Collective Disruption

Angharad Jones is a visual artist creating dark portraiture, monochromatic works and experimental art exploring themes around identity and belonging. She focuses on introspective paintings combining portraiture realism and abstract concepts to document past, future and community. The incorporation of sound into her practice holds equal gravitas through art performances on musique concrète and noise projects.

Anna Mud is a cross-disciplinary artist, researcher, and facilitator whose practice explores materiality, ecology, and design through site-specific investigation. Her work plays with architectural tropes and visual illusion to engage and surprise the viewer.

Bera is a North East based artist using microbiology to meditate on the menial parts of life, using microscopic photography to examine the life that exists all around us at every scale.

Brendan is mainly a musician working in community arts teaching many styles of music from the high action sound of Brazilian Samba to a ukulele orchestra. He also dabbles in bits of everything ranging from amateur photography to making things with anything he can get his hands on. He just like being creative and making things.

Cutie Guy Industries (CGI CIC PLC LTD) is an independent arts & entertainment company with corporate offices in Newcastle, Dublin & Dubai. Our board of directors includes Louis Walsh, Scotty T & Michael Schumacher. Fuck off.

Ellen Dixon is a North East-based photographer whose eclectic work combines portraiture, documentary and landscape forms in both analogue and digital media to produce an intimate, ongoing journal of Newcastle’s LGBTQIA+ community. They chronicle untold stories of everyday queer love and collectivity, pleasure and care, joy and silliness.

Ellen Fernley is a multidisciplinary artist experimenting primarily with textiles, sewing, collage, and printmaking. Her practice explores themes of mental health, humour, and everyday moments – inviting viewers to find beauty in imperfection and humour as a quiet form of healing.

Ethan Shek is an artist whose interests lie in fictional storytelling and writing, crafting imaginative stories with intricate characters, world-building, and objects. His works and passions are inspired by fantasy, animation and other pieces of media focusing on fiction; along with a craft for character designing.

Jakarin Shah is a proud Brown Muslim Geordie artist who uses creativity to nurture wellbeing. Inspired by the peace of the northern coastline, she works with acrylic and mixed media to explore emotion, belonging, and resilience. Her art sparks meaningful conversations around social justice, colour, connection, and shared human experience.

James Grant is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on Photography, Film and Analogue Techniques. Their work is influenced by their early life growing up in rural Northumberland, the local music community, a love of cinematic visuals, and the juxtaposition of industrial equipment in areas of natural beauty.

Johanna Bolton is a Swedish artist who lives between London at Hartlepool. She works across sculpture, installation, photography and performance. The idea of human presence and movement leaving behind memories or imprints in material form is key to her work.

Lee Drew is a multidisciplinary artist exploring fantastical landscapes and the concept of spirithood. Rooted in feelings of climate anxiety and a love for the natural world, their work seeks to rebuild human relationships with the land by fostering empathy for non-human entities.

Megan Brown is a movement artist based in Newcastle. Her work uses Dance, Sculpture and Visual art to acknowledge ideas around motherhood, community and the human experience.

The Menagerie are three transsexuals in the same oversized jacket from Chester-Le-Street who make music, smoke and paint! The adorable Gail Michelle Chapman, the ravenous Dr Bucket and the bookish Matilda Von Trapp. Lethal beats and wicked MCing.

Mridula Sharma is a researcher and artist who lives between Newcastle and Manchester. She works across writing, painting, and photography. Her ongoing research on Palestine informs her recent work.

Natasha Loydell is an artist, curator and writer. Drawing upon her interests in relics, local history and folktales she creates objects and publications that fall between intimate and peculiar. Weaving mytho-poetic personal narratives with extensive research and regard for both art and cultural conservation, her work questions when art becomes artefact, and the necessity of forms of pilgrimage in historical faiths vs the contemporary every day.

Nicola Hall of AngelicVision007, artist and designer. Multidisciplinary, often expressed through painting, textiles and performance. Layered pieces. Art as deep journeys. Intensive care of the Soul. Visceral responses dives to joyous rapture. Energetic bursts to transcendence of the physical realm.

Rachael Dee Brien is an abstract geometric artist that primarily works with red and blue. She works across textiles, painting and photography with a focus on patterns in order to communicate her response or impression of the world around her.

Reece Hi is a Newcastle-based artist working across 2D media, printmaking, digital art, sculpture and poetry.

Drawing from a queer and autistic perspective, his layered works explore perception, memory, and the absurdity of modern life. Often using reclaimed ephemeral materials and collage-based methods, Reece creates vibrant, ceremonial compositions where pop culture, nostalgia, and sensory overload collide.

Inspired by surrealism and theatre, Sarah Sweeney’s practice invites viewers into playfully shaped landscapes and sculptures textured to resemble nature, made using traditional craftsmanship. The different manual processes merge to offer narratives of transformation, fluidity of time and nonhuman mystery through reoccurring motifs of glamour and plantae.

Stacey Mckenna is a single mother and secondary school teacher exploring the art that can emerge from the everyday life of working mothers. Her work asks what collective, cumulative action might mean for those whose time is shaped by work, care, and systems that pull us from creativity, understood not as achievement, but as the meeting of experience and constraint.

Stephanie Smith is a visual artist who has developed an exciting process she calls ‘skin mapping’; observing and recording the invisible physical sensations she experiences within her own body.

Turtle Ravenholt is a photographer, printmaker and poet from Canada now working and living in Newcastle upon Tyne. As an autistic and disabled artist they use a monochromatic palette to mimic their black and white thinking. They aim to highlight the value in things discarded by society, whether they be physical objects or marginalized individuals.

Vivian Jing Ye is an Edinburgh-based Chinese artist whose practice spans fiction, poetry performance and cross-media projects. Her work explores themes of belonging, unbelonging, and in-betweenness, often reflecting on migration, identities, and cultural hybridity.

Create/Disrupt is an artist development programme for aspiring artists and art workers who have not attended university. Create/Disrupt is made up of a diverse group of people from across the North East with a shared desire to have a career in the arts and meet like-minded folk with similar experiences.

The Collective Studio is an artist development programme for early-career artists and/or recent graduates. Open to creative practitioners in any discipline and a diverse range of practices, it offers affordable studios, support, and a programme of events, mentoring, and exhibitions, providing a space to test ideas within a nurturing, critically engaged community.