Highlights

The Devil at the Belfire Fair Devil's Dyke, Brighton, 2025 by Danny Manning

Woven Mask of the Devil, part of a series of ‘Mummer Masks’ completed in 2025 for the Brighton Fringe Festival. Working from a themed handbook, I investigated the folklore of the Devil's Dyke and in particular the story of St.Cuthman and the Devil and created two large scale woven head masks from locally sourced materials, working with traditional basketry techniques.

Smart London had acquired the site, a derelict old pig farm on the Devil's Dyke earlier in the year and proposed an  Art Trail in May 2025 to open the site as a new Arts Centre. The masks appeared at the Belfire Fair alongside 7 other artists' work installed in a variety of abandoned sheds. This event won Best Brighton Fringe Exhibition Award 2025.

200 x 300cm

Rituals of Unconventional Love, 2025 by Ducky Elford

An immersive and interactive installation that combines interactive animation, wearable sculptural jewellery, voice recognition software and digital artwork. I am incorporating custom-made controllers and costumes that, like in immersive events such as Secret Cinema, allow the spectator to become a performer and help to shroud disbelief in a playful fictional world.

4 Beautiful Obscenities of Virginia Woolf, 2025 by Michelle Abbott

Pressing Matters - Printing with Virginia Woolf

Exhibition at Sussex University Library

June - September 2025

Starting in 2015, the Beautiful Obscenities series is an ongoing project of abstracted sewn insults, donated to the artist from the public. Initially stemming from vulgar slander between loved ones, insults are hand-sewn on embroidery wheels to challenge the domestic notion of Home Sweet Home and abstracted to create something else beyond the hurt. The words are still there, but the meaning and power have moved on. Over the years, the series has developed to further question what constitutes an insult? Can an insult be a positive? Is it ever ok to hurl an insult?

As Co-Organisers of the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf & Dissidence, Michelle Abbott, Clara Jones, Anna Snaith and Helen Tyson have each selected one of Virginia Woolf’s insults to be abstracted and reinvented. Known for her spiky comments, Woolf was not shy of penning her thoughts on others—often direct, sometimes more discreet. Is it an insult or simply an observation?

‘arrant feminist’, from Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), ed. by Anna Snaith (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 27, selected by Helen Tyson

‘a thin rigid trickle of a mind’, from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1977-1984), 4, p. 31, selected by Anna Snaith

‘in a tight dress’, from Woolf, Diary, 5, p. 303, selected by Clara Jones

‘over-dressed, over elaborate’, from Woolf, Diary, 2, p.75, selected by Michelle Abbott

Sharp Petals, 2025 by Tracy Satchwill

This work forms part of Bleeding Emerald, an evolving body of work exploring mythic, ecofeminist themes through digital collage, symbolism, and surreal narratives. It imagines a fierce, sacred feminine power rooted in nature and resistance.

30 x 42cm