I recently recognised that the method I use in making has always been through the structure of play, and it is with this realisation that I share my learning with others and create safe spaces for everyone to explore visual ideas together. I was a 90s graduate from the RCA and remembered even way back then that my thesis was researching the similarities a child has when playing with that of a person painting. I have always been dissatisfied to create images, yet accepting the fact that I was good with paint....a tricky link to try to dismantle. After a 20 ish year hiatus, I picked up making again and challenged every aspect of what I thought painting is and what it does....and after a few years I did make work that had infinite images, could be…

My name is Anastasiia Lodde. I am a visual artist with a background in science. I was born in a village in southern post-Soviet Russia, in a multicultural family, and I grew up with my grandmothers close to me. I turned to art after moving to Denmark. Migration, family archives, and the political reality around me slowly reshaped my path. In my work, I return to questions of migration, identity, and family history. I work with painting, performance, sculpture, and installation, and I often collect fragments of stories from other immigrants. Bright colour, light, fish, and everyday objects appear again and again, becoming part of my visual language.

Shirly’s practice over the past few years has been marked by relentless exploration, a process through which she continually expands her possibilities of expression. She first discovered this in the underground scenes of Beijing and its nightlife subcultures, and later realised that practice both pre-exists being found and outlives us all. Considering the past and the future, her work is rooted in artistic research that takes oral stories, urban myths, rumours and peculiar daily rituals as starting points. She examines how we form emotional bonds with soundscapes, spatial dynamics, social interactions, and subcultural expressions, and what becomes of them over time. Through sculpture, video, sound, and site-specific interventions, disorientation has emerged as a method in her practice. Disorientation can create absurdities, and a unique blurry tension between humour and repulsion, allowing playfulness to be serious and seriousness to be playful. In this blurriness, the possibilities of the night can appear in the middle of the day. The relentless task is to become blurry; to form constellations from the separate and disparate, and to make sense of their newly found togetherness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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.

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

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

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…..