemporary disabled artistic community and has been ongoingly researching, programming and creating around cripping the art world, since 2018. Self taught, Jamila is drawn to experimenting with a multitude of mediums in order to process her grief and radical hope.
Currently articulating through moving image, painting, photography, textiles and performance, she is a member of Open School East 23-24. Previous exhibitions, screenings and talks include Somerset House, South London Gallery, Studio Voltaire (London, UK) and Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen, Norway). Her writing has appeared in Frieze, Art Monthly, British Journal of Photography and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first novel.
Simon Raven (he/him)
Simon Raven studied BFA Ruskin School of Art, Oxford (1999); MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art (2002). His artistic practice in performance, video, and cartoon-drawing is informed by lived experience of late-diagnosed bipolar 2. Bipolar (or manic depression) is characterised by fluctuations between lucid, hypomanic, and depressive states which can radically alter artistic ability and temperament.
Simon’s experience informs his artistic practice as an auto-ethnographic engagement with disability identity, art, and theory. For the past twenty years he has taken part in and curated disability-identified exhibitions, residencies, and events; in 2012 I was awarded the Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary by Shape Arts.
Samiir Saunders (he/they)
Samiir Saunders is a multimedia poet from Birmingham working in spoken word, alternative hip-hop, and performance art.
Samiir’s work aims to arm individuals and communities with the tools to be curious, compassionate, and vulnerable in their everyday lives. Samiir often explores themes such as grind culture, isolation, shame, (mis)communication, intimacy, and the Internet.
Samiir’s work has featured at Ikon Gallery, Jerwood Space, La Gaîté Lyrique, Channel 4 Random Acts, BBC Words First, Vivid Projects, Wales International Film Festival, Tramlines Festival, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Supernormal Festival, and Outfest.
Josie Rae Turnbull (she/her)
Josie Rae Turnbull is a multi disciplinary artist and art facilitator, currently based in London. She completed her MA in Fine Art and Science at Central Saint Martins in 2022, following a number of years living in Ho Chi Minh City. Her MA work across textiles, sculpture, printmaking and lens-based media was impelled by research into absurd, fabulist ‘case studies’ of animal protagonists revealing human failings.
Throwaway consumer tat is refashioned through bricolage and material glitches. The life cycles of various industries, and their uncanny fall-outs, are reconstituted through a visual language led by artificial colour relationships and material glitches. She is fascinated by a feature common to aesthetics of microscopic imaging, and the concept of the hyperreal – that of using the ‘absolute fake’ to better see the ‘real’ thing.
Diana Zrnic (she/her)
Diana Zrnic is an emerging London-based artist. She graduated with Distinction from the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2021. She completed a BA in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2018. Her artworks have been shown in group and solo exhibitions internationally, including Saatchi Gallery (London), Mestrovic Pavilion (Zagreb), coGalleries (Berlin) and House of Ebata (Tokyo). In 2022, she had a solo show at The Stone Space and was an artist in residence at Unit 1 Gallery/Workshop. In 2023, Southwark Council commissioned her to create a permanent public artwork for the Camberwell train station.
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