Meet our deliberation fellows 2026

Abigail Villarroel

Abigail Villarroel (he/they) is a Venezuelan-born Birmingham-based artist and writer working across painting, facilitation, and text. Their practice centres on questions of diaspora, queerness, memory, and how cultural identity is carried, fragmented, and rebuilt through making. Drawing on Venezuelan heritage and lived experience across multiple countries, Abigail’s work is currently searching for a language to communicate exile, queer joy and desire, as well as fantastical world-building.

Their work has been exhibited with Wolverhampton Art Gallery (MORE ART INC.), Craftspace (Made in the Middle 2025-26, Birmingham Open 2025, Multistory’s The Printing Room Issue 2, and Solihull Surreal. Abigail also has an active community practice, facilitating workshops and projects in libraries and public spaces across Sandwell and Birmingham, with an interest in accessibility, curation, and collective learning.


Ifrah Sagheer

Ifrah's practice and material interrogations of producing abject objects relies upon sensorial textures and appearances in order to evoke feelings of uncomfortableness, yet familiarity within the viewer. They create post-humanist forms which have sensorial qualities and use materials like flock to represent hair, or latex which acts as skin or silicone as flesh. By utilising skin and flesh like materials they are able to mimetically reproduce aspects of the human body, which helps to elicit a familiarity with the viewer's body and the sculptural bodies. By establishing a bodily similarity with the viewer and the sculpture, desires of interaction within the viewer are awoken – eliciting a wanting to touch or to physically interact with the sculptures. 


Past Deliberation Fellows

  • Bismah Kanwal

    2024 - 2025

    Bismah is a West Midlands-based artist, writer, and researcher with a recent MA in Fine Art from Birmingham City University (2024). Her practice spans sculpture, video performance, and writing, focusing on the intersection of trauma studies, mental health, and self-acceptance. She has previously been commissioned by Birmingham City Council as part of the Compassionate City programme and has had her artwork exhibited at Midlands Arts Centre (2023).

    Her interests include exploring her culture and heritage via language and art, as well as themes of resilience and healing. Through her work, she aims to transform pain into pathways for empathy, dialogue, and collective reflection both within and beyond the diaspora.

  • Louise Beer

    2024 - 2025

    Louise is an artist and curator, born in Aotearoa New Zealand, now living in Margate. Louise uses installation, moving image, photography, writing, participatory works and sound to explore humanity’s evolving understanding of Earth’s environments and the cosmos. Her experience of living under two types of night sky, the first in low level light polluted areas in Aotearoa, and the second in higher level light polluted cities and towns in England, has deeply informed her practice. She explores how living under dark skies, or light polluted skies, can change our perception of grief, the climate crisis and Earth’s deep time history and future.

    Louise holds an MA Art and Science from Central Saint Martins and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Middlesex University London. In 2023, Louise contributed a chapter ‘The Transparency of Night’ for the book, Dark Skies: Places, Practices, Communities, edited by Professor Nick Dunn and Dr Timothy Edensor, and her recent awards and commissions include Fermynwoods Contemporary Art with Pale Blue Dot Collective (2024) Launchpad Lab Residency, France (2024) and a British Council Connections through Culture Grant to collaborate with Tūhura Otago Museum in Aotearoa New Zealand including a solo exhibition (2024).

  • Maryam Aisha

    2024 - 2025

    Maryam is a Birmingham-based artist who uses textiles to explore, reconnect, and navigate her identity as a British-Pakistani Muslim woman. She is particularly concerned with drawing attention to decorative art and the ways in which it can be used to explore personal and collective histories, cultural practices and traditions, including but not limited to artmaking itself. Though decorative art may excite the eye, Maryam is interested in showcasing the ways in which art can transcend ‘decoration’ and is instead intimately connected to worship and the remembrance of God.

    She is also interested in photography and film, capturing processes, and building her own history and archives. Her work has previously been exhibited at the Ort Gallery Member’s Show (2022), Birmingham School of Art (2023), Bene Culture (2024), Southbank Centre (2024) and more.

  • SRNA

    2024 - 2025

    SrNA is an interdisciplinary artist who is interested in experimental sonic sound and somatic movement. She explores intergeneration, expression and communication through acoustic and electronic improvisatory layering of multi-instrumentation. Including but not limited to: viola, piano/ keyboard and an array of sound healing tools/instruments. SrNA Investigates realms involving themes of lineages, the voice and the body.

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Hayati Poetry Residency Programme