Voices Of Pride
Chris Fleming, Will Hughes, Meg McWilliam, Davey Powell, Bethany Stead
Preview: Tuesday 10 June, 5-8pm
11 June – 5 July 2025
Chris Fleming, Danny Beard, 2024, spray paint mural, Canal Street, Manchester
Marking global Pride Month in June, the exhibition brings together a vibrant and diverse selection of work by LGBTQ+ artists working in the North East of England. It is part of the Clifford Chance Arcus Pride Art 2025 exhibition, the theme of which this year is ‘Voices Of Pride’, one of the largest corporate supported exhibitions of artworks by LGBTQ+ and supporter artists taking place across the law firm’s global network each year.
Will Hughes, Came through drippin’ (drip, drip), 2021, ribbed glass, MDF, chandelier icicle crystals, yellow foam ball, spoon, 46x40x18cm
Meg McWilliam, Cheap as Chips, 2024, mixed media collage, 25x20cm
Chris Fleming (also known as stencil artist IDa4 and drag artist Latrine Lurka) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centres on stencil portraiture and street art, exploring themes of queer identity, activism, and visibility. Using a bold visual style and self-taught techniques, they create socially engaged work that exists both within and beyond traditional gallery spaces.
Chris Fleming was born in Gateshead, in 1979, where they continue to live and work. Recent commissions of public works include work for Northern Pride and Newcastle Arts Centre, both (2024) and Gateshead Council (2025), reflecting a continued focus on community and queer representation. Their work was also featured in ‘We Are Part of History’, a 2017 touring exhibition across public sites and government buildings across Germany celebrating international LGBTQ+ narratives. They have collaborated with Bob the Drag Queen and were personally commissioned by fourth series winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, Danny Beard, to create their street portrait in Manchester.
Will Hughes creates work dealing with concepts of aspiration, queerness and glamour. They believe glamour is a spell which is cast, a blur, something transformative and seductive. As Donatella Versace once said, ‘you can be too boring, but you can never be too seductive’. They are interested in how the recreation of form through casting, layering and bejewelling affects an object’s cultural capital. They use song lyrics as titles to reference pop culture and obscure contexts, social and material histories to weave personal narratives which simmer below a veil of glossy, shiny surface.
Will Hughes was born in Leicester, in 1993, and is currently based in Stockton-on-Tees. They graduated from a BA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University in 2018 and were awarded the Kenneth Armitage Foundation, Graduate Award. Following a year’s studio fellowship at spike island in Bristol, they moved in 2019 to study an MFA at the BxNU institute (Baltic and Northumbria University), Newcastle upon Tyne. Hughes was artist in residence at BB15 in Linz, Austria, in 2021, and artist in residence at Lightpool festival in Blackpool in 2024. They were selected for the YSI Sculpture Network 2022 and was a Nominated Recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2023. Solo exhibitions include ‘La La La, La La La La La, La La La, La La La La La’, Abingdon Studios Project Space, Blackpool, 2023, and ‘Marea’, GS Artists, Swansea, 2021. They are a 2025 recipient of a Tees Valley Artists of the Year award.
Meg McWilliam, also known as @megmcart, is an artist whose mixed media collage work explores girlhood, class, and identity through a distinctly satirical lens. Rooted in her working-class upbringing in County Durham and shaped by the strength of her chosen queer community, McWilliam transforms the mundane into bold, maximalist collages. Her art playfully combines pop culture references, personal history, and hyper-femininity to critique societal expectations and celebrate nonconformity.
Meg McWilliam was born in Darlington, in 2001, and is currently based in Chester-le-Street. Her work is deeply inspired by the experience of growing up in a small North East town, capturing the push-and-pull between outgrowing your hometown and still holding a loyal nostalgia for it. Her piece, Renationalize The Parmo, 2023, was recently exhibited in the Baltic Open Submission, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 2024, and she is a 2025 recipient of the No More Nowt Digital Test Commission, which supports experimental new work from emerging North East voices. Alongside her independent practice, McWilliam is the Editor-in-Chief of RADGE, a magazine dedicated to platforming working-class creatives from the North East region. She has also produced work for RuPaul’s Drag Race UK alumni and collaborated with global brands such as Adidas, London, bringing her irreverent, rebellious style to a wide audience.
Davey Powell, Don’t Be Shy, 2024, cotton and bamboo wadding, 150x150cm
Bethany Stead, Salutations, 2024, installation of six works on sewn paper panels, acrylic, tempera, wax pencil, oil pastel, thread, wood frame, 223.5x118x72cm. Photo: Matt Denham
Davey Powell explores identity, heritage, and belonging through the tactile language of textiles. Deeply shaped by his early life within the Traveller community, Powell spent his first 19 years living on a Traveller site attached to a fairground and was fully immersed in the visual spectacle and rhythm of Showman culture. For years, his Queer and Traveller identities existed in conflict, straining his ties to both his heritage and his family. However, that world has now resurfaced in bold, quilted pieces that channel the energy of traditional fairground signage, reframed through a Queer lens. His work is a reclamation and reconnection with a culture that once felt lost. Through asymmetry, colour, and embroidered declarations, Powell weaves together fractured identities into something defiant, joyful, and whole. These works are not just textiles. They are banners of protest, pride, and possibility.
Davey Powell was born in South Shields, in 1987 and is currently based in Whitley Bay after 19 years away from the North East, living in Nottingham, London and Canada. He graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a BA Fashion Design in 2010. He moved to London and had a long career working in the fetish industry specialising in latex clothing and collaborated with several fashion designers for runway shows. He has recently exhibited as part of Leytonstone arts trail 2024 and currently has work in The National Glass Centre, Sunderland as part of the Hetain Petal’s ‘Come As You Really Are’ exhibition (until 5 July).
Bethany Stead works across drawing, painting, sculpture and textiles. She draws upon allegory, iconography, feminist theory, psychology, sci-fi and philosophy through visual storytelling and object making, culminating in symbolic spaces that disrupt our fragile socio-political fabric. She attempts to explore the discomfort and awkwardness of inhabiting bodies, both biological and artificial, the history of bodily health, the human connection to clothing and costume, notions of worship and religion, and our relationship with the non-human sphere through the lens of class. Following on from her recent research as artist resident at Hogchester Arts, Dorset, she is currently exploring the problematic nature of yogic and religious body cleansing rituals, and her early relationship with social class and Catholicism.
Bethany Stead was born in Wakefield, in 1995, and is currently based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She graduated from Newcastle University with a BA (Hons) Fine Arts in 2019. She completed the NewBridge Project Collective Studio Programme 2020-21, and was awarded an Elephant Trust grant for her solo exhibition ‘Snatch a Thread’, Moving Gallery, Sunderland, 2024. Recent group exhibitions include ‘The Omnipotence of Dream’, Salford Art Gallery, Salford, and ‘Antigone Revisited’, Hypha Studios HQ, London, 2024, and ‘Sustainable Clay’, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2025.
Share this page