Summer Show: MA Contemporary Dialogues

Rachel Cortazzi

MA Fine Art 

Framed by Imperium

What is our mark in this world? Our identity is far more complex than the ancient handprints left in dark caves. From history, we ask: who are we? How is our culture shaped by place and experience? The détournement of the golden frame—once a symbol of prestige and status—lures us in. But the truth it surrounds is made from fragments of domestic life: broken toys, discarded jewellery, the overspill of unseen labour. These ‘debris frames’ transform the domestic into the monumental, confronting systems—parenting, beauty, politics—that consume while promising fulfilment. How are we shaped by the cultures and narratives we absorb? 

Framed by Imperium includes painting, collage, sculpture and installation to unravel how power is coded into the everyday. Popular culture and mass media imagery thread through the collages like tentacles—seductive, delicate, but ultimately entangling—echoing the quiet danger of the jellyfish.

Lara Davies

MA Illustration

Life with Leyla

Life with Leyla is a children’s book project that aims to inspire and to help communicate complex emotions and hope to children. The work is inspired by my faith and each illustration has been poured over as an act of worship and discovery. Inspired by a number of illustrators and theorists, such as Makoto Fujimura, C.S. Lewis, J H. Schwarcz and M. Bang, my practice explores the origins of creativity in humanity through the Christian lens, while discovering what it means to worship through art.

Chris Harrendence

MA Illustration

Chris Harrendence’s illustrative work takes a slightly absurd view, focusing on childhood, belonging and the nonsense of trying to understand his place in the world. Exploring the boundaries of illustration, by pushing beyond the traditional means of image making, Chris brings his narrative to a three-dimensional plane. Through the use of costume, mask making and props, his illustrations become performative as well as interactive. He continues the quest to build a world where the boundaries of the real and unreal are blurred and coexist on both the page and the physical.

Tia Howells

MA Textiles

Rooted in a deep connection to nature, my practice bridges the outdoors and interior spaces through eco-printing, natural dyeing, and lighting design. Inspired by India Flint and Kim McCormack, I treat eco-printing as a way to capture fleeting moments—transferring the textures and pigments of leaves and petals onto fabric. Guided by Glenn Adamson’s ideas on craft and materiality, I see these textiles as tactile records of time and place. Light, influenced by designers like Tom Raffield and Moooi, plays a transformative role—activating surfaces and shaping immersive, atmospheric experiences. My process is grounded in Thinking Through Making, where hands-on experimentation with natural materials guides each stage, from foraging to fabrication. Through integrating eco-printed surfaces into lighting and interior design, I aim to create pieces that bring nature’s presence indoors—evoking stillness, memory, and connection. 

Gerald Isiguzo OP

MA Fine Art

ARTFAR

The acronym ARTFAR issues from a personal journey of faith and reason and represents a trajectory of artistic enquiry that explores “Art’s Response To Faith And Reason” which resides in the interplay between theology and the arts. ARTFAR aims to be expansive in exploring the scope, depth, and relevance of theological possibilities in contemporary art, experimenting new ways of re-presenting the quest for truth and meaning which are of vital significance to the human experience.  

Biblical themes of Creation, the Fall, and Redemption form a three-fold analogy in the practice, which takes “the used and dumped” as an overarching metaphor for rethinking historical and contemporary narratives about the social and spiritual conditions of our common humanity, while using discarded materials that bear social, economic and political structures. In this exhibition, Gerald deploys the concept of ‘Kenosis’ - the Greek word for self-emptying - as a universal language that transcends medium-specific and site-specific boundaries to speak to “the used and dumped ‘empty” spaces, places, and things in ways that reference Biblical narratives about creation, the Fall, and redemption, creating a context for an interdisciplinary collaboration, participatory art, and contemporary dialogues.

Carole Jones

MA Textiles

In Praise of Shadows

‘On the far side of the screen at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from a dark wall.’ Tanizaki.    

