WHERE IS MY MIND?
BILLIE ADELE, EMII ALRAI, RANA BEGUM, BROGAN BERTIE, BLCKGEEZER, MALCOLM BRADLEY, LIZZ BRADY, ZOE DE CALUWÈ, RHYS COREN, MATTHEW DARBYSHIRE, TRACEY EMIN, JULIE FREEMAN, LAURA FOOTES, ANDY HOLDEN, LINDSEY MENDICK, HAROON MIRZA, KIM NOBLE, HAROLD OFFEH, GUY OLIVER, ANYA PAINTSIL, ATHENA PAPADOPOULOS, HANNAH PERRY, NICKY PETRIE, HEATHER PHILLIPSON, KIERAN ROOK, PREM SAHIB
SATURDAY 29TH AUGUST - SUNDAY 11 OCTOBER 2026
Where Is My Mind? is a group exhibition bringing together artists with lived experience of mental health challenges. The project explores how artistic practice can function as a coping mechanism, a form of care, and a way of maintaining stability, while acknowledging the realities of making work alongside anxiety, depression, neurodivergence, trauma, and burnout. Rather than romanticising artistic suffering or framing mental health as a barrier to creativity, the exhibition centres on process, adaptation, and sustainability. It highlights the practical and emotional systems artists develop to continue working, positioning art-making as something that can coexist with vulnerability and uncertainty.
Alongside an in person exhibition there will also be a series of talks, discussions, online documentation, a booklet and online webinars!
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Billie Adele graduated with a BA in Fine Art from MTU Crawford College of Art & Design in 2025 and currently holds studios with Backwater Artists Group, Cork, and the RHA, Dublin, through the RHA Graduate Studio Award (2026–27). She is the recipient of the RDS Visual Art Award (2025), the Arts Council Agility Award (2025), the Arts Council Emerging Artist Bursary (2026) and the Valerie Gleeson Memorial Bursary (2026). Recent exhibitions include SOFTctrl, a solo exhibition at Backwater Artists Studios, Cork; The Body Electric, curated by Eamonn Maxwell at Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford; WHERE IS MY MIND at Quench Gallery, Margate; the RHA Annual Exhibition; the RDS Visual Art Awards Exhibition at the RHA Gallery, Dublin; and Ar Scáth A Chéile at the James Barry Exhibition Centre, Cork.
Emii Alrai Born 1993 / Blackpool / Scotland, Lives and works in UK has presented numerous solo exhibitions across the UK and internationally, including Capture (Towner Eastbourne, 2025), River of Blackstone (Compton Verney, 2025), A Lake as Great as its Bones (Maximillian William, London, 2024), Lithics (Quench Gallery, Margate, 2024), Passing of the Lilies (Jerwood Solo Presentations, London, 2021), and The High Dam (The Tetley, Leeds, 2020). Her work has also featured in major group exhibitions at institutions such as the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Art Gallery, British Museum touring exhibitions, CCA Glasgow, Bold Tendencies, and Warehouse 421, Abu Dhabi.Her work is held in significant public collections including The British Museum, the Arts Council Collection, the Government Art Collection, The Hepworth Wakefield, Leeds Art Gallery, and the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery.Alrai holds an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies and a BA in Fine Art (International) from the University of Leeds, and studied at the École Supérieure d’art et de design Marseille-Méditerranée. She has undertaken numerous international residencies, including Villa Medici, Rome; Wysing Arts Centre; Triangle Astérides, Marseille; and Pilchuck Glass School, USA. Her awards include the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, Jerwood New Work Fund Award, Knotenpunkt Artist Award, and the FUAM Graduate Art Prize.
The work of London-based artist Rana Begum distils spatial and visual experience into ordered form. Through her refined language of Minimalist abstraction, Begum blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture. Her visual language draws from the urban landscape as well as geometric patterns from traditional Islamic art and architecture. Light is fundamental to her process. Begum’s works absorb and reflect varieddensities of light to produce an experience for the viewer that is both temporal and sensorial. Born in Bangladesh in 1977, Rana Begum lives and works in London. In 1999, Begumgraduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design and, in 2002, gained an MFA in Painting from Slade School of Fine Art. Begum has received the Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture (2012) and Abraaj Group Art Prize (2017).
