Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq’s visual language invokes the tessellation of Islamic ornament and mysticism alongside sharp technological precision, ideals of modernism and science fiction held in creative tension with traditions of craft and devotion. His monochrome graphite drawings are produced through an exacting line by line process with pencil, compass and ruler, shimmering between qualities of pure surface and limitless depth, echoing through worlds interior and exterior, cognitive and embodied, secular and sacred, to explore dichotomies of light and space, opacity and reflection, zero and infinity.

C. Mae Bloom draws from long familial traditions of making and adjacent interests in craft and labour to define her experimental sculpture practice, a compelling constellation of ideas, interests and material inquiry. Placing no greater or less value on what she has made to what she has found, her highly articulate sculptures are an inspection of everyday material culture in our present era of innovation and object superabundance as much as they are acts of analogue wonder: entrancing, exquisite sequences of objects where the found and the handmade are one and complete. Her work asks us to consider on the one hand, if the ordinary can be extraordinary, if close enough attention is paid? On the other hand, it interrogates a question of value: what makes a thing special? Imaginative potential? Rarity? If that’s it, something broken or decayed should be more valuable as it’s singular, and something handmade worth the most of all.

James Capper explores human-machine relations, biomimicry and sculpture that deploys industrial techniques and engineering. Inspired by natural history and evolution, his sculptural language evolves along different modular chains he terms ‘Divisions’, a conceptual network of interrelated sculpture families each grouped according to specialised application. Varying in scale, Capper’s sculptures occupy their habitats like a system of machinic organisms, evolving and migrating from one ecosystem to another, their nomadic lives anchored in a distinct aesthetic iconography.

Stevie Dix makes uncanny paintings in a personal language of emotional realism where figures and symbols are metaphors for intimate feelings and political perspectives. Her hard-edged vivid urban scenes are filled with references to post-war Belgian crafts, post-punk fashion, rebellious nightlife and enigmatic or withdrawn female figures. Influenced by the Belgian Surrealists as much as American animator Suzan Pitt or German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, Dix’s exploration of cultural identity is introspective, existential and passionate.    

Bobby Dowler uses and reappropriates the detritus of his shifting urban environment to pursue painterly abstraction that is deeply embedded in the physical and psychological structures of social space. His materially austere, hybrid ‘painting-objects’ combine intuitive composition – stapling, gluing, cutting and tearing with passages of applied painting. Committed to central and recurring art-historical questions of authorship and objecthood, his work is nevertheless playful and revels in the illogical, mercurial nature of everyday human action, chance and circumstance.

Danny Fox’s paintings conjure heartfelt and unflinching portrayals of home, history and myth. Using bold, near-crude passages of flat vibrant colour infused with quick, loose mark-making, Fox’s lyrical and expressionistic style infuses local buildings, landscapes and townsfolk with the mysticism of local folklore and symbolism. Taking the position of both observer and participant, his work exudes the emotional realism of lived experience. Captured with tragedy, promise, heat, violence, affection and humour, his work celebrates the authenticity and colour of lives lived against the grain. 

Natalia González Martín examines the ways in which religious symbolism, allegory and fables represent deeper truths about ourselves and society, but also the ways in which they have been used to establish and uphold patriarchal narratives about the limits of female desire, creativity and freedom. Bringing together ancient and contemporary worlds, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to art history from the Counter-Reformation, contemporary popular culture to subtle imprints of her own personal experience, Martín’s work illustrates the symbolic mutability of love, passion and power throughout the ages.

Norman Hyams scrutinised everyday life through enigmatic and highly personal paintings and sculptures. Often working from singular photographs of his past that intrigued him, Hyams reworked them into a series of recurring motifs that dance the line between daydream and memory, a process he described as ‘teaching himself how to see’. In each case a history is told, a narrative beckoned. His work contrasted the boisterous and nocturnal energy of the city with solemn and inward-looking scenes, evoking the intensity by which particular memories – both real and imagined – come to hold significant emotional resonance and meaning in our lives. 

Kingsley Ifill has a multidisciplinary practice, at the core is photography, a  medium that offers him a form of proof, certainty, record-keeping. He works mainly in 35mm, always with consideration of how far he might push a photograph as an object. Ifill’s subjects, and the places in which he makes his work are impossible to pin down, classify or gather together in a linear way, although his images always capture and contain decisive moments, giving much of his work a diaristic quality.  

Marie Jacotey’s work is a wild and exhilarating diary of images inspired by her friends, strangers, literature and popular culture. It is violent, raw and brutal in combination with intimacy, sensuality, tenderness. Working principally in drawing of  mixed media and scale – dry pastel on Japanese paper, coloured pencil on plaster, large hand-painted and digitally printed murals and fabric as well as with animated film – her tales of love, passion, loneliness and solitude are portrayed through a signature style of cinematic vignette. 

Jas Knight depicts and celebrates contemporary African-American experience through the historical language of portraiture, still life and genre painting. Through masterful use of 16th and 17th century painting techniques, Knight translates his love of French and Dutch traditions into portraits of people doing everyday 21st century things, including himself and friends, as well as some settings far from home. Playing with the lines between reality and fiction, Knight’s paintings demurely subvert historical depictions of black subjects in academic painting, foregrounding the presence, personality and surrounding environment of everyday lives. 

Shaun McDowell makes paintings abundant in movement, drama, texture and harmonies. Working directly from the perceptible world, his apparently abstract works are the tangible expression of acute inner feelings, charged with the visual overload of a surrounding world where nothing is fixed. McDowell’s recent work is born from the natural landscape and historical setting of the Sabine region in Italy where he lives, fusing abstraction with allusions to local history and motifs as well as the wider history of painting.

George Rouy’s use of the human figure, vexed with desire, freedom, alienation and crisis, speaks to the extremities of our time. All his work is an ongoing inquiry into the body and the body as a landscape, an ongoing deconstruction of the image towards an expression of the human body in the throes of becoming, reconstruction and reformation. His painterly language captures the perpetual transformations of the body in our contemporary moment. His work undermines the perception of the body as a fixed unit, proposing instead a body that constantly imagines and defines itself through its relationship with itself, with others and with the world at large.

Harley Weir is known for the intimacy of her images carefully composed with a highly attuned sense of colour, material and composition, radically reshaping ideas of womanhood and how the female gaze might be engaged with and made new in our current era. Her work deploys analogue and digital techniques with experimentation in the darkroom and in post-production, combining a signature visual intensity and freedom with mysterious and unguarded subjects. The resulting images evoke a familiar world filled with emotion, but equally suggestive of a darker and more compulsive sense of our place within it.