Katie Cuddon
Katie Cuddon is an artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne where she is also a Professor of Fine Art Practice at Newcastle University. Katie has been making sculptures, mostly with clay, for nearly 20 years. Her work develops expressively and instinctively in a studio practice that explores psychological representations of the human body and the intimate interpenetration of art and life. Katie studied at Glasgow School of Art and then The Royal College of Art before becoming a Lipman Research Fellow in Ceramic Sculpture at Newcastle University. This was followed by a Sainsbury Scholarship in Sculpture and Drawing at the British School at Rome and the inaugural Ceramics Fellowship at Camden Art Centre. Katie’s solo exhibitions include A is for Alma, Hatton Gallery (2024), Night Portraits, De La Warr Pavilion (2023), Spanish Lobe, Camden Arts Centre (2011) and Pontoon Lip, a collaborative exhibition with Celia Hempton at Cell Projects (2014).
Sara Qaed
Sara Qaed is a UK-based artist from Bahrian. She is a mother, Illustrator, and Social Artist. Her works encompass various mediums including collaborative drawing, experimental animation, collage, wearable pieces, editorial cartoons and things in between. With a strong sense of social and political criticism, her works explore the language of drawing as a daily practice to document and archive news with a sense of black humour. Besides that, Sara uses her visual diaries and sketchbooks as a timeline surface to trace variety of things such as marks and conversations. Through a continuous publication of cartoons and comics (@saraqaed), Sara collaborate with the viewers to discuss controversial topics in the Middle East such as corruption, power, occupation and human being. Her cartoons are displayed on multiple platforms such as, Al-Hudood Satirical News Website, Roman Cultural Magazine, and Tanween Media. In 2019, Sara won Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought for caricature and Mahmoud Khuhail award for Editorial Cartoons. Besides that, Sara co-create social artworks with communities, classrooms, and care homes. She experiment with the possibilities of illustration, playfulness and human performance.
https://www.instagram.com/saraqaed/?hl=en
Kate Sweeney
Kate Sweeney produces drawing, animation, video and writing to explore how familial bonds are formed beyond the materials and myths of blood and DNA. She draws upon her feminist and queer activism and discourse surrounding queer kinship and LGBT+ history. Her practice is often located around archives, libraries and other sites of cultural repository and memory as well as shaped by her lived experiences. Kate’s studio-based practice and research includes collaborative and participatory projects in academic, educational and community settings. Her recent drawings were completed as part of a residency with D6: Culture in Transit and the National Trust. Her artist’s book, ‘the wings of a moth without the moth-bit in between’ was commissioned by the Women Artists of the North East Library in 2023. Her video works have screened nationally and internationally including Barcelona Short Film Festival, Sydney LGBT+ Film Festival, Manchester Animation Festival, Zebra Film Festival Berlin, AnimaTricks Helsinki. She completed her PhD at Newcastle University in 2020.
Lady Kitt
Lady Kitt is an artist, mam, researcher & drag king proudly from, and based in, the North East of England. They call their work “Mess Making as Social Glue”- driven by insatiably curiosity about the social functions of stuff that gets called art. Kitt invites people to join them in creating objects, interactions & events. They are most interested in using collaborative creativity to (gently) dismantle and mischievously re-craft systems, structures and spaces they find discriminatory, obsolete or just quite dull. Some of the things that have happened as part of Kitt’s work are: super-sized origami boat races, giant installations made from recycled paper, policy changes & the creation of an international feminist art magazine for, and by, children. Kitt is a co-lead for Social Art Network (SAN), trustee for Crafts Council UK, and a founding member of the award winning disabled artist led “art rabble” kin collective.
Image description: Colour photo, interior. A white human with a shaved head and a big smile wears a headdress made of huge multi coloured flowers and a black long-sleeved shirt on which white and orange text reads “queer crip craft power”.
Rosie Morris
Rosie Morris is an artist, Lecturer, Gallery Manager, Mum and, at times, long-distance carer, living and working in Newcastle. Her practice is interested in making time to reconnect our bodily and psychological relationship with an architectural space, through installations you walk into and around. In July 2020, in response to feeling, as a new Mum, a conflict of identity, feminism vs biology, lack of time, invisibility, guilt, extreme tiredness, depression and at times discrimination, Morris set about interviewing and sharing the stories of 10 artists, who are also mothers. Extracts of these stories are collated in the publication, Artist/Mum, together with a Forward by artist and researcher Martina Mullaney, and parallel text by artist Fiona Larkin.
(Image Credit: Colin Davidson)