Farida Yesmin (Image credit: Manuel Vasion)
Axis 2023 Fellowship Recipients Announced!
We are thrilled to announce the Axis members who will be taking part in the Axis Fellowship Programme over the next eight months.
The Axis Fellowship is a paid development opportunity that seeks to support a cohort of early to mid-career artists over an eight month period between Autumn 2023 and early 2024. Each artist will receive £4,000 to put towards the development of their practice as well as support from Axis staff, additional guest mentoring, promotion, and a shared cohort environment to help shape their artistic development.
Thank you to all of our members who applied for this year’s fellowship. We received so many amazing applications, and really enjoyed learning so much about your work. To acknowledge both the wealth of talent and need for support from our members, we have extended this year’s Fellowship cohort to bring the total number of Axis Fellows up to four.
"It's a privilege to welcome Harriet Bowman, Charlotte Cullen, Sam Hutchinson, and Farida Yesmin as our 2023 Axis Fellows. As we set off on this joint artistic journey, we look forward to seeing how each artist's distinct practice will evolve, inspire and shape the collective experience. We can’t wait to share the cohort's journey with you over the coming year.”
Harlan Whittingham, artist development and commission producer, Axis
Meet this year’s Axis Fellows…
Harriet Bowman
Harriet Bowman is a multidisciplinary artist based in Bristol. She works between writing and sculpture shifting between a material-led practice and written works that accompany, are performed alongside, or stand in for sculpture. Harriet has a particular interest in translating extensive details of industrial processes into written form, interwoven with autofiction in an attempt to build notions of sculpture and material through text.
Harriet looks at the female body as a vessel to carry, to nurture and to feed, a multi-purpose vehicle. The car is a recurring motif in her work that comes from visiting classic car shows, photographing tyre marks on roads and writing in the driver’s seat while her child sleeps.
Charlotte Cullen
Charlotte Cullen is an artist whose practice resonates around forms of care, healing and repair. Working primarily in metal, Charlotte’s interwoven sculptures are jagged and raw, scarred and bent, healing and holding.
Charlotte’s practice is rooted in their family’s Irish Catholic heritage and the forms of labour undertaken to build a new life in England, and the myriad, intersecting, intergenerational experiences coalescing from this point.
Angus Reid wrote in The Morning Star that “[Charlotte] greets the needs of the present without sentimentality and with clear eyes”.
Sam Hutchinson
Sam Hutchinson (he/him, b, 1993, Sunderland) is an artist and photographer based in Leeds UK. He works for Village, and is a co-founder and director of SCREW Gallery.
Sam works predominantly with photography, image-making and sculpture, alongside publishing and installation. Thematically this focuses on exploring the politics of images, the representation of both reality and truth in an overly saturated visual landscape, and how these function in an ever-mixing physical and digital existence. This manifests through surreal homages to photography's most banal forms - stock images, corporate structures, public advertising etc.
By creating fictional representations of familiar truths, the viewer is asked to question 'the image', particularly in a post-industrial cityscape. Tropes of class, religion and learned-beliefs are especially re-contextualised- assessing the evolution of these forms since the start of the second Millenia.
Much of his sculptural work exists only physically in photographs, a process that allows for the destruction and rebuilding, sharing of materials, and as a method to bypass financial restraints within sculpture making. These works exist in final but varied stages that acknowledge accessibility within material cost and space, and try to understand the image as a record of truth that can be constantly manipulated and re-imagined.
Farida Yesmin
Farida Yesmin (artist name Kajoli Ilojak) is a Bangladeshi artist based in Folkestone. She makes work across performance, socially engaged practice, video, photography and drawing. Farida is an asylum seeker, she grew up in Bangladesh and has overcome personal trauma to settle in the UK. Farida’s ever-evolving artistic practice explores themes of feminism, body politics and cross-culture identity.
Through her work, she engages with Eastern and Western cultural expressions, as a woman, as an artist and as an immigrant. Her practice is shaped through human rights and feminist politics, in parallel to her lived experience of trauma in the asylum process, homelessness, and as a sexual assault survivor. Her work negotiates barriers of language whilst staging her “otherness”, expressed through communication using her body, gestural mark making, painting and voice.
