Our 2024 grantees are graduating
It’s the end of summer, the slow slide into autumn’s started, and the spectre of winter is looming. But there’s an upside: it’s graduation time for many of the emerging artists we’ve supported over the last year.
To celebrate we asked some of them to share their degree work. From film to painting, illustration to conducting, here’s a little taster of what a handful of our 2024 grantees have been up to.
Thomas Arnold
Arnold’s practice revolves around observation. The collecting of fragments of lived experience including memories, conversations, and dreams provides a starting point from which to create. Arnold’s finished work, often taking the form of large-scale paintings or handmade books, is deeply personal yet ambiguous; a metaphorical collage united by consistent themes of loneliness, yearning, queerness and nostalgia. He recently graduated from Edinburgh College of Art, in Scotland.
Thomas: “My graduate show installation, ‘Twos’, explores the duality of grief and joy which has defined queer experience for centuries. In a long, cornered space, conversations take place; personal experience meets stories from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, charting connection and loneliness, longing and comfort, fear and desire.
David Gere’s love for his partner Joah Lowe, who died of AIDS in 1988, is memorialised in ‘Corpses Dancing, Dancing Ghosts’ [part of the wider show]. The work on paper is suspended just above head height, compelling viewers to look up to these men who were often looked down upon while alive.”
Lauren Musa-Green
Lauren Musa-Green graduated from the University of Edinburgh’s film and television course. Her practice aims to diversify the film industry and amplify marginalized voices, particularly through documentary work addressing racism, sexism, and classism. Key to Musa-Green’s approach is the belief that production roles carry significant influence and should be used ethically in order to foster social change within the industry.
Here Musa-Green shares a trailer for the documentary ‘Inherited Silence’, for which she was executive and creative producer. This deeply personal journey of discovery explored the hidden family history of the film’s director, Lola Barrero. The journey was prompted by two faded portraits in Barrero’s father's house, and took her to her family's village, a place marked by the echoes of the Spanish Civil War and the long shadow of Franco's dictatorship.
Lauren: “I was the executive and creative producer on this film, working directly with Lola to bring the project to fruition. I have been involved in the project from almost the very beginning, contributing to the narrative, editing, and coordination of both technical and organizational aspects. I aim to use documentaries as a tool to inspire social change and am keen on propelling voices from marginalized communities."
Lotte Siu
Lotte Siu is a UK-based illustrator born and raised in Hong Kong. Her artistic practice is dedicated to preserving the rich but vanishing culture and stories of Hong Kong through evocative illustrations. Passionate about cultural heritage, Siu’s work serves as a bridge between past and present, keeping the essence of Hong Kong alive and protecting its threatened traditions for future generations.
Siu’s graduation work features in Blue Days in the UK, a group show featuring the work of six Hong Kong–born artists, each of whom recently relocated (or are in the process of relocating) to the UK. Siu and her five collaborators explore the complexities of relocation and the notions of alienation, home, and unfamiliarity.
Lotte: “This project is a personal exploration of the intangible losses experienced through migration, not just of physical belongings, but also of memories, identities, and emotional connections, and how one eventually begins to rebuild. Drawing from real-life stories shared by individuals who have experienced migration, I translated these emotional fragments into a series of delicate, expressive illustrations.
The images are reimagined as part of a modular, cube-based puzzle, symbolising the disassembly and reconstruction that often accompanies the migrant experience. The work reflects on how, even in the face of loss, there is a quiet possibility of reconfiguring, of building something new from what remains."
Ramon Theobald
Ramon Theobald is a Brazilian conductor and pianist who made his debut as a conductor at the Opéra Bastille in Paris in 2023. Theobald’s artistic development and recent success have been made possible, he says, thanks to opportunities granted him by governments and reputable institutions. As a result he is committed to working with European musical institutions to foster better opportunities for the next generation of young Brazilians to pursue their musical careers beyond their home nation.
This year he completed an exchange at ICAV, Institut Canadien d'Art Vocal [Canadian Institute of Vocal Arts] where he acted as conductor and further developed his aspirations for future work.
Ramon: “The ICAV Festival was one of the most important experiences I’ve had this year. I conducted two concerts during the festival, and being part of such a vibrant international environment, working closely with artists from all over the world, was incredibly enriching.
It was especially meaningful for me because of my ongoing projects to support young artists. The exchange I had with the ICAV team, particularly with Marc-Antoine d’Aragon and Nadia Monczak, gave me new insights and helped me reflect on ideas I want to develop in the near future.”
Haiqing Wang
Haiqing Wang’s work juxtaposes personal and collective life experiences with fiction, pop culture, and historical events to address the marginalized narratives of the bodies and emotions of Asian women, queer politics, and collective memory. Moving between reality and fiction allows Wang to switch between micro and macro perspectives while the autobiographical approach enables her to merge her own identity with those of the people she portrays.
Wang’s graduation show, Family Affair, explores the shifting boundaries between reality and fiction, role-play and pretense. At its core is A Drop of Crocodile’s Tears, a film documenting a queer Chinese director’s casting process for a staged wedding—a fictional act that becomes an emotional rehearsal for real life. Additional materials, such as a casting call poster and a screenplay written after the film’s completion, offer alternate entry points into a world where the narrative is constantly being constructed. Other works in the exhibition extend this inquiry through material traces of personal and collective labor.
Another aspect of the show is the collaborative removal of floor paint by the artist, a Chinese immigrant family, and various friends—which embraces the kinds of labor usually rendered invisible in the presentation of art, further questioning authorship and the value systems of the art world. The show also includes True Story, an evolving installation composed of everyday objects from the artist’s own apartment wall, which blurs the line between life and display. Transposed into the exhibition space, these objects create a layered self-portrait—where home becomes archive, and archive becomes identity. Together, these works open a fragile, liminal space for reflecting on the politics of intimacy, the choreography of roles we perform in private and public life, and the porous edges between art and autobiography.
