Explore a spider’s web of practices, perspectives, and generations. The MFA Fine Art Degree show draws together artists at different stages of life and making. It’s a unique opportunity to see artists early in their journeys and those returning to study, offering a diverse mix of voices, experiences, and approaches to art-making today. The title, A Gathering, celebrates the coming together of these artists: a gathering of different and overlapping practices, pathways and approaches. It also hints at the collective act of gathering: an event or occasion, a party, a riot.

Artists showcased: Nancy Daykin, Mark Duffy, James Epps, Rebecca Etheridge, Trish Hudson-Moses, David Loftus, Tijana Mamula, Kitty McKay, Paulina Michnowska, Ardra Nair, Archie Ogus, Liz Oughton, Janice Palmer, Frank Pretorius, Marlene Rösch, Marjolaine Ryley, Sumire Sakuma, Lauren Shakespeare, Annie Weatherley, Freddy Williams, K. Woods, Liang Zhou. 

For graduating second-year MFA students, the show marks the culmination of two years of intensive practice-based research. Visitors can expect a wide range of disciplines and themes. One work explores personal histories through audio interviews, written reflections, and loaned belongings—offering a quiet meditation on grief, care, and companionship. Another revisits the idea of the cabinet of curiosities, assembling artefacts and bespoke display devices to trace the layered, often intimate, relationships between people and stone.

For first-year MFA students, the exhibition offers a chance to experiment with their practice. Some are building on the momentum of recently completing their undergraduate degrees, while others bring new international perspectives to the course. Highlights include a walkable video sculpture nestled within a landscape of branches, leaves, and miniature figures—where natural and artificial worlds blur. Elsewhere, performative works engage with everyday materials such as glassware and toilet paper, reframing the familiar through playful, tactile gestures.

Nick Fox, who supervises the MFA, says the Fine Art department will be speaking to galleries so they can see amazing work on show in the exhibition. "This show is about helping these talented artists move on to the next stage in their careers," he explains. "This year, the exhibition is open for longer so there's more time for their excellent work to be seen."

Storytelling and disrupting public space

South African artist Frank Pretorius's paintings are inspired by the Boer War. "It is very very exciting. We have been working for this for two years" he says. "I realised art is basically about storytelling. It's storytelling of families and communities and I was thinking back to when I grew up and my grandparents and they always told stories about the Boer War."

Kitty McKay has reclaimed old paving stones from Northumberland Street and used them to install her own pavement in a studio. She uses installation, moving-image, sculpture, sound, collage and writing in her work, which is interested in how public space can be disrupted and reimagined through a queer and disabled perspective. Her degree show work also gave her an unexpected link back to her roots which she included in her piece as  a film.

"I had a kind of serendipitous encounter with some construction workers who were laying  a pavement," she explains. "And we realised that we are both from the same place in Liverpool and one of them knows my my mum and another construction worker's cousin taught me at school so that was beautiful and unexpected." She said her work has evolved during the MFA. "I wish I had six more weeks but life is very exciting at the same time," she says. "I think the way my practice has developed over the two years is that I wouldn't recognise what I am making now."

Myths and artificiality

Annie Weatherley graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Newcastle University in 2024. 

In A Gathering, Annie weaves maternal mythologies through the process of handmade papermaking, repurposing her old diaries into delicate paper reliefs and collages that trace her lived experiences of place, memory, and time. A poetry sound piece accompanies the work, layering vocal harmonies that mirror the textured surfaces of her collages—marked with painted soil and strips of handmade paper. Running through the work is the recurring motif of the stripe or cut—read as wound—a symbol of fragmentation, healing, and rebirth.

Her work is inspired by a myth from the Sami people, indigenous to Scandinavia. "This one is about a mother and her three daughters," explains Annie.  I've been inspired by goddesses and maternal mythology and my work is a mix of influences."

Marlene Rösch is on an exchange programme  from Munich. She brings together different media such as video, photography and sculpture. In her work, she uses herself and the recipient as objects in relation to their surroundings and environments. By doing so she attempts to reflect something of the complexity and contradictions of being in the world.  Interior and exterior worlds are mutually dependent. In A Gathering, Marlene invites the audience in a walkable sculpture installation to be part of a scenery of branches, leaves and little people.

"I am interested in the inbetween of naturality and artificiality, " says Marlene. "I'm also interested in the construction of nature, what is nature and what is not nature or what is human? Where is the overlapping and where the similarities and dissimilarities between all those things and what is the natural landscape."