Materials: The Printing Room Issue 3

Writers

Sarah Byrne (she/her) is an artist whose practice centres on observing domestic rituals and reflecting on the connections between people, place, and memory. Her work explores these themes through family photographs, yarn craft, and, most recently, baking. These slow, tactile processes create space for nurture and reflection, allowing memories of home to surface and take form. Guided by the materials, processes, and people that organically enter her life, Byrne follows interest and curiosity first. Through time spent making and reflecting, stories and connections emerge, grounding each project within her long-term personal practice. By positioning domestic materials within artistic contexts, Byrne’s work questions material hierarchies and invites viewers to reconsider the value of the everyday.

Marie Craig (she/her) is a Black Country-based, final-year Fine Art BA (Hons) student working with analogue photography, pinhole optics, camera obscura processes, projection, reflection, and installation. Her practice explores notions point of view and the gaze, and how each act of viewing shapes the relationship between viewer and artwork. Her work is research-led, with the studio functioning as a live archive of images, notes, writing, experiments, and connections. Using handmade optical devices, historic and modern camera equipment, looping recordings, mirrors, and layered print processes, she treats each piece as a living experiment - a set of processes layered, repeated, and allowed to shift. The result is work that gently distorts space and time, unsettling the usual distances between subject, object, and observer.

Emily Scarrott (she/her) I am an artist and writer, preoccupied by speculative fiction and lived contemporary experiences of supernatural and extraterrestrial interaction. I am interested in the way that we believe in, welcome and care for such beings, and how watching the skies could become a political act. I like to explore my interests through pop culture references, fan fictioning (both textual and material) and collecting memorabilia. Significant projects have included: Coordinating More Art Inc, an artist development programme at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, a DYCP-funded residency in the Atacama Desert, Chile, and sitting on the Artist Citizens Jury to interrogate UK practice-based research funding. In 2023, I completed a practice-led PhD which explored absurdity as a landscape for protest and resistance.

Larissa Shaw (she/they) My research is situated within a continuum historical feminist lens (Federici, 2010), exploring how women’s pain, health autonomy, and access to healthcare are entangled with broader intersections of gender and disability. I speculate on the European witch hunts as a historical framework to interrogate enduring narratives that shape the contemporary gendered inequities specific in UK endometriosis healthcare. I examine how these legacies continue to (mis)inform testimonial injustice through diagnostic disparities and medical gaslighting, using art practice in community as an act of mutual understanding, compassion and solidarity. This practice takes form in organising focus and support groups to cultivate praxes of care, listening, and solidarity, in place of where the modern medical industry often fails. Through these groups, I utilise artistic method to hold space for complex, often painful conversations about the body, medicine, and institutional authority. My wider interests include disability and gender studies, Renaissance anatomical depictions of the female body, and working-class women’s oral histories.

Courtenay Welcome (she/they) The work aims to expand our understanding of sculpture and painting, with a special interest in the ways that these mediums can become one. Exploring the rich complexities of race, memory, space and time. Held by a critical infrastructure that examines pre-existing texts, these texts illustrate dreams, love, race relations and revolutionary thought. The artist documents transitions from one embodiment to another, while critically addressing the ways in which these transitions are perceived by institutional means. Often these documentations are bodies of material culture captured though photography - speaking specifically to identity construction and lifestyle. Disrupting pre-existing ways of looking and thinking about images and objects in space. Experimental mark makings relationship to the body and its emotions, these explorations are often in critical dialogue with a history of refusal.