Practice in Place was the culminating activity of Fruit Factory Network, a year-long pilot programme created to support the development of visual artists living and working in Hull.

The programme was been centered around visits to some of the UK’s visual art hubs, museums, galleries, residency programmes and artist-run spaces to showcase leading examples, as well as connecting artists from Hull with arts professionals working across the country.

Practice in Place saw the participants exhibit a varied collection of works at Humber Street Gallery. The artists produced responses to a multitude of concerns including climate change, displacement and migration, and have done so through a variety of art forms, including painting, photography, film and more.

To download and read more about the works exhibited, click below:

About the artists

Jessie Davies lives and works in the Humber region. Through lived disability, Davies situates herself directly into the ecosystem of the region, producing intimate and textural paintings and soundscapes based on the rural environment. A short cycle ride from the Humber estuary, Davies produces work by immersing herself into the reeds and foliage, extensively researching specific habitats and ecologies. Her work highlights important but fragile wetland environments which play a vital role in our wider ecosystem.

Ruby Deverell lives and works in Hull. Interested in bodies of water, a focal point to which she regularly returns, the artist has travelled extensively to capture abstract representations of place, patterns and movement, primarily using analogue photography.

The Dirars (Arafa, Mayas, Ethar, Waieel, Akram and Gaida Dirar), are a group of collaborative artists based in Hull. Born in West Sudan the family arrived in the UK in 2015 as refugees through then UN gateway resettlement programme. Having spent four years in a refugee camp in Egypt, the group developed their skills in drawings, paintings and poetry to reflect and share their story and to draw attention to the ongoing plight of the millions of people fleeing war and persecution.

Nash Hales is a Fine Art student at Leeds Arts University. Through painting, the artist creates surrealist imagery that journals dream worlds and hallucinations as a mode to explore futurism and hyperreality.

Wilf Holloway is a multimedia artist based in Hull, who works mainly with paint, pastels and fabric. The artist uses instinctive, logical process and elements of mathematical construction, both in colour and form, to create engaging and special compositions.

Lucy Howson lives and works in Hull. Howson uses painting and object making as an autobiographical tool to capture her domestic surroundings, a theme that she parallels with 19th century impressionist painters who became increasingly fascinated with their personal environments.

Sam Metz studied Architecture and Critical Theory at University of Nottingham and has previously trained in physical theatre. They worked out of the Makerspace in Hull during 2019. Metz’s work researches, creates and reflects on the concept of what they refer to as ‘choreographic objects’ – an object that has a relationship with movement, through its relation to the body, the making process or in its appearance. They work across the mediums of animation, analogue and digital film, painting and craft.

As a neurodivergent artist with sensory processing differences, these objects allow Metz to work in non-verbal ways that begin and end in movement and embodied interactions without recourse to traditionally privileged verbal and written forms of communication.

Myles Noble is a visual artist based in Hull and is currently a student on the BA Fine Art course at Hull College. Noble’s practice explores drawing, painting, moving image and performance, to confront themes of mortality and illness which are drawn from the artists personal lived experiences.

Lauren Saunders is a Hull-based visual artist-activist who explores questions surrounding environmental ethics within her highly experimental and philosophy-inspired drawing practice. She is also co-editor of critical and accessible Hull arts journal The Critical Fish.

William Vinegrad is an artist whose work explores consumerism, the environment and gender. Vinegrad works in a variety of mediums, including performance, photography, and mixed media, often using humour, song and beauty as points of access.

Fruit Factory Network is run by Humber Street Gallery in partnership with Hull College and Back to Ours, with additional support from IVE.