Influenced by the book In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki, this work explores the themes of chiaroscuro, geometry and existence using patchwork and repetition. It is inspired by the effects of light on materials, the transitions between seasons, and the natural recurrent patterns which surround us. The purpose of the black patchwork was to measure existence between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, to visualise and transform time into a tactile and tangible object. The light patchwork is a response to the encouraging signs of Spring and the increase in light at the start of the new year. It also signifies the launch of further exploration into the inherent link between geometry and the process of pieced patchwork. Repurposed clothes, fabric remnants, collected and donated were used in the creation of both pieces. 

Dione Jones

MA Photography

A Fragile Container 

A Fragile Container explores the leaky, unstable realities of the feminine body - its ruptures, thresholds and raw flesh. Often positioned as the abject and Other, the feminine body is central to the inquiry. Drawing upon research of historical medical wax figures of female anatomy (such as the Anatomical Venus), the work investigates how these sculptural forms have shaped cultural perceptions of gender, desire, and decay. Informed by Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, A Fragile Container evokes a body which has ceased to have boarders, a body that leaks and threatens the symbolic. It is within this body that horror, desire and intimacy enmesh. Luce Irigaray’s theory of the caress informs an approach to touch as a relational, unknowable gesture that resists harm – the caress is both tender and violent, unravelling flesh with perverse desire and without resistance. Within this organic terrain, desire and decay entangle, destabilising fixed identities and revealing the monstrous power of the abject feminine body. 

thread, bare 
flesh 
hand placed, 
one on hip 
other on face, 
pulling all of herself 
out from her navel 
life 
umbilical cord 
returning

Kelly Jones

MA Textiles

This quilt is a reflection on legacy, loss, and the resilience of women. One side, a digitally printed family tree, maps my lineage – one that ends with me - due to chronic illness. As I traced my ancestors, I discovered a history of craft: wool felters, milliners, glass cutters, toolmakers. Yet, the women’s labour was often invisible, recorded only as “unpaid domestic duties” or omitted entirely. This erasure fuelled my desire to honour their presence through textiles – a medium historically tied to women’s work. The reverse side, a cyanotype of lace and Welsh lovespoons, becomes an act of tribute. Lovespoons, symbols of devotion and care, frame the embroidered names of the women who have lifted me up, supporting me when I could not support myself. Their strength, like the intricate lace, is woven into my life. By layering craft, history, and resistance, this quilt reclaims the narratives of unseen women, asserting that their work, their love, and their legacies endure. 

Emma Martin

MA Glass

My work explores ways of expressing complex traumatic feelings in glass and textiles. It is an outlet for dealing with the nightmares and flashbacks that trauma uncovers. The work embodies sensory elements of touch, feel and texture to explore trauma. I hand dye wool in bodily colours and then use that wool to hand sew lines from poetry I write onto fabric. Through the sewing and the manipulation of fabrics, the structures echo bodily forms whilst encoding the poetry. The translation of ductile materials into glass, a solid form, obscures the writing whilst creating transparency. The emotions are captured in the glass – a moment in time.

Courtney Mitchell

MA Product Design

Sustaining Change 

Sustaining Change: Integrating Communication, Data, and Psychology for a Greener Future is a series of papers that explores sustainability and our relationship to it, as both consumers and as manufacturers and designers. The papers in this series are designed to reflect on the different ways that we can interact with sustainability according to three distinct areas. The works in this series offer a look at the past use of sustainability, as well as the current state of play and what we can do in the future to improve it. The papers are reflecting on how communication, data and psychology can be used to enable governments, designers and consumers to work together to create a more sustainable future and increase our environmental awareness and positive environmental impact.

Katie Nia

MA Photography

Escapism

“A tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy” (Oxford English Dictionary) 

Escapism reflects upon a childhood experience growing up with an abusive father in a place that did not always offer the security associated with home. Instead, safety was found in places of escape, specific locations that for a moment made everything else disappear. The work revisits those places, and through the exploration of mixed media and fabric processes, aims to convey some related feelings and memories. A homemade shelter embodies the comfort and warmth the space offered through the use of comforting fabric. The home the artist made for herself, the images reflecting the beginning of her journey, invite us to escape to the space with her. The accompanying book represents one of Nia’s many explorations of the space, attempting to walk in the footsteps of her younger self as she revisits the locations that brought her the most comfort and wonder.

