The Axis Fellowship 2026: Meet the Axis Fellows

We're extremely excited to introduce the three Axis members who will participate 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 2026 and February - April 2027. Each artist will receive £4,000 to support the development of their practice as well as guidance 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.

Stay tuned for updates, new projects, and insights from their time on the fellowship.

Meet this year's Axis Fellows...

Sarah Hardacre

I am a visual archivist, trawling images in public archives to reveal hidden narratives. My collage explores the experience of women within the urban built environment and the complex relationship between female bodies, architecture and space, investigating how collage can function as a feminist spatial method, concerned with the tensions between visibility and containment across domestic and urban scales.

My practice is now moving into ceramics. Where the collage extends outward into the built environment, the ceramics turn the same questions inward: from the building to what happens inside it. What ceramics offer that collage does not is the object itself: the plate, the vessel, the domestic surface, things made by women, used by women, cleaned by women, and largely unseen. They open onto the feminist histories of invisible labour, the Wages for Housework movement, and the domestic interior as a site of unseen work. Clay is heavier, slower, more labour intensive, and the making itself becomes part of what the work interrogates: as a working-class artist, grafting and driving HGVs alongside my practice, and coming from a lineage of factory workers and unionists, my labour is never a metaphor, it is always the material.

“Being selected as one of this year’s Axis Fellows comes at an important moment for my practice, as my work moves from collage into ceramics, and it gives me time to experiment, learn new processes and explore where this new direction will take me. With the support of the Axis team, the Fellowship peer cohort and external mentoring, it also gives me space to develop the longer-term research that sits behind the work, and the opportunity to share that thinking with the wider Axis community, and more publicly, as the work takes shape.” 

Ngo Chun Tse

Ngo Chun Tse (b. Hong Kong) lives and works in London. He works across moving image, installation, lecture performance and writing, critically engaging with hauntology, immigration, infrastructure, geopolitics, technological systems, image production and the historiography of decolonisation. 

His current research concerns the politics of addressability: how administrative and geospatial infrastructures, from postcodes to GPS and shipping trackers, determine who can be located, counted and named. He is developing an installation on surveillance asymmetry in the English Channel alongside a new project on postal addressing.

"This is my third application to Axis, after two unsuccessful attempts. I kept applying because my practice keeps growing. What I am looking forward to most is the cohort itself, in their 35th year."

Julia McKinlay

My work is spatial and moves between two- and three-dimensions, translating ideas across drawing, print and sculpture. Mutations and evolutions happen as subjects shift across dimensions. Responding to the qualities and agency of material drives my practice. Metal is malleable, pigments bleed and acids react. Through interacting with these materials, a body of work emerges. Many of my works explore the narrow spatial field of flat materials and how they can be cut, incised or polished into something that feels absolute. 

I create bodies of work in series to be exhibited as spatial assemblages that represent imagined spaces and environments, where matter and objects interact and create new connections. Previous works have represented the surface of a snail’s shell, an obscure garden, or the edge of the world. Underpinning this is an interest in science fiction and theory around human and non-human interaction, and the making activities of other species. 

The viewer is invited to explore my bodies of work physically and imaginatively. Through process and abstraction, I am seeking to capture moments where form and surface combine to articulate sensations or experiences that I find impossible to verbalise.

“I’m delighted to have been awarded the Axis Fellowship. I’m looking forward to pushing my practice in new directions through the Fellowship, and working with the other Axis Fellows each month will be invaluable in this period of development. I have lots of ideas for new, larger-scale work, and I’m excited that this Fellowship will help me bring them to fruition at such a critical time in my practice”