Meet the artists: Reflections

Louisa Chambers is a Resident Artist at Primary and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. In 2022, she was a featured artist for the Beep International Painting Prize. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and recently completed an Online Drawing Development Year at the Royal Drawing School in London. During and since that year, she has developed a series of pieces that will be exhibited in Reflections.

Chambers’ work is vibrant and fantastical; an amalgamation of imagination and perception. Drawing on the everyday – suburbia, boredom, routine – she positions herself on the edges of urban environments, in wild spaces often overlooked. Figures appear within dream-like spaces – peeping, morphing, watching. Sometimes a recurring bird-like creature emerges. She interprets the character as an alter ego, birthed from her experiences of matrescence, a symbol of motherhood. Drawing on her observations and memories through a childlike lens of curiosity and unease, she reflects on her shifting relationships with herself, space, and the environment.

Since her Online Drawing Development Year, she began applying more painterly approaches to her work. She embraced intuitive mark-making in her process and now incorporates soft pastels into her pieces, where she continues to explore colour through perception. Undertaking more spontaneous methods has allowed imagined worlds to surface. What arises is a hybrid space between the familiar and the fantastical. Physically and sensationally responding to the landscapes around her, she reframes the mundane into something strange, sublime and otherworldly.

For more of Louisa’s work, visit her website here.

Nic Gear is an independent artist based near Nottingham and a member of the non-profit arts organisation ArtCan. He regularly exhibits across Nottingham, including at the Surface Gallery (2023), Broadway Cinema (2022), the Nottingham Society of Artists, and the NSA Friar Lane Gallery. He received his MA in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University in 2015. Recently, he received the Fronteer Gallery Award for his solo show, Time [Line] Traces (2026).

Gear describes his work as ‘indexical traces’. Nature serves as a central inspiration, pulling from his time spent outdoors. Through his works, he reflects on the paths he has walked, marking the ‘unseen’, inviting us to perceive what lies beyond ourselves.

His body of work includes highly intricate pieces that draw on and work with the materiality of landscapes. He uses handmade oak gall ink along with other mixed media to create his abstract works. For his sculptures, he plasters discarded objects he finds during walks, which are coloured with the gall ink and mixed media. These ‘drawn’ sculptures are then inscribed with language marks, paths and contours. In doing so, he creates objects that take on new ‘seen’ value, which direct us to what has been lost, and what can be rediscovered. Alongside this, he creates paintings that are drawings, utilising traditional landscape painting materials in a contemporary way – cleverly linking the past to the present.

Recently, he’s been exploring the meaning of language, how our interpretations change, and how we use it to communicate with each other. You may spot a returning circular motif within his work. It’s a symbol that points to sign the spiritual steps taken in the process of walking and meditative mark making – an eternity line without a beginning or an end.

For more of Nic’s work, visit his website here.

Hondartza Fraga is a Spanish-born artist and researcher currently based in Leeds. She received a PhD from the University of Leeds in 2024 for her practice-led research, Uncalibrated: Drawing, Photography and the Raw Images of Astronomy. In 2025-26, she held a residency at Leeds Beckett University for her project, Dark Holding. Her work has been featured in Vitamin D3: Today’s Best Contemporary Drawing by Phaidon (2021).

Drawing is central to her practice. She often combines analogue and digital means of image-making, with a range of materials, techniques, scales, and sizes. Her starting points often come from archives and museum collections. But other works emerge from open-ended interactions with the materials at hand in the studio.

Her practice captures the experience of attempting to correspond with things that are difficult to apprehend. She uses ‘things’ as an overarching term to include places or objects, materials or concepts, and real or imagined ones. Whether they are either too big or too small, too distant or too close, but also too ephemeral, fragile, or hazardous, she tries to grasp the elusive. The sea, the sky, and the forest are recurrent sources of inspiration.

Fraga’s work is abstract yet highly complex. A piece from her PhD, ‘In Saturn’s Shadow’, is a response to the fragmented nature of astronomical images. To create this piece, she tracked down the raw images that are stitched together to form the natural images we see of space. This resulted in her own mosaic version of the Cassini mission’s photos of Saturn, playing around with distance and size. Foregrounding the overlays, gaps, and misalignments, she reconfigures the minuscule details into something fragmented and ethereal.

For more of Hondartza’s work, visit her website here.

Andy Black is a Welsh-born artist based in Leeds. He is currently the Pathway Leader for Fine Art on the Extended Diploma in Creative Practice course at Leeds Art University. In 2002, he received his MA in painting from the Royal College of Art. He regularly exhibits in Leeds and has been selected for the Jerwood/Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.

Black’s work is distinctive: abstract, muted, minimalist, and stylistically striking. He has curated an impressive index of around 200 drawings of forms. Inspired by a variety of sources, some of these are objects from the landscape; others are reminiscent of topiary, architecture, or food, whilst still others suggest something animated. This diverse index provides him with endless opportunities to input and build new imagery.

Using these forms, he constructs his surreal drawings and paintings of imagined spaces. He thinks of these drawings as gardens, cities and stages, assembling ambiguous territories where these forms can pile up, multiply, or interact. Some are sharp-edged and geometric, whilst others are more amorphous and blobby.

The work submitted to this exhibition includes ‘Index 2021-26’, 220 small drawings on panel that explore an increase in scale and how the drawings might be configured within a specific three-dimensional space. We will also display his large charcoal drawings in which two selected forms interact with goofy logic, forming delightfully absurd sequences.

For more of Andy’s work, visit his website here.

Gary Simmonds is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. He received his MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in London. In 2024, his work was displayed in the Graves Gallery in Sheffield. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including solo shows in Milan and London.

Simmonds’ recent work is precise, geometric and colourfully transcendental. He is largely inspired by his responses to the world around him. His practice is grounded in an attentiveness to materials – their contingencies, limitations and potential – and to how meaning emerges through their application. Gradually, layers and structures build, unfurling onto the page.

His new 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 seek to ‘tread lightly’ both in the act of making and in relation to the wider world. These works, as well as continuing the interest in geometric abstraction, are informed by a connection to place and serve as a record of time. 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. These drawings reflect on both the physical and mental processes of wandering, through the landscape and across a page. They suggest a period when light is in transition – emerging or fading – evoking the subtle, uncanny atmosphere of the gloaming.

For more of Gary’s work, visit his Instagram page here.

Reflections will be running from Saturday 1 – Sunday 30 Aug 2026. Find more information here.