Lead In the Pipes
Mary Adams, Callum Ashcroft, Lucy Gee, Morgan Gibbs, Katarina Jimack, Pablo Mitchell, Gina Newstead, Megan Nicholson, Liberty Peters-Murphy
Preview: Wednesday 7 May, 5-8pm
8-10 May 2025
Katarina Jimack, Colonel Grunckle, 2025, glazed ceramics. 80x60x55cm
‘Lead in the Pipes’ is an amalgam of liminal, surrealist and thought-provoking artworks by nine current Newcastle University Fine Art students. Although diverse in subject matter, all highlight the peculiar, both real and unreal. Spanning textiles, ceramics, painting and sculpture, the work engages with a variety of personal, political and comedic themes.
Mary Adams explores self-portraiture through puppets and performance. Her work investigates the relationship between the puppet and the master, and the line between agency and control, as well as ideas of alter-egos and how to represent yourself. With a background in textiles and sculpture, she is fascinated by colour and pattern. However, each element of her pieces is conceptually driven and, particularly with this puppetry project, she never takes herself too seriously.
Callum Ashcroft’s body of work, Lobstergeddon, creates a delusional reality that definitely does not mirror our own, employing humour to form a satirical hellscape of tyranny and misfortune under the iron-claw rule of Divine Prawnstar Philoneous Prawn. He forms sculptures and models to inform the worlds inside his paintings.
Lucy Gee works predominantly in ceramics. Themes of the relationship between humanity and nature are prevalent in her work. Her installation, Overthrown, explores nature superseding domestic everyday items. Gee utilises an unusual method of decoration through hand piping slip to create an organic effect.
Morgan Gibbs’ work is based heavily in painting and illustration and involves both figurative and abstract elements. The three pieces on display in the exhibition combine surrealist influences with motifs of cats, playing cards, and bodies of water.
Megan Nicholson, Y Mabinogion, 2025, coloured pencil, ink and watercolour on paper, willow and twine, 170x91cm
Katarina Jimack’s work centres around the unexpected and bizarre. She infuses an amalgamation of personalities into her pieces, working with clay and using her hands to mould her characters into existence. In her latest piece, Colonel Grunckle, the artist draws inspiration from stories told of her late relative: a high-ranking member of the Swiss military, he was frequently seen with a stern expression and stoic mannerisms.
Pablo Mitchell’s practice is occupied by participatory questionnaires: graphs and questions on a wide range of topics which are then answered by participants. The central piece in this collection of work is a screenprint of a small section of a participatory graph that questioned “How happy are you?”. He also creates unusual objects, sculptures and prints.
Gina Newstead’s work is underpinned by natural processes and the progression of time, investigated in this exhibition through using the movement of the sun marking its light and shadow on cyanotype textiles. This is accompanied by ceramic figure-like forms. Influenced by surrealism, she further enjoys creating textile creatures to physically embody insubstantial concepts.
Megan Nicholson’s work consists largely of drawing, painting and beadwork revolving around Welsh folklore and the mechanics of mythology. They explore the loss of Welsh history and the mythological tale, Y Mabinogion, challenging the viewer to consider lost social identities in Celtic cultures.
Liberty Peters-Murphy is a mixed media artist whose practice centres on depicting the internal landscape and creating mappings of the human soul. They are researching automatism and atheist spirituality, leading to their creation of ‘Map of the Soul I’, which represents a development from their ‘Internal Landscape’ series as a guide to the subconscious and as personal documentation.
The exhibition is supported by the Newcastle University Make it Happen Fund.
Callum Ashcroft, CNG-02 Crawdad Gunship, 2025, balsa wood, sporks, coffee stirrers, matchsticks. 40x20x12cm
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