Brogan Bertie is a painter based in Margate. Brogan’s art practice is rooted in connection, painting from life in order to offer an intimate and energetic insight into the sitters. Using the physicality of oil paint, Brogan creates rich and textural works that construct an honest yet tender portrait of human connection and complexity.
Blckgeezer (b.1997) is a multi-disciplinary artist born and based in London. In my practice I respond to losing my right breast during the painting masters at Royal College of Art 2022. I approach painting and ceramics through my obsession with the non- colour. From black clay and porcelain to acrylic, oil, chalk, charcoal, sand, talc and sometimes artists hair. I use my lived experience as both material and medium. The work thinks about lightness and darkness, softness and hardness, fertility, mortality and iconography. Through the lens of Breastistentialism: how the underboob sweat gives nuance to perspective and Black Nausea: which is a speculative umbrella term I used to think about the work through the challenges and ambiguity of cancer treatment.
BLCKGEEZER holds a BA from the University of Westminster (2020) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2023), where she is currently completing an MA in Ceramics and Glass 2026. She was awarded the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship (2022–2023) and the Chadwell Award (2023). Recent exhibitions include Black Nausea / 24, Alma Pearl, London (2024); Material Matters, AGBI, London (2024); MANIFOLD DELUXE, No. 9 Cork Street, London (2023); BUFFER 2, Guts Gallery, London (2023); and Transforming Legacies, Black Cultural Archives, London (2022), a group exhibition on Black British art history curated by Pacheanne Anderson.
Malcolm Bradley B.1992, lives and works in London. Graduated Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art 2024, Recent exhibitions include; Image World: Curated by Alex Harding, group exhibition, Hypha Studios, London (2026), Same as it ever was: curated by Jean Watt, Koppel Project, London (2026), Errors and Vain Reports, CORPUS Gallery, Cambridge (2026), The Shape of Things, group exhibition, Workplace, London (2025), Look at the Lights, My Love, group exhibition, Teaspoon Projects, London (2025), CORPUS, group exhibition, CORPUS Gallery, Cambridge (2025), Scene VII: Hair, group exhibition, Matt Carey-Williams, London (2024), A garden the camera can't see, solo exhibition, San Mei Gallery, London (2023), on the flip side was, curated by Kollectiv Collective, group exhibition, Guts Projects, London (2023), Dilations, DES BAINES, London, (2022), “Hope” is the thing with feathers', group exhibition, South Parade, London, (2021)
Lizz Brady (b. 1988) is an artist and curator based in Greater Manchester and Liverpool. She is the founder of Broken Grey Wires, an organisation that explores mental health, disability, and accessibility within the arts. Lizz creates work that examines the tension between rejection, failure, and hope. She has curated ground-breaking visual art exhibitions that challenge conventional forms of communication, portraying the nuanced experiences of mental health in ways that resonate deeply with both audiences and participants.
Through ongoing engagement with her audiences, Lizz encourages people to dismantle the stigma surrounding mental illness, empowering individuals to embrace their identities and manage their mental health with confidence, autonomy, and support.
Zoe De Caluwé While having an academically informed understanding of art history, their practice is rooted in experimentation rather than formal training. De Caluwé undertook their Art History masters at Oxford University in 2022 and is now based in Margate.
Recent exhibitions include: ‘Always container, sometimes contained’ at TRA Collective, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ at Irving Contemporary, ‘I’m Nobody! Who are You?’ solo at Marcella, ‘Ein Kaltes Herz kann die glücklich sein!’ solo at Liminal Gallery, ‘Salon II’ at Liminal Gallery, ‘Honkatonk’ at Limbo, ‘Love and Mankind is Grass’ curated by Blue Whip at Joseph Wales; ‘Entangled’ at Liminal Gallery x Saatchi Gallery, ‘Preparations’ curated by Late Works at Cafe Oto, ‘A Cat. A Cat!’ solo at Limbo, ‘Superstitious’ curated by Leonie Cameron at Madre, ‘Another’ solo at Smith & Sun, ‘Feast of Fools’ at Limbo.
Rhys Coren (b. 1983, Plymouth, UK) is a London-based artist. Working across painting, animation, drawing, collage, writing and public art. Coren is represented by Cristea Roberts Gallery, London.
