Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Skylar He

I am Skylar (Jianheng) He, a cross media designer, technical artist, and a core member of Wrench2Studio. My practice operates at the intersection of interactive media, generative AI, and the digital preservation of cultural heritage. With a background spanning Engineering and Design for Performance and Interaction, I focus on translating ephemeral data into immersive spatial experiences. Whether I am developing real time visual algorithms in Unity VFX, experimenting with robotic fabrication, or utilizing machine learning to reconstruct human perception, my goal remains to explore the agency of digital technologies in shaping how we remember and interact with our world. My professional trajectory includes serving as a Research Assistant at Aalto University and collaborating with institutions such as the V&A Museum and YAMAHA. My work, which ranges from large scale immersive installations at Outernet London to AI driven visual designs for FOLD Nightclub, seeks to solidify the intangible, creating enduring traces of human experience through the synergy of technology and matter.

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Diren Demir

Diren Demir (Istanbul, 1997) is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist and independent curator. Their work explores transformative solutions to the challenges posed by patriarchal and authoritarian regimes. Their installations and performances often engage with themes of revelation and the body-power relationship as a site of conflict. Diren focuses on transformational activism, participatory practices, and developing new models of resistance in their artworks. They incorporate queer themes, using their own body to challenge stereotypical gender roles and surface the silenced memories of place and the city by referencing LGBTIQ+ history in their articles, seminars, and workshops. In 2019, their compilation titled “A Night in June: A Biographical Analysis of the Stonewall Revolution” was published. In August 2022, their poetry and illustration book “Hail to the Fallen” was released. They have curated more than 30 guerrilla exhibitions on streets and in rural areas, prioritizing the accessibility of art, as well as in venues like Akbank Art Center, Fixotek Berlin, Gazhane Museum… Diren’s works and projects have been exhibited in various countries, including Estonia, Turkey, Serbia, the Netherlands, Argentina, Germany, Slovakia, India, USA, China and the UK.

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Liza Petrova

I am a Serbia-based artist with a background in urban planning and architecture. I am interested in continuity and complex global systems, and I am particularly inspired by Aby Warburg’s idea of the migration of images, in which visual motifs act as carriers of emotional memory, moving across time and cultures while changing in new historical contexts. This is why I work with classical subjects such as portraiture, the nude, or the figure in landscape: timeless and ever-evolving, they create a conversation between artists throughout history. My work examines how the language of contemporary art interacts with and reshapes these traditional subjects and materials. My work begins with the tension between a person and the space around them. In my portraits, the figure affects the surrounding space, distorting it, extending personality beyond the body, and reflecting an inner state. I work in mixed media, primarily combining alcohol ink and oil on plastic.

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Olivia Fry

Olivia Fry (b.1992, United States) Olivia Fry is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose figurative works confront themes of loss, vulnerability, and the raw edges of lived experience. Their paintings are charged with intensity, often balancing dark emotional undercurrents with moments of stark tenderness. Fry’s imagery draws from observation and memory, collapsing intimate realities into psychologically dense compositions that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant. Fry’s practice is transatlantic in scope: they exhibited widely across the Pacific Northwest and completed a residency in Brooklyn, New York before relocating to London.

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Kyle Cottier

 Kyle Cottier (b. Louisville, KY 1993) is a visual artist based in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their interdisciplinary practice merges traditional basketry and woodworking techniques with sculpture, installation, and photography. Through immersive installations, Cottier explores intersections of the natural, constructed, and digital worlds, with a focus on transformation, repair, and survival in contemporary culture. Cottier holds an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. They attended the New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn and have been an Artist-in-Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in the Smoky Mountains and Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee.​Their work has been exhibited nationally, including Vessel: Embodiment, Autonomy, and Ornament in Wood at The Museum for Art in Wood, Modular at Manifest Gallery, and Transformation: Contemporary Works in Wood at Contemporary Craft. Cottier has received recognition from the International Sculpture Center, including the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, and their work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine. They are a recent recipient of a CERF+ Get Ready Grant and have previously completed a body of work supported by Tri-Star Arts’ Current Art Fund Project Grant.

