I'm a young Portuguese designer and developer; I created the studio/brand Complica (also based in Portugal), which explores the conjunction of Risography, design, and creative coding. I love experimenting with methods and trying something new when my creative output is near zero. Furthermore, I love combining these methods to create something that frequently clashes with itself but shows some level of uniqueness. With Complica, a lot of what I have experimented with is animation through Riso printing. After being a purely digital creator for years, Riso printing struck me with the physical aspect of creation. From zines, prints, and animations to a lot of editorial design, Riso made me explore a lot of new ground and allowed me to meet new people, connect with different communities, and put myself out there in ways I would have never done without this studio.

My name is Wako Ishiguro and I’m a Japanese painter. I moved from Tokyo to London last summer, and now I paint in oils in my studio almost every day. Like opening up the pores of one's skin, like cracking open one's brain, I wanted to place myself back within that state of flux, and so I moved away from the island. (An island again, I know!) I build my paintings out of presentness and immediacy, and in a sense, being "No reason" lies at my core. I believe that meaninglessness — and the power found in that very fragility — is the path toward authenticity. It may be a philosophical inquiry, or perhaps it's simply my most natural bodily mechanism.

Hi everyone! I’m Lael Reiss, originally from Israel and currently based in London. My practice is deeply rooted in exploring the human body and the intricate relationship between our physical form and the psyche's internal journey. I’m fascinated by how the mind's inner struggles and experiences leave their tangible mark on the physical body and the skin—and, in turn, how the external world perceives these hidden landscapes. For me, the creative process is essentially a form of serious play. I gather materials that captivate me in the moment and start experimenting with them in the studio. I test their limits in different states, juxtapose them with the body, sculpt them, and photograph them. It’s a process of continuous trial and error, a tactile conversation where things slowly begin to coalesce. In this fluid space between mediums, the camera acts as an extension of my hand—blurring the lines between a sculptural gesture and a photographic act. Excited to share more of my world with you this week!

Hi, I’m Elham Hemmat. I’m originally from a small town in Iran famous for its ceramics, and I’ve been living in the UK since 2019 after being awarded the Global Talent Visa for my artistic practice. I turned to art because I’ve always found it easier to communicate through making things rather than words. I’m quite introverted, long conversations can leave me exhausted, but I can happily disappear into the studio for days without noticing the time. My practice sits between graphic design (my day job) and ceramics, which I began teaching myself by quietly watching generational potters at local studios. I’m drawn to the quiet stories held in materials, especially clay: how soil from different places carries its own colour, personality, and unpredictable reactions in the kiln. The clay from my hometown, for example, is full of salt and creates beautiful, unexpected effects with glazes. Process for me is about staying open to what the material wants to do, even when it breaks. My recent Shadows series grew directly out of embracing those breaks and repairs, turning accidents into part of the language of the work. I’m excited to share more of the messy, hands-on side of things over the next few days.

I am a multimedia artist Massachusetts born, NYC bred, now rooted in South Carolina. I traded corporate life for the classroom and the studio and have gone back to my art roots. Process is everything. Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB) is my philosophy. With TAB the journey isn’t a means to an end — it is the end. The result just shows up and guides next steps in an ongoing quest to look deeply into my psyche: things I feel, things I love, things I’m curious about, things I despise…

I’m currently on the edge of the world, aka Pembrokeshire, Wales. I got here after 34 years of travel via Kent, Glasgow, Warsaw and Bristol. My practice mostly involves a lot of experimental approaches to collage and land art. Cutting things weird or stealing away tiny fragments of mountains, oceans and valleys, then losing them again. I use my process to stay connected, it keeps me anchored, attached and active. It also keeps me excited. I have always been in love with art, even when I have hated it. And I have always strived to push my understanding of what art actually is and what it can do.

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.