Introducing: The Printing Room Issue 2 writers

Multistory is delighted to announce the five artists selected, along with guest panellist Leah Hickey, for The Printing Room Issue 2. They are: Abigail Villarroel, Billy Haynes, Exodus Crooks, Laura Onions and Lorna Rose. The Printing Room yearly journal sits under Multistory's BCN Artist Development programme, commissioning new art writing by Sandwell and Black Country artists. The programme is supported through a writing workshop and crit led by guest mentors; this year's mentor is Cathy Wade.

Abigail Villarroel

Abigail will explore his experience as a queer immigrant from the Venezuelan diaspora to challenge conventional nature writing, offering a multivocal perspective on how power and extraction have shaped his relationship with nature. Drawing on queer ecologies, Abigail aims to explore how art can help confront these complex histories and imagine more expansive futures.

Artist Bio: Abigail Villarroel (He/They) is a Venezuelan-born artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of queer immigrant identity. Raised in Venezuela and Qatar, Abigail’s art reflects his diasporic experience, blending themes of identity, nature, and displacement. His practice includes figurative and non-figurative work, often influenced by the male form, drag culture, and his love for nature. Abigail uses a range of mediums such as acrylics, dry and liquid techniques, to create pieces that reflect a fusion of his queer gaze and cultural heritage. His art is in constant dialogue with his poetry and personal essay work.

Billy Haynes

Billy will draw on his recent project, Common Land, which reclaimed green space in the Chapel Ash underpass on Wolverhampton ring road, to write a piece that explores industrialisation, urbanisation and consumerism from the perspective of the earth itself. This is a perspective with permanence, contrasting to the fickleness of human memory and the transience of our existence.

Artist bio: Billy Haynes is a writer, artist and musician. He blends sharp observation with myth and the uncanny to pose questions about how we might create or discover meaning in an uncertain age. Past works include ‘Common Land’ (2024), a multimedia piece including a soundscape, a shrine, and plantings of fruit trees, bushes and herbs in an underpass, and the discography of cult indie band The Calamity. He is currently working on ‘Folktales’, a series of short stories, and ‘The Book of the Witch Doctor’, a novel.

Exodus Crooks

Exodus will work on a series of diary entries from the perspective of a plant trying to survive in a patch of land next to a post-industrial site in Sandwell. Inspired in part by Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the piece will explore themes of survival through the lens of a non-human life form.

Artist bio: Exodus Crooks is a British-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist and educator, interested in self-determination and how it is steered by religion and spirituality. Their practice is auto ethnographical and exists in the orbit of their educational role where they work to reimagine Western pedagogy. Their art is research focused and follows the lead of the many radical Caribbean writers and thinkers advocating for indigenous ways of living. Exodus is currently experimenting with gardening, text, filmmaking, and installation to better understand indigenous thought and tend to the breaks that occur in the human experience. Exodus serves on a regional arts advisory board and a national artists council that advocates for the development and protection of artists and has previously exhibited and worked with Ikon Gallery, the International Curators Forum, iniva, Freelands Foundation, LUX Scotland and the National Gallery in London. They are proud to be based in heart of the Midland’s vibrant art community, working closely with local galleries and organisations such as Grand Union, Vivid Projects, The New Art Gallery Walsall, and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

Laura Onions

Envisaged as part fiction, part series of anecdotes on reproduction, death and inherited landscapes, Laura’s proposed piece Matrix is an experiment in how writing can function like geological layers, utilising geological research and reflections upon ecological, material and industrial perspectives on the Wrens Nest site.

Artist bio: Laura Onions has a printmaking practice that adopts sculptural, painterly and social forms to hold and share spaces for learning. The manoeuvres of printmaking (contact, transference, intimacy) underline these activities in which a focus on making together have emerged as her approach. Laura works with archival research to connect with people, place and histories, offering a framework to respond and reimagine. She is thinking about local ecologies and inherited landscapes through these means. Recent activities include ‘Start the Press’, group exhibition Ikon Gallery, (2024), ‘Gathering Press’, mobile screen-printing project (2022 – present), ‘Deveron Projects Residency’, Up Projects Constellations cohort (2023 – 24).

Lorna Rose

Lorna's piece responds to her ongoing performance project, which explores local Brierley Hill residents' relationship to the Hawbush community gardens and the ways in which they protect and nurture it. The piece will explore how we can preserve these spaces for future generations, incorporating many voices from the local community and how they relate to this one piece of land.

Artist bio: Lorna Rose is an actor, poet and theatre maker. She is also co-creative director of RoguePlay Theatre based in Edgbaston. She has worked with Black Country Touring, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and toured with Apples and Snakes. Her debut poetry collection ‘Caterpillar Soup’ is out now with Verve Poetry Press. She has three autobiographical solo shows under her belt and her debut novel based on Greek mythology is out with Tenebrous Texts next year.