Reflections

Louisa Chambers is currently a Resident Artist at Primary in Nottingham and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Her recent practice begins in the everyday – suburbia, boredom, routine and overlooked wild spaces at the edges of urban environments, which she reframes into something strange and otherworldly. Her practice involves intuitive mark-making within her drawing and painting process. In 2022, she was a featured artist in the Beep International Painting Prize.

Image: Louisa Chambers, Shrub (Yellow fingers), 2026, Soft pastel on Khadi paper.

Nic Gear is an artist based near Nottingham whose works are ‘indexical traces’ that draw on the materiality of landscape, reflecting the places he has traversed. Using a range of mediums, he creates abstract pieces utilising pattern and overlapping elements that suggest being in and travelling through these spaces. His work is multi-layered in its execution and includes literary references, inviting viewers to reconsider how landscapes are experienced, remembered, communicated and understood. Most recently, he won the Frontier Gallery Award for his 2026 show.

Image: Nic Gear, ‘Earth [Heaven]’, 2025. 

Hondartza Fraga is a Spanish-born artist currently based in Leeds. Drawing is central to her practice, with her works combining analogue and digital means of image-making, with a diverse range of materials, techniques, scales, and styles. In her work, she attempts to correspond with ‘things’ that are elusive, for being too big or too small, too distant or too close, but also too ephemeral, fragile, or hazardous. The sea and outer space are recurrent sources of inspiration. Amongst other accolades, her work has been featured in Vitamin D3: Today’s Best Contemporary Drawing by Phaidon (2021).

Image: Hondartza Fraga, ‘In Saturn’s Shadow’, 2020, Pencil on paper. 

Gary Simmonds is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University who creates geometric abstract paintings and drawings, informed by a response to the world around him. His recent watercolour drawings are part of an ongoing series that reflects on and works with ideas of lightness, both as a material and a concept.  They use the security of a hand-drawn grid to establish a structure where ideas of uncertainty and a mapping of time are recorded with muted washes of watercolour.  His work is held in the Graves Gallery’s Colour and Line collection, and he has exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Image: Gary Simmonds, ‘Interstitial – bruised blue’, pencil and watercolour on paper, 280 x 380mm.

Andy Black is a lecturer at Leeds Arts University, whose index centres around drawings of varying abstract forms. Landscapes, architecture, food, and other everyday sources inspire his work. His pieces construct imagined exterior spaces that function as ambiguous territories; gardens, cities, or stages, where forms accumulate and interact. His work explores the relationships between scale, space, and repetition through intimate panel drawings, large-scale charcoal works, and site-responsive wall drawings.

Image: Andy Black, ‘Cliffs & Clouds’, 2019, Charcoal on Paper.