BEAF Arts has been selected to take part in the prestigious British Council Uk/Poland Festival 2025, curating 2 exhibitions, across Muzeum Śląskie in Katowicach, Poland and Boscombe Arts Depot in Bournemouth, UK.
Muzeum Śląskie (Katowicach)
19 June – 26 October 2025
Boscombe Arts Depot (Bournemouth)
28 June – 17 August 2025
You’re Not Alone: Women in Art 2025 brings together ten visual artists; their experiences as women outside mainstream art and education and foregrounding their significant contributions to contemporary art. The exhibition showcases the spectrum of different journeys through painting, drawing, textiles and installation, created by self-taught, working class, learning disabled and neurodivergent artists, and by women who feel excluded because of the systems and structures that are inherent within the art world.
Conceived and researched by Carol Maund, Director, BEAF Arts
Featuring works by artists living in the South and Southwest of England it includes: Mahlia Amatina, Kate Bradbury, Ann Churchill, Yvonne Mabs Francis, Sarah Jane Hender, Delaine Le Bas, Kim Noble, Elinor Rowlands, Patricia Shrigley and Kwaga Sillingi.
Painting © Sarah Jane Hender
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Mahlia Amatina (b.1984, Reading, UK, lives and works in Reading, UK) is an artist whose practice began just before she was diagnosed with Autism in 2015. Her work is focused on themes around neurodiversity, and she uses multi-sensory experiences to give insight into life on the autistic spectrum. Her practice includes immersive interactive installations, abstract mixed media paintings and digital art work. She has undertaken residencies, and had her works displayed in both fine art and community venues in seven countries, as she pushes for artwork to be experienced by a wider variety of audiences.
Mahlia has exhibited across the UK and has been awarded Arts Council England (ACE) funding several times, including the ‘Developing your Creative Practice’ fund. She has been featured as one of the ‘Top 50 Influential Neurodiverse Women’ by Women Beyond the Box and is one of Scope’s selected artists. Available for talks and collaborative art projects, Mahlia also has a special interest in autism and the workplace and building neurodivergent-friendly workspaces. mahliaamatina.com
Mahlia Amatina with work ‘Transitions I’, acrylic on canvas in the background
Kate Bradbury (b.1961, Ibadan, Nigeria, lives and works in London, UK), is a prolific creator of a diverse range of artworks. From detailed ink drawings over a metre in length to sculptural twirling dervishes made from found objects, her style of work is ever changing. Since 2003, the motivation for her work comes from a variety of sources, but is particularly drawn from objects she finds. She gathers endless supplies of discarded industrial and household waste that she places in relevant boxes around her home, where they stay until the opportune moment arises. Bradbury’s work goes through phases, sometimes focusing on figures and characters and sometimes on more abstract forms.
Each piece tells a story plucked from her imagination. Having no formal art training, Bradbury learns through trial and error, experimentation and by observations of how others work. Intuitively working day and night, Bradbury creates her pieces losing all sense of time, getting lost in the details of her drawings or sculptures. Several private collectors now own Bradbury’s work across the UK and her work featured and sold in the Royal Academy of Art’s Summer Show in 2016 and 2021. outsidein.org.uk/galleries/kate-bradbury/
Kate Bradbury in her studio, photograph by George Maund
Ann Churchill (b.1944, Oxford, UK, lives and works Bath, UK) is a self-taught artist and maker whose output encompasses drawing, painting, knitting, batik and beading. Churchill views her practice as a meditative process that supports her own inner, spiritual journey. Her practice developed during the 1960s through daily black and white automatic drawings. During the 1970s Churchill’s process grew to encompass vibrantly coloured inks, creating complex works on paper which combine swirling, interlacing lines and forms with passages of labyrinthine pattern. Her most recent works evoke the natural world, incorporating earthly forms, invented landscapes and sacred imagery. Made without intention or plan, the works unfold and develop automatically through the intricate and subtle interplay between the hand and the unconscious. Ann is interested in how the term ‘doodle’ is derided or understood negatively, to her doodles are a way to express the personal unconscious imagery that we all have within us.