Zoë Noakes

MA Glass

Many Hands Make Light Work, by et al. 

This work explores pattern, materiality and meaning through the motif of line, as it flows between a patchwork of experience, objects, images and text, working with cloth, glass, video and light to form an immersive installation in the stairwell of the building. Following a sudden illness during the pandemic and subsequent mobility issues, the poignancy of this archetypal, architectural non-place is elevated in recognition of its inaccessibility and limitations to a wheelchair user. The installation aims to reflect the forces of production acting on the materiality of the artist’s body and the pattern (or encoding) of disability being inscribed on it. Nothing is truly equal, everybody is different - as are the bodies of our institutions and artworks – this work pays respect to complex embodiment while asking the audience to reflect on the overlooked and mundane ways disabled bodies are denied access to learning and knowledge across the UK.

Eleri Richards

MA Textiles

Er Cộf Annwyl  

At the forefront of this praxis, consideration to working sustainably with textiles has been applied. Er Cộf Annwyl is a body of work that marks a personal identity with family customs in textiles. Ethnographic traditions have been explored surrounding materials that are custom to the Welsh Woollen Industry: fleece, spinning, wool, thread. Through researching into native methods of textile making, the work delivered in the form of mini quilts, evoke memory of past life around ancestor’s cottage industry, Melin Llech, Bannau Brycheiniog, now a ruin. The images presented capture the theme of hauntology paying homage to family members no longer present.  

Katie Richards

MA Fine Art

REFLECTIONS (I)(O)N (O)F WATER 

In this collection, I have explored the physical and symbolic characteristics of reflection and fluidity of the most essential element for all lifeforms, Water. It is an invitation for the audience to contemplate the duality and sublimity of water, life affirming yet destructive, calming and yet powerful, as well as its beauty and our subconscious connection with this powerful lifeforce. The work considers Water both as a medium and as the subject for this artwork. As a universal solvent, water dissolves binders and pigments to create paints (the medium) which embody its properties of fluidity and motion. I have experimented with paint on glass through a collage of tiles, manipulating the surface through processes of mark- making, paint pouring, fritting and screen printing to reveal the interplay of light off reflective surfaces, and as the subject through a series of abstract paintings of waterfalls and reflected images to convey energy, spirituality and connectedness. REFLECTIONS encourages one to contemplate the fragility of water - just as one drop of water can cause a ripple, so too one individual action can evoke change.

Leigh Sinclair

MA Fine Art

Meaning Deferred 

Mechanical and real time oscillate, a familiar place becomes temporally abstract, the more I learn the less I know, meaning is deferred. My research has brought me back to the 6 acres of post agricultural, post-industrial farmland that remain in my family. It is a landscape with a narrative. Scrape back the topsoil and you will see the remnants of the industrial past, time has homogenised its chronology though, through the gorse, nettles, birch and oak that now occupy the area. No longer can a linear understanding of its history be perceived. Appropriating materials more commonly associated with industry and subverting them to represent the organic and impermanent, Meaning Deferred presents this fragile relationship between the organic and non-organic, time and the brevity of matter. The work is created in a state of high entropy, materials combine, resist, flow and dehydrate, creating a surface full of tension and fragility. The process is a recording of energy and time, what remains is the inert traces of activity, a temporal artifact.

Seren Willicombe

MA Photography

This project utilises photography and 3D printing to explore the local coal mine in Craig Cefn Parc. This project also uses layers as a representation the cycle of organic life and industrialism. The layers also let the audience view the different aspects of the project depending on the layer they focus on. By focusing on objects specifically the unique and rare mushrooms that grow in the shadow of the mine, this project explores the effect of the mines on the physical and metaphorical landscape of the area. One of the main influences on my practice is Mika Rottenberg and the main themes and theories are hauntology and landscape.