Collective members
Meet our EMERGE collective members
Our collective membership benefits those who have been part of our EMERGE story, as well as other creatives and individuals who are helping to build a strong creative community in the Bath area. We aim to encourage collaboration, conversation and opportunities across multidisciplinary creative practice.
EMERGE collective membership offers support and opportunities for the wider creative community and our EMERGE resident alumni, and helps our current residents by providing a wider and more diverse collective of EMERGE creative partners.
EMERGE collective member benefits
- Free membership for 9 months
- Access to a growing creative community in Bath and the wider region
- Access to meeting rooms (subject to availability)
- Access to our front studio space for events (subject to availability and suitability)
- Free workshops and events (only open to our EMERGE residents and collective members)
- Networking opportunities
- Opportunity to apply to exhibit work in our Front Room space for one month, or space to put on a dress rehearsal or performance (subject to availability)
- Inclusion of selected “retail” ready items within our shop space (subject to available space)
- Quarterly newsletter for EMERGE and the opportunity to appear in our EMERGE collective member feature
- The opportunity to promote your shows, exhibitions, new collections on our social media channels
Collective members
Illustrator, muralist, curator and designer.
Having spent many years in the media industry, Emma took the plunge and set up her own art business and works as a freelance artist, designer and curator based in Bath. She was lucky enough to be mentored through a grant the Network for Creative Enterprise and Arts Council were running which finally gave her the confidence to go it alone.
She has recently launched her own collection of luxury silk scarves and prints that depict her artwork and illustrations. She takes on a variety of projects varying from murals in offices, hotels and private homes, curating artwork collections for hotels and supplying international retail companies.
Areas of expertise: Curating, creative resourcing whether it's exhibition space or artists resources, help in promotion, motivation to achieve goals
Creator of visual digital experiences using code, to provoke, communicate, connect, engage and motivate.
Dave is a creative technologist and artist in digital media. After completing an MSc Creative Computing at Bath Spa University, he was awarded a residency at The Studio Palace Yard Mews alongside other established creative practitioners. Dave is part of a collective awarded a Data Prototype grant by SWCTN to promote citizen awareness of the Circular Economy using art, data and technology.
Dave is a member of the Bristol-based art and technology collective Control Shift Network, and delivers workshops on creative uses of code and technology to those with limited or no experience. Dave collaborated with fellow Studio resident and artist Ximena Alarcon to create The Studio Breathes, a mobile web app that invites residents to slow down, reflect and send their breathing rhythm to The Studio as a proxy for your presence during lock down.
Areas of Expertise: Web, digital technologies, AI, basic game design, interactive installations, creative coding, generative/algorithmic art
Zoe is a textile designer who uses print and embroidery to created fabrics. She then uses her own fabrics to create products which she sells. These products include lampshades, cushions, wall-hangings, scarfs, bags and more.
Naughty Water provides a safety blanket for all small and growing artists to turn to when they find themselves struggling for freelance or commissioned work. It provides mechanisms to maintain the growth and progression of their careers, such as clothing collections, print collections, pop up events and promotional campaigns. This is what fills Zoe's time as a creative and business owner, as well as being the printer behind the clothing and print collections that run.
Working media: Textiles, screenprinting, embroidery, business support
Abi is a sculpture and installation artist that focuses on materiality through play. Objects are produced through the collective use of play, materiality and touch. The forms of these sculptures are her unconscious translation of existing objects. This allows the shape to develop freely to become disassociated with the familiar. In essence, they act as devices of unlearning, freedom and playfulness. The need for forms to exist purely out of aesthetic relationships results in installations of balance and tactility. These objects gravitate and respond towards each other as if paused in the act of play.
Working media: Sculpture, installation
Jodie's works attempt to investigate a sexually ambiguous identity which may come across in the structures she makes with fabric or clay that resemble female and male genitalia.
Working media: Textiles, ceramics, sculpture, installation
Mateja is building her own brand, Perosa Design: stories told in linen. Textiles is her main medium of expression, through hand and machine embroidery and print. Mateja is also trying to integrate dressmaking into her professional practice, as there is an increase in demand of hand made clothing.
Working medium: Textiles
Megan Kimble is a Textile Designer who uses her love for botanicals and nature to translate into her specialist work of print and embroidery. Megan’s work often uses a range of processes to build surface patterns within her designs through illustrations that are translated into digital embroidery and hand stitching finishes. The print bases and embroidery techniques used throughout her work all closely relate to the subject matter within the use of found materials that are developed into unique embellishments.
Megan produces work that is tailored to a fashion clientele for womenswear and has made a range of products to support her practice.
Working media: Textiles, print, embroidery
Alongside her decade-long career in digital marketing, Amy is a recent graduate from the Bath Spa MA in Children's Publishing, and now freelances in specialist digital content for publishers. Sunny Side Up is the umbrella name for both Amy's digital content specialist freelance work, but also a community bonded by a love of children’s literature and eco-positivity.
While these two streams are quite separate for now, Amy plans on unifying them into a positive, focused business that can offer creative digital content to a whole host of publishing and indie clients, while exploring offline messaging of eco-positivity through the production of magazines and child-focussed workshops.
Working media: Digital content, publishing, marketing
Exploring ecologically conscious ways of thinking about, valuing and interacting with urban places and spaces. Jonathan is interested in exploring people’s relationship to and with place, particularly in urban contexts.
His practice looks at new ways of experiencing place through art and place-based conversations which allow unheard of or othered voices to shape how we think about, interact with and value place. He often examines the boundaries and borders between different places, and how these act as porous membranes through which information and bodies pass.
''In a globalized world, our relationships to and with place can appear overwhelmingly complex, we find it hard to grapple with interactions between the micro and the macro, how we relate to the world and how our cities and towns are formed by processes, persons, animals and materials that have their origins elsewhere, or are completely uncoupled from any specific location. I hope to offer tools by which we can navigate this complexity and the fragility of our position within our inherited, dynamic ecologies.''
Working media: Writing, poetry
At Dumb Found Theatre we create work that immerses our audience fully into easily accessible, hilarious, punchy and poignant stories. We are a bold and brand new voice in the arts. We're always testing our creativity - trying new forms, experimenting and playing.
We collaboratively devise all of our work, each of us contributing equally to shows that evolve constantly, stories that we care about, and work that feels wild and alive, every time we perform.
Dumb Found Theatre is run by Bath Spa graduates Joe Topping, Jacob Aldcroft, and Aaron May.
Working media: Performance, devising, comedy, acting
Sam is a comedian and writer who focuses on the surreal, satirical and absurd nature of the world around him and the people who reside in it.
“Writing, recording and performing are the cornerstone of my practice. I have a particular interest in Comedy Writing, Voice Over and Voice Acting practice. Through observation and obscurity, I unpick social norms through satire and hyperbole. This takes its form as audio sketches, stand-up comedy performance material and curated comedy shows in partnership with local comedy collective 'Fast, Fresh and Dirty Comedy'.
Through my work I intend to explore the incongruous nature of our world and our lives using humour as a means of relaying that information to an audience. I'm constantly in awe of the comedian's ability to neatly package a large and confusing concept into an understandable and funny piece of content. I believe we all need humour in our lives to help us cope with the bad times and elevate us during the good times.
How to apply
EMERGE collective membership is by invitation only at this stage, but you can register your interest by emailing: emerge@bathspa.ac.uk.