Voices Of Pride

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.