FINDING YOUR WAY IN THE ARTS
SATURDAY 2 NOVEMBER, 2-3:30PM
Listen to recent, early, and mid-career artists reflect on their journey into the arts and how they continue to find work, and ways, for their creativity.
With reflections from Ffion Williams, Sadia Pined Hameed, and Sophie Lindsey.
If you would like to come along, please book a free place via Eventbrite here.
This talk will be taking place on our first floor. Unfortunately, we do not have disabled access to this floor.
FFION WILLIAMS
Ffion is an artist from Abergavenny, based between South Wales and Edinburgh. They received a BA in Painting from Edinburgh College of Art and were awarded the Purchase Prize at the Graduate Show. They exhibited in our annual graduate exhibition, Portal, in 2023.
Ffion’s work uses Cymraeg (Welsh) to explore identity, Welshness, and belonging. Their ongoing project, Cymraeg Ddrwg (“Bad Welsh”), embraces language as an evolving tool for creation, layering text, artwork, metal frames, and sound to create work distanced from legibility. Ffion’s practice is a manifestation of their complex and uneasy relationship with Welshness and aims to share similar stories on a wider scale.
Since graduating, Ffion has hosted numerous children’s art workshops and has been an active member of Mutual Artists Studio Co-operative. Mutual is an artist-run studio in Edinburgh, where members work collaboratively to run the space, providing and maintaining affordable working spaces for artists.
Ffion is currently exhibiting Cymraeg Ddrwg in Llantarnam Grange’s billboard gallery and hosting workshops encouraging experimentation and play with language.
SADIA PINEDA HAMEED
Sadia is a Filipina Pakistani artist and writer based in the Ebbw Valley. She studied English Literature at Cardiff University before developing a visual arts practice, partly through the creation of arts publication LUMIN.
Her work explores latent ways to speak about collective and intergenerational trauma through inherent anticolonial strategies of dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets. Using film, installation, text, performance and research into capitalist and colonial tools such as epistemicide and ecocide, her work further imagines what future tools for resistance, value and communication springing from these strategies might look like.
She has shown with Iniva, Mosaic Rooms, Bluecoat, Catalyst Arts, Brent Biennial, g39, Chapter, MOSTYN and others; and has received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists, Literature Wales New Writers Award, Freelands Fellowship and British School at Rome Fellowship.
Sadia is currently working with Llantarnam Grange and Big Pit National Coal Mining Museum to develop a new body of work that explores how radical movements of the past exist in international solidarity with movements today.
There will be an exhibition of Sadia’s work at Llantarnam Grange in May 2025.
SOPHIE LINDSEY
Sophie has worked part-time as our Marketing and Development Officer since 2019, moving from being a full-time creative freelancer to part of a small team at a regularly funded arts charity.
Graduating back in 2014 with a BA in Fine Art: Critical Practice from the University of Brighton, Sophie has spent 10 years moving from short term projects, internships, casual work, residencies, collaborations, and post-graduate education; working throughout England, Scotland, Wales, and internationally in the Netherlands, Spain, and the US.
From rural projects and socially-engaged arts organisations, running and curating online exhibitions and programmes, to developing artistic research, studying a Masters in Performing Public Space, writing, fundraising, and more, Sophie will reflect on the good and the bad to question the blurriness and boundaries that come with working in the arts, along with ambitions and strategies for the future.