Selected solo exhibitions include GRATITIDINOUSLY J.M.Churchill & Ann Churchill, Quench, Margate (2023). Ann Churchill: Works on Paper: 1974-78, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2019); and GRANDINE, London (2018). Her work was also included in a Hayward Touring Exhibition: Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist As Medium, Drawing Room, London (2020), Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool (2021), Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea (2022) and Millennium Gallery, Sheffield (2022). annchurchill.art @drawnbyann
Ann Churchill at home in Bath, 2019, photograph by David Bebber
Yvonne Mabs Francis, (b.1945, Oxford, UK, lives and works in Bicester, UK) trained in Fine Art at The Slade School of Art in the Sixties. A year after she left art school her beloved father died. Immediately she had obsessive thoughts, and suffered the mental hell of psychosis. She admitted herself to the Warneford Hospital in her home town of Oxford where she spent three months. Following this horrendous experience Yvonne designed clothes, manufactured them, and retailed her garments under the name MABS. After eleven years, she returned to painting. In 2000 she decided she needed a subject in her paintings. It was only then she thought of her suffering during her breakdown, and how little people knew, even Doctors of the exact experience. She wanted an image which would arrest you and encourage you to read the text. The text is an integral part of the work. The paintings shown in this exhibition is one of a series of eight.
Yvonne exhibited in John Moores 1968. She has exhibited across Oxford and London, most notably the Mexico Gallery, 2004, ‘Wild Old Women’ Novas Gallery 2008, ‘Dare to Wear’ St. Pancras Gallery 2010, London. Barbara Herbin wrote an article on her for the international Outsiders magazine Raw Vision 2017. outsidein.org.uk/galleries/yvonne-mabs-francis
Yvonne Mabs Francis in her studio
Sarah Jane Hender’s (b.1972 Dorset, UK, lives and works in Bournemouth, UK) work draws from personal experience and often offers a tragic, fragile perspective. Her human figures derive from the shadows of fatalistic hedonism, the uncanny and feminist principles parry with gender violence. Hender’s fascination with the figure stems from her early obsession with self-image and the fetishisation of the body and face. More recently, she has been drawn to depictions of female masculinity, androgyny and the blurring of identity.
Sarah Jane spent many years in London where she was part of an art collective that converted disused buildings into art studios and exhibition spaces. Whilst in London, she explored lo-fi wearable fashion and public performative interventions. At the core, her work has been driven by experimentation within a wide breadth of materials that include hand-sewn garments, clay-clad figurative soft sculptures and video. Her practice spans over twenty years with the past ten years as a full-time parent and home educator.
Graduating in 2024 from Central St Martins with a Distinction and winning the Cass Art Painting Prize. Her works have been included in Dangerous Women at The Russell Cotes Museum 2024, Surface Skin Gramercy Park Studios, London 2025 and one of the artists selected by Sarah Maple for Seeing the Unseen, as part of the UAL showcase CSM alumni curation. Sarah is represented by Gertrude – gertrude.com/artists/sarah-jane-hender
Sarah Jane Hender with ‘Nike‘ 2024 in the background, photograph by Sam Jackson
Delaine Le Bas (b. Worthing, UK 1965, lives and works in Worthing) is a British artist whose work addresses nationhood, land, belonging and gender across diverse media including fabrics, film, performance, photography, texts and sculpture. “I try and express myself in many ways,” Le Bas says. “I want to show people how it feels to be ‘othered’ and where we fit when we are not part of a community.”
Le Bas was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2024 and presented large scale immersive installation works for the exhibition “Turner Prize’ at Tate Britain. She has exhibited extensively both in the UK and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Tramway, Glasgow (2024), Secession, Vienna (2023), Whitechapel Gallery, London (duo show with Damian Le Bas) (2023). She created a commissioned work for a group exhibition ‘Radical Landscapes’ for Tate Liverpool (2021). Le Bas collaborated extensively with her late husband Damian Le Bas (d. 2017), creating installations including ‘Safe European Home?’ and musical stage designs and costumes for Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin) (2017). Her works were included in the first Roma Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2007). Le Bas will be a subject of a solo show at NCA Newcastle in summer 2025.
Le Bas is represented by Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix London www.yamamotokeiko.com
Delaine Le Bas, A Stranger in Silver Walking on Air, 2025, photograph by Alexander Christie
Kim Noble (b.1960 London UK, lives and works in London UK) is a mother, artist and author who has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). DID is a creative way to cope with unbearable pain. The main personality splits into several parts each having an amnesic barrier between them. In and out of hospital from the age of 14, with no formal art training, Kim and her alters became interested in painting in 2004 after spending a short time with a support worker and trainee art therapist at the time. The resulting 13 artists each have their own distinctive style, colour and themes that they work with. Many are unaware they share a body with other artists.
