Fine Art Studio Site and Context
MULTOCULAR
Our Fine Art: Studio Site and Context degree course at Swansea College of Art UWTSD has an established reputation as a centre of excellence in the visual arts in Wales, England and internationally.
Our course gives students access to their own dedicated studio spaces as well as a range of excellent facilities for traditional and digital media, including wood, metal and ceramic workshops, lens-based & sound studios and equipment, a dedicated life drawing room, and Mac suites with professional-level software.
Students are taught by internationally practising and recognised artists, drawing the professional world closer to their educational experience. Our course enjoys an excellent working relationship with local and national galleries and museums, where there are opportunities to participate in residencies, internships and training & mentoring activities to support their ambitions.
Our Work
Sommer Ashbie is an artist whose practice centres on nostalgia and the human experience. Working primarily in paint, she conveys a personal sense of longing for the past while considering how memory continues to inform and shape her present. Her work moves through a psychological space, where recollections often distorted or fragmented linger within the subconscious and influence identity and perception. In her current body of work, Ashbie turns her attention to childhood, investigating ideas of innocence and belonging. She considers the many ways memory can surface, from feelings of yearning to moments of joy and quiet understanding. By focusing on these subtle, often overlooked experiences, she reveals how they accumulate to shape a sense of self. Through this approach, she encourages viewers to reflect on their own memories and recognise the enduring impact of fleeting moments.
Stephen is an artist whose work is rooted in his observations of the landscape and his experience of the atmosphere in specific places. Rather than visual representations of places, he responds to the fleeting qualities of light, weather, colour, sound, and movement that define an environment.
Working across these two mediums allows Stephen to explore their different expressive qualities. Watercolour offers immediacy and fluidity, encouraging spontaneity as pigments move and interact across the surface. Oils, by contrast, provide richness, depth, and the opportunity for layering and reworking, enabling the gradual development of complex colour relationships and textures. Together, these processes reflect the shifting nature of the landscape itself, sometimes delicate and atmospheric, sometimes bold and dynamic. Each work becomes a reflection of how landscape can be felt as much as it is seen.
Aimee Brown explores grief and loss through found objects, flowers, and ceramics. Her practice examines absence and nostalgia, creating lasting records of loss and connections to the grieving process. A series of ceramic tiles reflects the nature of grief, with impressions suggesting ghostly traces of existence.
This theme continues in In Memoriam, which presents flowers in varying stages of decay. The work draws parallels between the decomposition of flowers and the absence of a loved one, exploring the natural cycle of life and death. Combining the visual beauty and fragrance of flowers, the piece creates an immersive sensory experience that mirrors the overwhelming nature of grief.
Flowers remain central to Aimee’s work, symbolising absence through presence and recalling those left on gravestones as public expressions of remembrance and care.
Collins artwork explores fears and heavy emotions through the use of abstract concepts and images. Collins uses a mix of acrylic paint, pastels, and charcoal to explore how everything we experience as humans is not black and white. Collins uses motifs such as eyes to explore the constant feeling of being watched and under pressure by outer society, and what expectations there are of artist.
Davies explores the transformation and layering of natural materials to process her personal experiences and emotions.
The work ‘Haenau’ combines her love of ceramics and painting, coming together to form a work reflecting her memories and feelings. The large ceramic piece acts as a protective shell, with wire stitching being a metaphor for the patching of psychological scars held by the body, marking her lived experiences. These scars are also shown in the layers of paint that cracked and crumbled from the wrapped form of the paper, a constant reminder of Davies’ mental battles. Layers showing through the cracks of a not-so-perfect life, where unfortunate experiences fade but never truly disappear.
Through these entwined materials, Davies reflects on memory, vulnerability, and healing, inviting her viewers to find their own meanings within the work’s layered surfaces.
Eve Ellis-Delve is a multidisciplinary artist, working across video, installation, and sound art. Her work considers states of being, belonging, and the shifting edge between natural and constructed worlds. Her background in religion, continues to inform an ongoing exploration of belief, identity, and place.
Delve’s work is deeply autobiographical, with each piece reflecting a specific moment or position in her life. She often places herself at the centre of the work, taking on the quality of a living portrait, one that documents not only how she sees the world, but how she exists within it.
Through immersive and sensory approaches, Delve examines what it means to occupy space, navigating the boundaries between organic and constructed environments, questioning how digital landscapes reshape our understanding of nature, selfhood, and territory.
Harding-Thomas uses fabric installation to process trauma, grief, and healing, focusing on her own experiences and her healing process throughout the past year, using light gauzy fabrics contrasted with bright pink walls reminiscent of her first childhood bedroom. The mixture of healing and residual anger warring throughout the installation.