Matthew Darbyshire (b.1977) lives and works in Rochester, UK. He studied at Ipswich Art School, The Slade School of Fine Art, London and The Royal Academy Schools, London. He has exhibited widely in major London institutions including Tate Britain, The ICA, The Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Gasworks and The Royal Academy, and elsewhere in the UK including solo exhibitions at The Hepworth, Wakefield; Kettles Yard, Cambridge; Tramway, Glasgow; Manchester City Art Gallery and Nottingham Castle. He has exhibited in numerous museums and commercial galleries across Europe, America and Asia. Darbyshire has permanent public commissions in Holland, Finland and the UK, and artworks in public collections including CNAP, Paris; Arts Council Collection, England; Government Arts Collection, UK; The Hepworth, UK; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK and Deutsche Bank, Germany. Matthew teaches regularly across the country including The Slade, The Royal Academy, Goldsmiths, Camberwell and wrote the syllabuses for both Open School East and The Margate School. He has teaching fellowships from The Slade School of Fine Art, London; Kingston University and Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Matthew is represented by Herald St Gallery, London and Jousse Enterprise, Paris.
Dame Tracey Emin DBE RA b.1963, London, England
Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, neon, drawing, video and installation to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work. Emin’s art has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. Her paintings, monoprints and drawings explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963 and studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and was elected a Royal Academician in the same year. In 2011, Emin became the Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. In June 2024, King Charles III appointed her Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.
In February of 2026, Emin opened her critically acclaimed exhibition, A Second Life at Tate Modern, spanning the artist forty year career. Emin lives and works between London, the South of France and Margate, UK
Julie Freeman works with living systems and emergent technologies. Since the early 1990s, her large-scale immersive installations, sound sculptures and online artworks have advanced a critical approach to sound and real-time data as artistic materials. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the V&A, ICA, Barbican, Modern Art Oxford and Science Museum, as well as internationally, and featured in The Guardian, BBC, Vogue and New Scientist.
Andy Holden lives and works in Bedfordshire, UK Works can be found in the permanent collections of Tate Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery, Bristol Museum and Arts Council Collection in the UK, Kroller Muller Museum, NL, and various collections in Europe.
Lindsey Mendick (b.1987) is a Margate-based artist who works primarily with ceramics, embedding her sculptures within installations that include stained glass, film, furniture, large stage sets and performance. She received a BA from Sheffield Hallam University and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. Her autobiographical work offers a form of catharsis, encouraging the viewer to explore their own personal history through the revisionist lens of the artist.
Lindsey was the recipient of the Sky Arts Award in Visual Art in 2024, the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020, the Alexandra Reinhardt memorial award in 2018 and was selected for Jerwood Survey in 2019 and the Future Generations Art Prize in 2020. Mendick has participated in solo and group exhibitions at Jupiter Artland, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Hayward Gallery, Carl Freedman Gallery, Somerset House, Jeffrey Deitch, Cooke Latham, and Hannah Barry Gallery, among others. In 2025, she presented Wicked Game, an ambitious outdoor installation at Kenilworth Castle. With her partner, the artist Guy Oliver, Mendick initiated Quench Gallery in Margate to provide vital support for early career artists through exhibitions and mentoring.
Mendick’s work will be included in the British Art Show 10, a vital overview of the most exciting art produced in the UK during the past five years. Curated by Ekow Eshun, Mendick’s major installation will tour to Coventry, Swansea, Bristol, Sheffield, Newcastle Gateshead from October 2026- June 2028
Haroon Mirza has won international acclaim for installations that test the interplay and friction between sound and light waves and electric current. Haroon Mirza was born in 1977 in London where he lives and works. He has a BA in Painting from Winchester School of Art, an MA in Design Critical Practice and Theory from Goldsmiths College (2006) and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design (2007). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Lisson Gallery, London (2023), max goelitz, Berlin (2023), Lisson Gallery, New York (2022), max goelitz, Munich, Germany (2022), Gnration, Braga, Portugal (2012), Browns Brook Street (2021), CCA Kitakyushu, Kitakyushu, Japan (2020); John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK (2019); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China (2019); Ikon, Birmingham, UK (2018); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA (2018); Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, Denmark (2018); Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (2017); LiFE, Saint-Nazaire, France (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada (2017); Summerhall, Edinburgh, UK (2016); Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); Nam June Paik Center, Seoul, South Korea (2015); Matadero, Madrid, Spain (2015); Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2015); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); His work was included in the Islamic Arts Biennale, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2023), Beijing Biennial, Beijing, China (2022/2023), Noor Riyadh Festival (2022/2023), Lille3000 Triennale, Lille, France (2022), Lofoten International Art Festival, North Norwegian Art Centre, Svolvær, Norway (2022), Thailand Biennale, Ministry of culture, Korat, Thailand (2012), Liverpool Biennale, Liverpool, UK (2021), Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2020 & 2018), Whitstable Biennale, Canterbury, UK (2016), Sharjah Biennial11, Sharjah, UAE (2013), 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011), where he was awarded the Silver Lion. He was awarded the Northern Art Prize in 2011, the DAIWA Foundation Art Prize in 2012, the Zurich Art Prize in 2013, the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize in 2014, the Calder Art Prize in 2015 and the COLLIDE International Award in 2017 which has given place to a two-month residency at CERN, Switzerland in the course of 2018. In the spring this same year, Haroon Mirza unveiled Stone Circle, a large-scale outdoor sculpture commissioned by Ballroom Marfa, Texas, which will remain in the landscape for five years.
Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video and social arts practice. Offeh is interested in the space created by inhabiting or embodying histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture. He has exhibited widely including: Tate Britain; South London Gallery; Wysing Art Centre; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; MAC VAL, France and Art Tower Mito, Japan. His recent solo exhibition opened at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge in November 2025. He studied Critical Fine Art Practice at Brighton University and MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art. In 2020, he completed a PhD by practice exploring the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance at Leeds Beckett University. He lives in Cambridge, UK and is Head of Programme for MA Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, London.
Anya Paintsil is a Welsh and Ghanaian textile artist who lives and works in Glyn Ceiriog. Drawing inspiration from her childhood and adult life in rural North Wales, and her ancestral, Fante tradition of figurative textiles, Paintsil combines practices she was taught as a young child; rug making, appliqué and hand embroidery with afro hairstyling techniques to create semi sculptural large scale portraits. Paintsils’ figures explore the possibilities and politics of non representative depictions of the Black figures. Paintsil primarily works with discarded, found and repurposed fabrics
Anya made her debut at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2020, and since then Anya has received sustained interest from private collectors and public institutions. Recent acquisitions include Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The National Museum of Wales, The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester and The Women’s Art Collection at Cambridge University. Her work has been featured in publications such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Forbes, The Guardian and Ocula.
Athena Papadopoulos (b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) is a Greek/Canadian contemporary artist based in Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, collage, textiles, drawing and painting. She is known for creating psychologically charged, materially complex works that combine everyday objects, cosmetics, fabrics, toys, and industrial materials into hybrid forms that blur distinctions between the human, animal, and fantastical. Papadopoulos studied Visual Arts and Contemporary Art Theory at the University of British Columbia before completing an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include The New Alphabet at MOCA Toronto and Cain and Abel, Can’t and Able at MOSTYN Museum, Whales. Her work has also recently appeared in major group exhibitions across Europe and North America, including the Institute of Contemporary, Art Los Angeles, the Carlos Marsano collection Lima, Peru and Utopia Dystopia, Museo Madre, Naples.
Hannah Perry was born 1984 in the North of England, and lives and works in London, UK. She graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2009 and then the Royal Academy of Arts 2014. Her Recent exhibitions include: ‘HARD LOVE’ at TickTack, Antwerp, ‘Solo Show’ Baltic Gallery in Newcastle 2024, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf 2024, NTNT, Chester Contemporary, Duo show at Galerie Kandlhofer 2023, ‘Liquid Language’ Arsenal Toronto, 'A Smashed Window and an Empty Room' at the Kunstverein Hamburg, 'Gush', Somerset House, London and 'Rage Fluids', Kuenstlerhaus, Graz, Austria as well as an exhibition of the Artist-in-Residence programme of the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Russia. Her work has been shown at: Over the Influence (LA), Arsenal Contemporary (Montreal), ICA Off-Site (London), 'Private Settings: Art After the Internet', MOMA Warsaw (Poland), Royal Academy of Arts (London), and Stedelijk at Trouw, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). Upcoming shows include; Royal Academy Summer Show, ‘Where is Your Mind?’, Quench, Margate, opening July 2025, and British Art Show 10. Hannah Perry is represented by Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin), Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer (Vienna) and Jeanine Hofland Gallery (Amsterdam).
