Alex Vellis is a Greek-British poet, producer, and playwright from Canterbury, Kent. They hold an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Kent and have published five books through Whisky & Beards Publishing.

Vellis’ work challenges the ideas of hope and home, love and futility, and identity and place. Their new book ‘I saw a bird once’ follows the lives of three people as they explore change in a working-class world.

Alex’s work has been studied in schools in the Netherlands and in young offender’s institutes in the United States.

Vellis has performed nationally and internationally as a poet, gracing stages in Paris, London, Oxford, and Malta. As well as delivering lectures at universities and festivals on events production, being a working-class artist, and poetry in the larger sphere.

Emelia Kerr Beale predominantly works in drawing, sculpture and textile. Using recurring motifs and forms, they create a personal visual language through which to articulate complex individual and collective experiences. Interested in how we communicate ourselves to the world, and how the world communicates back, Emelia is often influenced by stories, slogans, clothing, promotional material- devices which extend outwards. Emelia is also invested in the exchange and building of knowledge through collaboration, and loves working with others.

Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2019, Emelia has sought further ‘education’ through alternative routes, including In Session FKA GRADJOB (2019-2020), and The Newbridge Project’s Collective Studio (2021-2022). Recent projects include There Has To Be Somewhere, Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham, 2023; pain folds its legs, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 2023; and Where a castle meets the sky, Pipe Factory, Glasgow, 2024 as part of Glasgow International. 

Gwennan Thomas is a Franco-British artist who grew up in both France and South Wales. Her practice is studio-based and process driven, working primarily with painting which sits between abstraction and figuration. The work explores fluidity in the context of memory, bicultural identity and language. She paints on a variety of surfaces and often makes her own paints, building a body of research on materiality and the tactile. The paintings have a strong focus on colour and use framing mechanisms and repetitive motifs derived from film scenes, personal memories and the built environment.

She was nominated for Abstract Critical Newcomer Awards in 2012, selected for Flowers Gallery’s Artist of the Day in 2013 and was shortlisted for the 2024 Waverton Art Prize. She has shown regularly in the UK and has also participated in several curatorial projects. She graduated with an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2018 and is an Associate Artist at Open School East in Margate 2023-24.

Jas Dhillon (UK 1979) is an artist and artist-curator with a multi-disciplinary practice.  She uses her Punjabi, Sikh, Indian heritage, and a deep reverence for nature and spirituality, to create spaces for a tender and sensitive reflection on ideas of identity, rootedness and belonging. She works with objects, memories, stories, and feelings, to create spaces for thoughtful reflection and connection.

Jas is currently an artist in residence at People Dem Collective, and previously was part of the Autograph Gallery ‘PILOT’ mentoring programme. She also studied with Dr Vandana Shiva in India on her ‘Return to Earth: A-Z of Biodiversity’ programme.

Her recent projects include, a site-specific intervention in a Thanet cave, called ‘Home’ 2023, a light installation for the Glow Illumination trail 2022, curation of the Whitstable Biennale 2022 short film programme, co-curation and commissioning for the Estuary Festival 2021 opening weekend programme, a commission for Margate Now 2020.

She was granted Arts Council DYCP (Develop Your Creative Practice) funding in December 2022.

Kenny Mala Ngombe (b. Leuven, Belgium) is a visual artist currently based in Brussels. His practice is preoccupied with the way the fiction that is “otherness” seeps into our reality and global society. Through painting and drawing in an abstract figurative way – as well as explorations via sound, video and sculptural work – Kenny attempts to unravel the invisible world hiding behind the visible one in which we operate daily. He seeks to cultivate and centre this covert sphere in order to transcend but also heal from the fiction that dehumanises us.

He is co-founder of Customs & Borders, an artist-led collective that was active from 2021 to 2023, and which aimed to shift the boundaries of access to contemporary art with an Afrocentric vision.

Lucia is concerned with leisure, pleasure-seeking, and entertainment culture as sites for considering anthropological and ontological questions. Her upbringing in Brighton has particularly influenced her filmmaking and performance practice.

She has a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths and was the recipient of the Nicholas & Andrei Tooth Travelling Scholarship in 2019. As a result, she created The Last Tender (64 minutes) which was filmed during a month-long cruise at the start of the pandemic. Drawing from her experiences of family cruise holidays, she explored how entertainment spaces like cruise ships operate as microcosms where codes of behaviour, social hierarchies, and performances of power are intensified, reinforced, or opposed. She focused on herself and those closest to her as protagonists.

Through a process of zooming in and getting under the surface of the subject matter, her work aims to understand and challenge the pre-existing culture of a space and the specific ways one is meant to navigate through it.

Middleton Maddocks an artist working through various mediums.  Middleton’s work is concerned with mapping; language—its failures and tricks—; nonsense making; theatre as a space & performance as a mode for living; autofiction; and personal symbolic histories. Off-beat and out of tune are considered important & technical homes in the creative, neurologically diverse landscape Middleton inhabits.

Middleton completed their BA at Goldsmiths in 2023.

Nikki Sheth is an internationally recognised sound artist and composer. Her work aims to give voice to the environment and foster a deeper connection with the natural world through field recordings, soundscape composition, spatial audio practices, multimedia installations and sound walking. She holds a PhD in Musical Composition from The University of Birmingham. She has been nominated for Ivor Novello Composer Award (2021), awarded a Sound and Music Seed Award (2022) and winner of the Leah Reid Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2023).

Her work has been presented most recently at The Royal Academy of Art (London), The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology Conference (Florida), Ars Electronica (Austria) and The Wellcome Collection (London). She has released with Nonclassical and Flaming Pines. She is currently in Queensland, Australia as selected artist for the R|Artist Residency: Natural Ecologies with The Refinery, SCCA and UniSC.