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Rain Howard

Rain is a visual artist and researcher who lives and works between London and Newcastle. They graduated with a degree in Sculpture from Camberwell University of the Arts in London in 2013. They also hold an MA in Fine Art (2018) and an MA in Queer History (2021) from Goldsmiths, University of London. They are a final-year PhD candidate funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) within the Performance Cultures and Contemporary Art Research clusters at Northumbria University. Rain has exhibited their work extensively across the UK and Europe. In 2013, they exhibited their undergraduate degree show exhibition as part of Saatchi's New Sensations Award. They received the 2018/2019 Goldsmiths and Acme Studio award, supported by Jane Hamlyn. Their work has been featured in various creative outlets, including "Fleisch," a book celebrating queer artists (Germany, 2019). As a researcher, Rain contributed to "Queer Pandemic," a video-based oral history project that captured stories of LGBTQI+ people in the UK during the pandemic, which was later exhibited at Queer Britain 2022. In addition to their creative work, Rain is a passionate advocate for LGBTQI+ rights and regularly works as an advisor and independent writer championing inclusivity. They are also an associate lecturer on the BA (Fine Art) Sculpture Degree at Camberwell University of the Arts in London.

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Max Hautala

For the past decade, Hautala has studied self-taught and visionary artists, underground comix, and museum collections to understand how symbols carry meaning across time and cultures. His work investigates consumption, digital culture, and the tension between the handmade and the mechanical, explored through printmaking, carving, and functional objects

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Asfah Hamid

My practice sits in the quiet middle ground where things are made, unmade, and sometimes held together by the faintest thread. I work with mycelium as a way of thinking through loosened structures. Decentralized forms, soft ruptures, and the slow work of repair guide me far more than any fixed category of art or design

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Hattie Grimm

Birds migrate thousands of miles into the unknown together, trusting there are better conditions ahead. When I stand on the shore of Lake Michigan and the only other people around me are birds, I learn that my animal body has this same instinctual wisdom. So I draw with curiosity, rather than control. Like my body knows what to do…..

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Tania Pourashraf

Tania Pourashraf is an emerging artist and recent Fine Art graduate from Kingston University. Deeply influenced by her personal experiences of living in Iran under a restrictive regime and the people closest to her, Pourashraf transforms these traumas into powerful artistic expressions. Her multifaceted work spans drawings, performance, sound, and recently, poetry, now that she has the freedom to. Her art serves as a voice for the oppressed, highlighting the brutal reality faced by those struggling under the dictatorship in Iran….

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Saniya Farooq

Saniya Farooq, a visual artist from Pakistan, currently based in the UK. Completed her Masters in Fine Arts, with a Distinction from UCA. She is a painter with a multidisciplinary approach, and explores the dynamic interplay of traces, motion, and subjective perceptions. She is interested in the transformative process, repurposing of surfaces and distorting the familiar; creating a point where the seen and suggested converge. Statement Her ongoing series of work "Transception" is an exploration of how static forms can embody movement through the layering of surface, material, and subjective experience within the field of painting….

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Everything But the Work . Everything But the Work .

Natalie Petrosky

My occupation as a gardener is heavily influencing my current work. I am often engaged in the meditative process of collecting sticks, rocks, and leaves which is reflected in the little bits of fabric that I collect and compose to form pictorial spaces. I employ the imagery of windows and fences in my paintings as frames for overgrown plants escaping and reclaiming their environments. The question of viewership is also addressed as we can peer through frames and windows, and occasionally the paintings and the natural world seem to perceive us back. The bones, stones, and seeds that comprise a natural environment can be combined into something greater than the sum of their parts. They contain many lives and possibilities and their appreciation often depends on the empty space between them. The negative space in my paintings gives the impression of a mosaic or stained glass windows but also of a forest canopy, the shattering of rocks, and the magical intermixing of all of nature’s elements….

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