A small, perfectly pink bedroom caused a lot of irreversible damage, with shaggy lilac carpets and blinding glitter mixed with wall paint. The bedroom offered a horrific mix of safety and cruelty wrapped in a perfect pink bow.
She prioritises fabrics that represent her feelings best, using thinner white fabrics to encapsulate her feeling of lightness and the relief of acceptance from processing her trauma over the last three years, the breathable fabric mirroring her now found ability to breathe freely after years of weighted grief.
BEFF comes in all shapes and patterns!
- She can model
- She can do acrobats
- She can run
- She can spin
- She can facepaint
- She can crawl
- She can run a lemonade stand
- She might be able to do a cartwheel?
- She can do anything!
- She’s changing look!!!
BEFF scrambles unspoken expectations and rules people made to protect themselves from their shame. She navigates through this bizarre world with elegance and tacky outfits, and she loves sharing her clothes!
Branwen Jones’ practice explores the material fabric of everyday life and how histories and politics are embedded within this space. These might be histories of origin, production, trade and use – be it commercial or personal – or future histories of disposal and pollution.
Working across sculpture, drawing, printmaking, animation, and video, Jones’ current work examines the colonial histories of everyday commodities, reflecting on process and material.
The process of casting has for centuries been used to make copies of statues and multiples of industrial goods. Europe eventually managed to decode and copy China’s method for producing porcelain, and then invented semi-porcelain, a cheaper earthenware alternative for mass production. These complex layers of meaning are evoked by numerous rows of blank semi-porcelain goods.
H Balicka explores the Forest as a representational landscape of the unconscious mind. They draw on Carl Jung’s archetypal theories, and the absurdist writing and attitude of Samuel Beckett, in order to interact with ideas of disorientation, growth and becoming endlessly lost.
Through painted fabric and immersive installation, Balicka creates environments that mirror the fragmented nature of dreams. Their practice investigates the tension between visibility and obscurity, inviting viewers to navigate layered surfaces and shifting forms. Here, the forest encourages introspection, where unconscious thoughts can be lost within the labyrinth of trees.
If you ask the leaves for directions, expect to only get more lost,
For the leaves will fall apart,
as they float into that one nightmare you thought was forgotten.
It is cold here.
May you wonder forever, oh tired one.
Tilly Lewis investigates flesh and body, using the unpredictable nature of watercolour to explore nudity and human nature. Her practice rejects mainstream representations of the body, diverting assumptions that flesh equals sex, or that nudity means pornography.
The abject nature of the body (particularly a feminine body) often disturbs audiences. Lewis is attracted to this disturbance and terms like ‘disgusting’ that we attach to the body, alongside tasks we undertake to conform to societal standards and purity culture.
Using paint and water as a documentary medium, she uses her form as a tool, a means to make an authentic impression of the body, fully immersing herself within the painting process.
The artist’s work is a collection of small watercolour paintings of Welsh churches that are part of her ancestry and memories. Each painting is a different point of view of many different churches that they have visited. The paintings are done in a light and airy painting style where the artist lets the paint have a mind of its own. Phillips’s work is of the peaceful feeling that she feels and remembers when thinking about being in a church and has translated that feeling into their paintings.
Anastasia’s practice explores the relationship between environment, emotion, and human experience through painting, drawing, and printmaking. Rooted in observation and intuitive response, her work examines space, materiality, and the tension between order and chaos, vitality and fragility.
In her current work, the forest becomes a metaphor for inner life: dense, chaotic, and fertile, where thoughts and emotions intertwine like roots and branches. Through depictions of local forests and gardens, Anastasia evokes confusion, disorientation, and emotional entanglement, while recognising growth within complexity. By portraying life persisting through disruption, whether natural or human-made, she captures the coexistence of disorder and vitality, revealing resilience, beauty, and quiet hope within fractured expectations.
Kesia Tucker’s practice explores the relationship between material, environment, and ritual through processes rooted in the natural world. Using natural pigments, inks, and organic matter, she approaches making as an alchemical act, examining how elemental materials evoke hidden, sacred, and liminal spaces. Her work is shaped by the sensory and emotional responses landscapes provoke, particularly curiosity, wonder, and the tension of the unknown.
This body of work centres on the classical elements: earth, water, fire, and air, represented through canvases made entirely from natural materials. At the centre sits a sculptural work representing ether: a glazed ceramic and woven willow form containing found and handmade objects, partially submerged in water. Over time, the natural colours may shift, reflecting the living, cyclical nature of their origins.
Exhibition Gallery
