The Axis Fellowship 2024: Recipients Announced!

We are extremely excited to announce the Axis members who will be taking part in this year's Axis Fellowship. 

We are thrilled to introduce the four Axis members who will take part in this year’s Axis Fellowship, a programme designed to support early to mid-career artists in developing their practice over two intensive periods between October - December 2024 and February - April 2025. 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. Due to the outstanding quality and volume of applications, we are pleased to announce that we have extended the cohort to four artists this year, recognising both the exceptional talent and the need for greater support.

"It's an honour to welcome Uma Breakdown, Asuf Ishaq, Hannah Leighton-Boyce and Sean Roy Parker as our Axis Fellows of 2024. I can’t wait to see how each of these artists will inspire the cohort and Fellowship experience as we develop together over the coming year. It is a huge privilege to share with you their journeys, so please keep your eyes peeled for updates!"

Harlan Whittingham, artist development and commissions producer.

We look forward to sharing the progress of our 2024 Axis Fellows with you—stay tuned for updates on their development, new projects, and insights from their time in the fellowship.

Meet this year’s Axis Fellows…

Uma Breakdown

I’m Uma, an artist, writer, and award winning game designer interested in animals, horror, and psychic/cybernetic structures which support/inhibit solidarity. Everything I make is about some combination of love, grief, hallucination, and an excess of joy. With my collaborator Belladonna Paloma I also make video games about the divine and occult providence of transfemme existence. I live and work in Gateshead, overlooking the North Sea.

Recent exhibitions include: “The Joy of Destruction” for Backlit (Nottingham, 2023),  "Hinterlands" at Baltic (Gateshead 2022), and my first solo exhibition/game series “Earth A.D.” co-commissioned by and touring across Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge, 2022), FACT (Liverpool, 2023), and Quad (Derby, 2024). I was shortlisted for the Adam Reynolds Award (2020) and The Arts Foundation Award (2023).

Asuf Ishaq

Asuf Ishaq’s practice examines the post-colonial body as an archive and historical geographical places as sites of cultural and political meaning. Ishaq investigates themes of migration, embodiment, transformation, displacement, and memory. Excavating personal archives and testimonies of his family's migration experience, re-thinking traumatic episodes in history, where meaningful knowledge is located.

Ishaq reimagines the experience by weaving memories and imagined time, place, relationships and resurrection of lost time. Through hybridity or hybrid forms, just as he navigates through his hybrid cultural experience and identity. Ishaq works with sculpture, sound, images, text, language, moving image and installations to communicate his ideas. 

Asuf completed his MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College of Art in 2020. Recent exhibitions and awards include;  Solo exhibition Articles of Home, Reid Gallery, Glasgow (2023), Group exhibitions, The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, (2022), Image Behaviour, ICA (2022), New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London (2021/22), Groundings (online film screening), Goldsmiths CCA, London (2021), London Grads, Saatchi Gallery, London (2020)

Hannah Leighton-Boyce

Hannah Leighton-Boyce works across a variety of sculptural formats ranging from collage, drawing, and print to site responsive installation. Her practice is informed by material and sensory relations, contemplating the interrelations between people, objects, and their environment. These enquiries consider the corporeal, the material and somatic, their social, historic, and political resonances.

Her current research and making processes contemplate experiences of extended periods away from and out of time, towards expressing a position that slips between the frame, beneath time, image, and surface. A state of in-between-ness, instability, and suspension is central to expressing sensory and embodied responses as a process, material, place or event, often through invisible processes such as energy transmission, the passage of time, cumulative and reductive forces.

Exhibitions and residencies include The Skyboat Residency, Hugo Burge Foundation (2024); Articulations (2022), The National Festival of Making and Darwen Terracotta & Faience in Blackburn; Hospitalfield Interdisciplinary Residency (2021); The Position of the Sun in the Sky, White Columns online (2021), Personal Structures, PAPER Pavilion, Palazzo Mora, Venice Biennale (2019); Each Toward the Other, Bury Sculpture Centre (2019); Ruth Barker & Hannah Leighton-Boyce, Castlefield Gallery (2018) touring to Glasgow Women’s Library (2019). 

Sean Roy Parker

I am a visual artist, writer and fermentation enthusiast based until recently at The Field, an experimental artist-led housing project and residency space in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. Here I had been finding harmony in a creative community, working locally as an organic gardener, and researching cooking as socio-cultural infrastructure for artistic production. I am impatiently anticipating the post-capitalist transition.

For five years I've worked under Fermental Health, an open-ended critical anthropology practice for food sovereignty and emotional well-being in late capitalism. I practise slow, low-tech crafts and food preservation with consumer waste and natural abundances, and share extensively through workshops, labour exchange, favours and artswaps. I also write essays, journals and poems on the lifecycle of materials, complexities of interspecies responsibility, and collaborative problem-solving through the lens of food justice.

Recent solo shows include Piccalilli Gallery, London and Two Queens, Leicester. I was selected as a Wysing Arts Centre 2023-24 resident, and completed my first permanent public sculpture - a recycled glasshouse in a community garden for Metroland Cultures, London.