ARTIST FELLOWS 2026
This year, we have introduced the Ort Artist Fellowship Award, which offers three artists at different career stages a no-strings-attached bursary. The fellowship celebrates creative vision and dedication to excellence across various artistic disciplines, with a focus on practitioners connected to the Midlands.
Aishah Carberry
Aishah Carberry is a Burton-upon-Trent–based artist whose vibrant, kaleidoscopic artworks draw on African, Indonesian, and Aboriginal textile traditions. She completed a BA in Textiles at the University of Derby in 2019, developing a bold, colour-rich approach that defines her practice.
Aishah creates richly coloured dreamworlds that explore stars, seasons, moods, and the beauty of everyday life. As an autistic and Deaf artist who communicates in British Sign Language, she embraces her identities as sources of imagination and insight. Her work functions as a visual language, inviting viewers to connect with diverse perspectives and experience the world through colour, pattern, and form.
She recently exhibited alongside 37 artists in Craftspace’s Made in the Middle touring exhibition, featuring her vibrant, kaleidoscopic dreamworlds painted on handmade paper that explore colour, pattern, and shifting moods.
Fae Kilburn
Fae Kilburn is a Midlands based artist and arts facilitator, specialising in printmaking. A large part of her practice is the relationship with materials and tactile nature of the different processes. She actively encourages people to physically engage and connect with her work.
Fae is expanding her body of work Transient Moments, a visual documentation of her transition from partial-sight to blindness, and her vision post op in a world with no straight lines. These handmade prints showcase how Fae experiences the landscape and how her perception of colour changes from bold colours to beautiful translucent tones.
Fae has exhibited regularly in the UK, had commissions from large organisations, fellowships and thanks to grants from Arts Council England worked internationally where she was artist in residence in Canada, this led to further residencies and exhibitions.
Jamal LLoyd Davis
Jamal Lloyd Davis is a British-Jamaican Photographer and Filmmaker with a practice centring on the complex and enigmatic realms of Black identity; specifically, focusing on themes such as mental health.
His work explores community and their surroundings, and comments on the societal constructs that try to limit and define it while embarking on a continuous journey of experimental techniques.
Jamal is currently working on a series titled black-and-blue, turning the camera on himself for the first time, a new series of self-portraits that intimately explore his own experiences with anxiety.