Where Is My Mind?

29th August - 11th 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 the exhibition, in-person and online seminars will share peer support and practical resources. The project aims to create an open, supportive space for artists and audiences—reducing isolation and strengthening Margate’s creative community.

Artists

Billie Adele is a contemporary painter based between Cork and Dublin. Her work celebrates femininity while challenging the patriarchal structures that attempt to contain it, all while considering her own relationship and to beauty as ritual. Working primarily in painting, she explores the grotesque, the monstrous feminine and the body as a site of power, humour and resistance. Drawing on influences from the occult, cinema, sci-fi, camp horror and beauty rituals, Adele creates uncanny, theatrical worlds where exaggerated, amorphous bodies dissolve, transform and resist fixed ideals of femininity.

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 SOFT, 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 is an artist working primarily in sculpture and installation, whose practice explores materiality in relation to memory, archaeology, and the lingering structures of empire. Her work interrogates Western museological frameworks and the ways history is stabilised, classified, and romanticised, particularly through the language and aesthetics of excavation and ruin.

Alrai 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.

Brogan Bertie (b. 1995, South London) is a painter and artist based in Margate. He graduated from London College of Communication in 2019 with a BA (Hons) in Illustration and Visual Media. He worked in freelance illustration and animation until moving to Margate and training in leatherwork with Cope Studio.

Brogan’s art practice is rooted in connection; preferring to paint from life, his portraits offer an energetic and intimate 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.

Recent solo show, No moon tonight (just the light from other people's windows) at TKE Studios, Margate. Recent group exhibitions include: Works on Paper, Quench Gallery (2024), Claude Cahun: Beneath This Mask, The Beaney (2023), Y’all Better Quiet Down, Leslie Lohman Museum (2019).

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 varied densities 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, Begum graduated 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).

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.

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.

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)

Zoe De Caluwè - 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.

Laura Footes - 𝐵𝑜𝑟𝑛 𝑖𝑛 1988. 𝐿𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑒, 𝐺𝐵. Laura Footes’ practice is shaped by the experience of living with chronic illness, which she approaches not simply as a condition, but as a way of perceiving the world. Her paintings unfold through states of instability, vulnerability, and transformation, where bodily experience, memory, and imagined space become inseparable. In her work, dysfunction is not treated as a flaw, but as a threshold — a place where forms dissolve, shift, and re-emerge.

Recent solo exhibitions, L’antichambre, Bremond Capela, Paris, France, Anamnesis, SHRINE Gallery, New York, US and A Healing Dream, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, UK. Her work has also been shown in exhibitions at the Royal Academy, London, GB; the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, GB; and in presentations organized by the Royal Drawing School at Christie’s and Buckingham Palace, London, GB. Her works are held in collections including the Royal Collection, the Tracey Emin Foundation, the Rothschild Collection, the Blavatnik Family Foundation, and the Koç Family Collection.

Andy Holden is an artist whose work includes sculpture, large installations, painting, music, performance, animation and multi-screen videos. Andy's work can be found in the permanent collections of Tate Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery, Bristol Museum, Arts Council Collection and Zabludowicz Collection in the UK, Kroller Muller Museum, NL, and various collections in Europe.

He also performs and releases music with the band The Grubby Mitts, which was the subject of the film, Oh! My Friends, made for the exhibition about the history of Charles Schulz and Peanuts at Somerset House in 2018, and he curated the first festival of artists’ music at Wysing Art Centre in 2010.

Holden lives and works in Bedford, where he is currently running a project space, Ex-Baldessarre, from his studio, showing a mixture of outsider art, curated projects, experimental music and collaborative installations.

Lindsey Mendick works predominantly with clay, a medium that is often associated with decoration and the domestic, subverting these historic connotations to create skilled monuments to ‘low culture’ and the contemporary female experience.  Often culminating in elaborate installations, Mendick’s autobiographical work offers a form of catharsis, encouraging the viewer to explore their own personal history through the revisionist lens of the artist.  Her work challenges the male gaze, promoting instead an unapologetic, humorous and, at times, grotesque femininity.

Mendick received an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. She was the recipient of the Sky Arts Visual Art Award in 2024, the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020, the Alexandra Reinhardt memorial award in 2018 and was also selected for Jerwood Survey 2019 and the Future Generations Art Prize 2020. 

Mendick’s work will be included 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 (b. 1977, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK. Mirza’s adisciplinary practice tests the interplay and friction between sound, light and electric current. He devises sculptures, performances and immersive installations that pry on one’s awareness of their own experience. An advocate of interference, he creates situations that purposefully cross wires. He describes his role as a composer, manipulating his primary medium, electricity, alive, invisible and volatile natural phenomenon. Preoccupied with waves, from those in the ocean to neural oscillations, from soundwaves to the electromagnetic spectrum, Mirza asks us to reconsider perception and draws into question the categorisation of cultural forms, theological tropes and truth in relation to belief.

Kim Noble is an award winning comedic performance and video artist. His multi-disciplined approach has led him to work across theatre, TV, film, art, comedy and like every other loser he has a podcast.

Kim’s work uses a provocative and humourous style to expose the human condition: notions of death, sexuality, gender and religion are picked at with dry comedic use of tragedy meshed with absurdity.  He has a girls name and no longer smells of wee.

He was one half of Perrier Award-winning, BAFTA-nominated experimental art-comedy duo Noble and Silver but that was fucken ages ago.

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.

Guy Oliver (b.1982) lives and works in Margate. He graduated from the Royal College of Art, London (MA Painting) in 2015. He was shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2021 and received the Jerwood/Film & Video Umbrella Award 2020. Recent solo exhibitions include: "Millennial Prayer", Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2025), ‘Interiority Complex’, Quench Gallery, Margate (2023); ‘We Put The Unction Into Erectile Dysfunction’, Brooke Benington, London (2022); and ‘Hindsight’, Jerwood Space, London (2020).

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.

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 in a variety of media including video, sculpture, electronic music, large-scale installations, online works, text and drawing. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022. Her work has been presented at major venues internationally and she has received multiple awards for her artwork, videos and poetry, including the Film London Jarman Award in 2016. She is also an acclaimed poet whose writing has appeared widely online, in print and broadcast.

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.