Nicky Petrie is a sculptor whose work explores the body, surface, motherhood, damage and the slow accumulation of experience across a female life. She is known professionally as Nicky Wilson through her institutional and curatorial work, including as co-founder and director of Jupiter Artland. Trained at Camberwell, Chelsea and the British School at Rome, Petrie exhibited through the 1990s in group exhibitions including Dirty at Ikon Gallery and Cornerhouse, England's Glory at Witley Court, and It's a Pleasure at Royal Festival Hall, alongside artists including Helen Chadwick, Hermione Wiltshire and Laura Ford.
After eighteen years building and leading Jupiter Artland, her own studio practice receded as she created platforms for others. She is now returning to making with a renewed sculptural language rooted in bodily memory, psychological residue, material vulnerability and the politics of female endurance.
Heather Phillipson is a British artist working across sculpture, installation, video, digital media, drawing, sound and text. Phillipson was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022 and her sculpture THE END was selected for the Fourth Plinth commission, Trafalgar Square, UK, from 2020-2022. Recent solo projects include The Quaking and the Shaking of Our Previous Making, for Sterischerberbst Festival, Graz (2026), Mama, longlisted proposal for the High Line Plinth, New York (2026), SPRITZ! a permanent outdoor sculpture for Hospital Rooms, UK (2025), Extra Time at Kunsthalle St Annen, Lübeck (2024), Out of this World for the Imperial War Museum 14-18 Now Legacy Fund at Glynn Vivian, Swansea, UK (2024), Dream Land, a co-commission between Art Fund and the BBC archives for Art Night, Dundee, UK (2023), and Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries commission, London, UK (2021-22). Also an award-winning poet and an acclaimed filmmaker, Heather Phillipson has published several poems of poetry and received the Film London Jarman Award in 2016 and the European Short Film Festival selection from the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018.
Kieran Rook is a Margate-based multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, and sound. Born and raised in Thanet, he studied Fine Art at UCA, first exhibiting in 2017 at Turner Contemporary, presenting his debut solo exhibition Temporarily Simulated at CrateSpace Margate, and taking part in Optic Illusions during Folkestone Triennial 2017.
After several years working as a decorator, during which he taught himself to paint in oils from a cold garden shed studio, Rook’s practice was reignited through Open School East’s Associates Programme in 2022–23. He is now based at Joseph Wales Studios in Margate, continues to exhibit locally, and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at Kavel Rafferty’s gallery in Margate this September.
The work of Prem Sahib (b. London, UK. Lives and works in London) embodies a poetic and provocative “destabilised minimalism”, referencing the architecture of public and private spaces, structures that shape individual and communal identities, senses of belonging, alienation and confinement. Mixing the personal and political, abstraction and figuration, Sahib’s formalism is suggestive of the body as well as its absence, drawing attention to traces of touch and frameworks of looking.
As recipient of the Royal Academy of Arts Frampton Fund for Sculpture, Sahib’s commission, Bronze Apotropaic (2025), is currently presented at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London. Sahib’s mid-career survey exhibition will open at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, in autumn 2026.
Recent solo exhibitions include Kin, Phillida Reid, London (2026); Liquid Gold, The Perimeter, London (2026); Doubles, Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (2025); Documents of a recent past, Studio Voltaire, London (2025); The Life Cycle of a Flea, Phillida Reid, London (2023); presentations within forms of the surrounding futures, the 12th Göteborg Biennial for Contemporary Art, curated by João Laia (2023); Balconies, Kunstverein Hamburg (2017); and Side On, ICA London (2015). Alleus, a live performance work co-commissioned by Somerset House Studios and The Roberts Institute of Art, was performed in 2024 at Somerset House, and toured to the Edinburgh Art Festival.
Sahib’s work has been included in group presentations at Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; Migros Museum, Zürich, Switzerland; Whitechapel Gallery; Hayward Gallery, London; KW Institute of Art, Berlin, Germany; Des Moines Art Centre, Iowa, USA; and the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, among others. That Fire Over There, an artist’s book developed from Descent, Sahib’s three-part show of 2020-21, was published in summer 2023 by Book Works, London.
Their work is in the collections of Tate, The Arts Council, Government Art Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway; X Museum, Beijing, China; and MONA, Australia.