Resident Artists
Bertie Purkiss
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Bertie Purkiss is an early-career sculptor based in Lancaster, North West England. Working primarily in ceramics and plaster, he creates small- and medium-scale pieces that explore organic forms, landscape connections, and the interplay of light and shadow. Originally trained in ecology, Purkiss draws on this background to inform his sculptural practice.
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With a growing ambition to develop large-scale works in a wide range of materials, he has recently been awarded a UK Arts Council grant to support this progression. His studio is based at Assembly Arts Lancaster, where he is an active member of the local arts community. He has previously exhibited informally at Assembly Arts and at the Lancaster Art Fair, and is preparing a larger body of work for exhibition in the coming year.
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​​Lucy Sanderson
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Lucy Sanderson works with a wide range of media and artists. Over the last 15 years, a consistent theme in her work is the creation of highly textured, layered and unique effects. Lucy has considerable experience in shaping accessible and engaging events for all ages, through an exciting range of projects, including community led festivals. In 2020, Lucy designed, developed and delivered a 12-week programme of accessible online art classes.
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"I have always found peace, inspiration and connection through creativity and find it a tonic to the more mundane and difficult elements of life. I work to embrace the uncertainty and unpredictability of life and to develop an artistic practice that is congruent with my values, skills and purpose. I am inspired by the natural world and the creative people in my life."​​
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Brooke Simmons
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An academic within the Astrophysics Department at Lancaster University, Brooke has been passionate about the importance of creativity throughout her life.
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"I first picked up a bag of clay in search of balance. The other side of my working life is in many ways abstract and untouchable. In ceramics, I found a medium that could both ground and elevate, that could be both functional and high art, that both is used to create cutting-edge materials and was used by the first humans for some of the earliest craft. My work aims to provide a human-scale connection to that shared experience, primarily via everyday pieces."​
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Naomi Ryder
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Naomi Ryder is an early career Oil painter, who's large scale portraiture work has previously been awarded the Welsh Portrait Award.
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"My art is connected to people. I want to make work that reflects people, who they are and their inner self. Their connection with the world around them, how that plays out, the representations of themselves, their thoughts and their beliefs."
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Ingrid Christie
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​"My practice considers the intersections of natural forces, human intervention, and the shifting boundaries of life itself. Working in experimental photography, I draw on early processes such as cyanotypes and photograms, using the raw materials of the environment - light, wind, water, and air - as both subject and collaborator. I create images that register the invisible touch of the weather. Each piece becomes a trace of a moment in flux: a storm cloud staining the paper, sunlight searing through a leaf, or droplets of rain distorting the outline of a fragile petal. These images are not fixed representations but atmospheric recordings, shaped by the elemental forces that sustain - and threaten - our existence.
Alongside this is a contemporary watercolour practice that speculates on the future of life forms altered by human-made inventions. Microplastics, now embedded in soil, oceans, and bodies, form a strange new ecology. I imagine hybrid beings - part plant, part human - emerging from this entanglement. Through loose washes and layered pigment, I give form to figures that are unsettling: roots merging with veins, translucent skin threaded with synthetic fragments, limbs and body parts fused with plants. These imagined hybrids are both warnings and possibilities, suggesting futures in which our intimacy with the environment becomes irreversible and deeply embodied.
Together, the photographic and painterly strands of my practice examine how weather and pollution shape not only landscapes but also ourselves. I work with chance, unpredictability, and the porous boundaries between natural and artificial, human and non-human. My art seeks to document the present while also projecting visions of the future, asking how we might adapt, endure, or transform within a world altered by our own making."
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Emily Conroy
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Lancashire based ceramicist and vase obsessive who makes illustrative stoneware forms and functional-ware based upon a love of folk art, vintage design and nature. My work often features subtle-not-subtle references to self, society and the world. My careers background is in the music industry but my education was in Fine Art which I have enjoyed a return to in the past decade.
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Meg Bowyer
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Meg Bowyer is an artist, writer, and curator from the northwest of England, whose work seeks to explore personal relationships with home landscapes, territories, and ecologies. Megs visual works utilise a variety of different mediums including soft pastel, graphite, digital print, egg tempera, ceramic, and foraged plant matter. Meg is primarily trained in drawing, having recently graduated from Paris College of Art with an Master of Fine Arts in Drawing.
Her 2023 graduate exhibition 'My Flaws and Charms Won’t Work Here' was displayed at the Bastille Design Centre in Paris,
and looked specifically to the complex ecology of Cumbria and Lancashire - linking graphite mining, nuclear power, agriculture, and folklore. Meg’s works in drawing, ceramic, and writing aim to hold a mysterious narrative quality, depicting strange, weird, and queer events within the landscape, often featuring mythic personal objects and mutated biologies.
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Matta
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A cross discipline, multi-sensory artist with a lifelong background in professional video production, music and mural/street art, Matta describes his personal art practice (fusing elements of punk, funk, jazz and folk) as ‘graffiti adjacent’- the history of paint over the surface and explosive colour responses echoing the rich textural/textual layers, both intentional and unintentional, found in an urban landscape still haunted by the ghost of Vaughn Bodé’s calligraphy and cartoons. The Bee stencil which features on all Matta’s work is both a ‘tag’ and dedication.
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Taking the idea that the self is an illusion as a serious premise, Matta operates as a fluid collective of personnel, constructs that have developed over multiple professional roles in the creative industries. Collaborative projects with both non-professionals and fellow artists are a central thesis of Matta’s practice.
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A graduate of the Manchester School of Art and The University of Salford, Matta’s work is a record of ephemeral movement - temporal and physical; a poem to music, movement, and dance, not mind or the expression of emotions. His current work is a series of large scale abstract paintings, a project that continues an engagement with recording whole body movement, improvised composition and structure, searching for authentic conversations that allow a spontaneous impulse to create without ego.
Influenced by the principles of embryology and evolutionary theory, the stochastic ‘bottom-up’ painting/drawing process develops in a call and response to chance lyrical mark making. Complexity emerging from simplicity (Darwin’s ‘endless forms most beautiful’), infinite variation tempered only by the vernacular of the human form. His pragmatic aim is simply that of an examined practice, to be curious and vulnerable - it’s not necessary to have all the answers, just to keep asking questions.
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