Our artist-in-residence for Feb/Mar 2026 was Ash Martin, a multidisciplinary artist working primarily across drawing, poetry, and drag performance.

Ash Martin's dreamlike Biro drawings (rich with personal symbols, medieval marginalia, Skyrim fanart, and bubble-written poetry) chart a journey of liberation, self-mythology, and queer spiritual reimagining. These images are held within cartoonish papier-mache frames inspired by the architecture of churches and the Baroque frames of classical paintings.

For Testing Ground, Ash pushed this work further by creating large papier-mache sculptures, evoking ruined archways and TTRPG dioramas. The residency also enabled Ash to develop and rehearse a new performance which was debuted at Humber Street Gallery.

Our artist-in-residence for April/May 2025 was Emma Bolland, a transdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the intersections of painting, drawing, and assemblage.

Emma works primarily with these media, though their practice also encompasses writing across poetry, fiction, essays, and scripts.

For Testing Ground, Emma created an ambitious ‘expanded painting stage set’ that continued their material exploration of a decommissioned psychiatric hospital in Yorkshire.

Using their sensory memories of the building and its internal architecture, Emma tested impermanent compositions that sought to reproduce their experience of the hospital’s specific and affecting atmosphere.

They were interested in the physical and bureaucratic boundaries of such institutions, asking: who is kept in and who is kept out?

Our artist-in-residence for September/October 2024 was Simon Le Ruez, an artist with making at the heart of his practice.

Simon works mostly with sculpture and multimedia installations, often combining conflicting materials and colours to create friction. He finds inspiration in architecture and biological forms, imagining new relationships between the built and natural world. The resulting work bends the concept of the norm and pushes against mainstream ideas of beauty.

For Testing Ground, Simon created a series of installations that changed and evolved throughout the residency. He used the studio as a stage to publicly experiment with new visual compositions that filled the whole space, playing freely with materials, colour, light and transparency.

Throughout, Simon was interested in conjuring new landscapes and provoking playful ideas about what our spatial environment could be.

Our artist-in-residence for May/June 2024 was Grace Clifford, a recent graduate from Sheffield Hallam University.

Grace’s practice looks to the workshops of blue-collar trades for inspiration, reflecting on heritage, class and identity. Throughout the residency, she was interested in the rituals of these “making spaces” in relation to art studios, raising questions about the perceived value of creative labour.

Metalwork and welding were becoming increasingly important parts of her practice. For the residency, she built a welding workshop and used repurposed materials and offcuts to test out a new sculptural installation.

Our artist-in-residence for September 2023 was Bethan Maddocks, an artist who works with archives, communities and organisations to collect stories and make socially engaged artwork.

Bethan often works with light, paper, fabric, and found objects to create interactive sculptures and installations.

For Testing Ground, she produced a series of large-scale hanging papercuts drawing on imagery from the archives at Chatsworth House. They told the unseen stories of those who had worked at the estate over the years, from cooks and servants to gardeners and farmhands.

She also produced prototypes for kinetic paper sculptures lit from within, that cast shadows on the gallery walls.