Assembly 2023

Daya Bhatti

Drawing from personal and collective experiences, Daya’s multimedia practice explores the significance of traditions and histories within South Asian culture. She explore themes of migration, home, identity, and nostalgia through illustrations, paintings, portraiture, installations, and wearable art. Influenced by South Asia’s maximalism, Daya’s pieces contrast with today’s minimalist trends. By reinterpreting them with a contemporary approach, she creates a bridge between the past and present. Her work blends vibrant colours with intricate motifs inspired by Indian textiles, architecture, reimagining traditional crafts and design. She uses traditional media such as painting, fabrics and recycled materials with digital elements like AR and animation.

Susan Brisco

Susan Brisco’s artistic processes sit at the boundary between art and science, where her outcomes explore interplays between drawing, film and sound. The natural world serves as her inspiration, especially scientific notions of plant sentience and communication. She is also interested in the unseen anatomical landscapes within our human bodies, connecting science and medical health and the effects of wellbeing that nature has to offer. Susan searches for that special ‘hook’ which serves to inform and intrigue her audiences through the familiar and real.

Thomas Jack Brown

Thomas Jack Brown is a video artist, video installation artist and media freelance producer based in Worcestershire, United Kingdom. His current practice focuses on the reconstructive nature of memory. He does this by hand-crafting archive or self-shot Super8 film to change the captured images on the negatives.

Sukhjeven Chumber

I am an Artist who is interested in Identity, social and economic subject matter in my photography. I take photographs of subject matter that questions the viewers idea of why are people interested in car number plates and why is it on the increase even more so today? I have also been making art for over 10 years and exhibited works in many galleries and had various commissions.

Amelia Hawk

I am a Sandwell based visual artist exploring experiences and conversation as a way to make and share artwork, often starting with a cup of tea or coffee. I have over 15 years experience, and graduated with an MA from Kunstakademiet i Oslo, in 2015. My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Interkulturelet Museum in Oslo, Luda in St Petersburg, Floodlight Foundation in Delhi and National Gallery in Prague. In 2021 I received an Arts Council England grant to explore how counselling strategies might create new spaces for conversations, resulting, among other things, in the project The Listening Line and featured work in Social Works publication. I am currently leading a social prescribing project at MAC as part of Bedlam festival.

Shannel James

I am Shannel James from London, now based in the West Midlands. I am a keen enthusiast of the Black British Art Movement established here in Wolverhampton, and most recently I was inspired to create a piece which I titled, ‘A seat at the table’ exhibited at Newhampton Arts Centre. The piece was a vintage dining room chair, upholstered with traditional African Kente fabric, complemented with a spoken word poem telling a story about British colonialism in Africa, focusing on empathy and depth of human experiences. The underpinning focus being the positives of both contrasting cultures coming together in unison, demonstrating the beauty of collaboration, whilst stepping away from negative connotations of significant historic events that keep us mentally enslaved.

Neoliberalizard

Neoliberalizard is a graffiti artist, anarchist, panpsychist and psychonaut who hails from the Black Country. They use street-based art to spread joy, spark curiosity, and promote the peaceful decentralisation of power. This is achieved via the dissemination of whimsical characters, paste ups, and calligraphy, but more recently sculptures too. As their name suggests that want to raise awareness about neoliberalism i.e. a mutated form of capitalism that favours privatisation, deregulation, and austerity. Through a playful approach and magical mark making "Neo" wishes to alter people's state of consciousness from a place of fear to one of action and solidarity.

Chantal Pitts

Pitts’ practice focuses on the use of furniture and everyday objects to create sculptures, assemblages and installations that delve into personal identity and self-representation. She will use her residency to develop an interactive, den-like installation that will resonate with the theme of domestic shelter and serve as the exhibition’s information hub.

Isobel Scarsbrook

Isobel is a textile artist from the Black Country. She is an MA Craft student at Manchester School of Art and a graduate of Camberwell College of Arts and Central Saint Martins. She works in patchwork quilt, embroidery and knitting. Her practice focuses on the history of female craft, weaving together themes of women’s history, local folklore and a broader national identity within an ever-evolving England.

Natasha Stoianovska

Natasha Stoianovska, born in 1996 in Ukraine. In 2022, due to Russian invasion in Ukraine, the artist fled to West Midlands, England, where she currently resides. The war and unwilling immigration became a catalyst of the artist’s work as a desire to analyse and release the overwhelming emotions. The artist covers the subject of mental and physical isolation, sorrow and subtle inexhaustible hope. All this is reflected in dramatic colour combinations, distorted physical features and whimsical scenes. The figures are found in the state of alienation and emotional detachment. Therefore, the abstract element is used to immerse into the character’s unrevealed emotions.