Combined, they have had over 100 exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Noble was the first Artist in Residence at Springfield University Hospital in Tooting, South West London. Her book ‘All of me’ was published by Piatkus in 2011. Noble has had many TV and radio appearances, including the Oprah Winfrey Show, This Morning Show, Anderson Cooper Show and BBC Radio1 with Victoria Derbyshire. kimnobleartist.com
Kim Noble in her studio, photograph by George Maund
Patricia Shrigley (b.1960 Liverpool, UK, lives and works in London, UK) is an underclass neurodivergent artist who challenges the discrimination and stereotypes perpetuated by politicians and the media. She employs foxes and pigeons in her work to reveal class-based prejudices—foxes represent the so-called ‘feral’ youth, while pigeons are associated with negative narratives about the poor ‘breeding for benefits.’ Through her art, she critiques these dehumanising labels and emphasises resilience and dignity.
Her films have been exhibited internationally in galleries and film festivals, and she has been interviewed by The Hospital Club and Filmarmalade. She exhibited one of her films, Estate Face, at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, and she received the Light of Day Prize from Artquest. She recently worked as an artist animator on the Emmy-winning Create Together series for YouTube Originals and exhibited at Sotheby’s London as part of the Outside In National Open Exhibition. linktr.ee/Patriciashrigley
Patricia Shrigley at home in bird mask, photograph by George Maund
Kwaga Sillingi (b.1991, London, lives and works in London) is a painter who combines paper collages and acrylic to create bold large-scale paintings. She has developed her artistic practice at ActionSpace’s studio in Studio Voltaire since 2018.
Through her practice, Kwaga repeatedly explores densely layered colour combinations and formations of circular shapes. Frequently working across four paintings at a time, Kwaga has developed her own systematic painting process; initially collaging pre-painted circles into ordered patterns as a base layer before applying varying layers of paint. Each layer has its own unique approach. Over time the patterns laid down have shifted from tight order into looser, diagonal formations with layers of thick painterly loops. The work gradually evolves as Kwaga assertively applies thick brush marks, revelling in the rich colours and paint texture. As each layer is added the underlayer of collaged circles disappears, leaving an echo of dense, looped circles. Kwaga’s work feels like an ongoing expression of bonding, a relentless, intuitive and loving exploration of colour, texture and above all the circular form.
Kwaga has exhibited annually at Open House, Studio Voltaire, London since 2021. Recent exhibitions include Vital Mix (2024), Wandsworth Arts Fringe, London, x3 Ritual Patterns (2021), online exhibition, ArtWorks Together (2021), online exhibition and Where The Heart Is (2019), Cockpit Bloomsbury, London.
Kwaga Sillingi is a Resident Artist at ActionSpace – actionspace.org/artists/kwaga-sillingi/
Kwaga Sillingi in her studio, 2023, photograph courtesy of the artist and ActionSpace
Elinor Rowlands (b.1984 Luxembourg, lives and works in London, UK) is an award-winning UK-based artist and multi-disciplinary maker, whose work combines elements of sound art, composition, drawing, painting, spoken word, and AV. As a Fine Art practice-based PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University’s Artistic Research Centre (ARC), her research focuses on autistic stimming as an artistic methodology. Rowlands explores how her experiences as an autistic individual informs her artistic practices.
Through her drawings, paintings, and films/soundscapes, Rowlands creates dreamlike worlds, inspired by ritual, magic, and trans-feminist perspectives. Her work also engages with psychogeography, hauntology, and autoethnographic narratives, often incorporating highly sensorial and fictional elements. As an autistic/ADHD individual with synesthesia, Rowlands’ work is shaped by their/her unique perspective, which they/she expresses through repetitive and rhythmic gestures.Rowlands’ paintings are often created during periods of burnout, where highly saturated colours, mark-making and strokes flow freely onto paper and canvas creating tacit knowledges. She collaborates with others to develop new languages, investigate folk histories, and build temporary communities. Her practice encompasses radical approaches to making, revealing, hiding, overlapping and collaging, accompanied by poetic language and ancestral whispering.
Rowlands’ work has been supported and presented by organisations including: Canal and River Trust, The Supporting Act Foundation, Arts Council England, Creative Health Camden, Nottingham Contemporary, Unlimited, LADA, Shape, Tate Modern and Disability Arts Online. elinorrowlands.com @elinorrowlandsart
Elinor Rowlands at home in her garden, 2025
