Artist Bursaries

Perm Bhachu, Laura Chen, Atlanta Ellis, Scarlett Ford, Vijay Pall

During the 2021 lockdown, we offered five bursaries for local emerging artists to create a small piece of work, develop an existing project, or to undertake a period of research / experimentation. The selected artists were invited to share the outcome of their bursary through an online exhibition on our website, and later presented their projects at an artist social held at

Perm Bhachu

Perm experimented with a new photography project titled Through the Lens of a Lens, collaborating with friend Shameena MacPherson to create a set of photographic portraits of herself as her alter ego, Candyfloss. The series of images are presented here alongside photographs from her personal and family archive, framed by writing. Through this project Perm embarks on a deeply personal exploration of her creative practice, tracing lines from her childhood through to present day and celebrating the influences in her life who inspired her to take up the camera.

Laura Chen

‘Ant Football’ is made with revisited images from my Laura’s archive, holiday snapshots and collages created with photographs from the found roll of film, which seems to date back to the 50s or 60s. The day after she bought the film she got hit by a car when crossing the road - the camera took the brunt of the impact but miraculously the lens remained in tact. These works are inspired by her time in hospital following the accident, where she watched TV for hours. In the collages, the creation of noise and pixelation is used to distort and obscure the photographer’s sitters and the TV subjects’ identities. TV noise is most commonly seen as fast- flickering “dots”, “snow” or “bugs”. In Hungarian it is called hangyafoci, meaning “ant football”.

Scarlett Ford

'Women in Art History' is a series of cyanotype portraits and accompanying creative writing pieces focussing on women artists who have been overshadowed in their careers, perhaps by their spouse e.g. Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning. Or perhaps their artistic achievements have been accredited to men (Elsa von Freytag – Loringhoven). All of the photos of these incredible women show them in their element. In their studios, with their cameras, making art. Blue historically was hard to come by and usually reserved to depict important people, leading Scarlett to chose cyanotype as a process.

Atlanta Ellis

Mixed Tangible is concerned with the self-representation, identity, and an exploration of 'stereotypes' that I face daily. Every day, the world that we live in moves towards being more accepting of people no matter their background or identity but sometimes we still experience the 'labels' that are given to us. It can become difficult to express your feelings because of the judgement or even backlash that could be received from others. The reason why I created this project is to show how much I am proud of being myself, how I can use these 'labels' or stereotypical comments in order to create powerful abstract pieces of work. I will forever be proud of the person that I have become, and I hope that there are others that can also relate and be proud of themselves too.

Vijay Pall

For his bursary, Vijay created a short documentary film based around interviews with people that explore how their mental health has been affected by the pandemic and how they've been coping, developing his ongoing work to raise awareness around mental health issues. Vijay has always been interested in stories. Film and photography have been the gateway for him to share these with an audience, whether it's around mental health, gratitude or delivering a promotional video for a client. Telling stories is how we open our minds and hopefully see the bigger picture. The new short documentary was based on the pandemic and how it affected 3 individuals mental well-being.