Highlights:

Quiet Entanglements: Shoelaces and Post-Natural Ecologies, 2025 by Claire Barber

This project begins with a deceptively simple question: what happens to the textiles we never see — the seconds, flawed items, and returns that are discarded before reaching the consumer?

Working in dialogue with Sole Responsibility, a Yorkshire-based SME that diverts unsold and returned fashion from landfill, I investigate the overlooked afterlives of textile components, focusing on the humble shoelace. By melting and fusing discarded shoelaces onto dried heather, grasses, and stone, I expose their petrochemical nature and explore how synthetic materials mimic, infiltrate, and entangle with organic forms.

The resulting works are delicate yet unsettling: root-like structures that hover between growth and contamination, beauty and unease. They reflect a post-natural condition in which plastics quietly enter soils, landscapes, and ecological systems, often unnoticed.

Bringing together artistic practice and sustainability discourse, this project considers how textiles move not only through systems of commerce, but also through land, memory, and imagination — and how art can act as a provocation, making hidden material realities visible and open to rethinking.

New Metal Age, 2024 by Brighid Black

A short super-8 film made in Jubilee Cave, North Yorkshire as part of my PhD research. Crawling from the rear of the cave entrance passage, through mud and over rocks, the piece embodies the experience through the jerkiness of the camera and the indistinct imagery at the start of the film. Chance visitors to the cave witness my emergence. The main still image shows sunlight reflecting from an old laptop hard-drive strapped to my head. The title refers to the new age of extraction of rare metals and minerals.

The Lost Sunrise, 2025 - 2026 by Kathleen Fox

It's concerned with the destruction of our world through climate change and war.

80 x 90cm

Land Marks, 2020 - 2021 by Carole McCourt

Artist-in-residence project, Killhope Lead Mining Museum

Land Marks was developed during a three-month artist residency at Killhope Lead Mining Museum. The project explores overlooked traces of mining heritage through walking, drawing, and site-responsive marking.

Referencing the mineral fluorite, fluorescent pink was used to highlight subtle geological and historical features encountered along a circular walking route linking the museum, Hymers Hush, woodland paths, and Hazely Hush. The work invited visitors to experience the landscape through slowed attention, noticing details embedded in rock, vegetation, and ground.

The project began inside the museum with Under Feet, a series of oil paintings depicting metal-rich stones and lichen. Extending into the surrounding landscape, Land Marks positioned walking as both research method and artistic practice, foregrounding rural heritage and acts of attentive looking.