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Seven postgraduate artists and designers to watch at MA Graduate Show 2026
Monday, 20 July, 2026 — Discover new work spanning painting, sculpture, glass, fashion, photography and ceramics at Arts University Plymouth’s free MA Graduate Show, 20–30 July.
Arts University Plymouth is highlighting seven postgraduate artists and designers to look out for ahead of the opening of our MA Graduate Show 2026, which runs from Monday 20 to Thursday 30 July.
<p dir="ltr">Open to all, the exhibition presents final projects by graduating MA students working across art, design, craft and media. Work will be shown in MIRROR at Arts University Plymouth’s Tavistock Place campus and at Studio 11 on Regent Street.</p>
<p dir="ltr">A launch event takes place on Thursday 23 July, 6pm to 8pm. Visitors interested in postgraduate study can also attend our <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/events/open-day-pg-july25">Postgraduate Open Day</a> on Saturday 25 July, 10am to 1pm, during the exhibition.<br /></p>
Co-existence by Sophie Richmond
<p dir="ltr">The selected students are Layla Lyons, Kathryn Timms, Macy Ford, Sophie Richmond, Jake Visser, Katie GoddenGreen and Ashley Rudolph. Their work ranges from large-scale painting, sculpture and participatory glass installation to queer fashion writing, feminist fashion photography, ceramic storytelling rooted in Cornish rural life and material-led work exploring memory, ownership and domestic possessions.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Becky Dodman Wainwright and Jason Hirons, Postgraduate Course Leaders at Arts University Plymouth, said:</strong> “The MA Graduate Show is a chance to see students at an important point in their practice, as they bring together research, making and public presentation. This group reflects the range of work taking place across our postgraduate community, from painting and sculpture to fashion, photography, ceramics and participatory installation.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“What connects them is the seriousness with which they have developed their ideas through making. These projects deal with grief, landscape, queer style, feminist image-making, rural memory, ecology and the ways people gather around art. Many of the students are also building practices beyond the university, through teaching, artist-led spaces, community projects, publishing and regional exhibitions.”<br /></p>
Work by Layla Lyons from the MA Midstream event 2026
<p dir="ltr">Course: <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/ma-fine-art">MA Fine Art</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Layla Lyons’ <em>Landscape with Forms I</em> and <em>Landscape with Forms II</em> are large oil paintings on stretched linen, made through layering, revision and close attention to colour. Working from a woodland studio, Layla lets forms appear slowly across the canvas, sitting between landscape and abstraction.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The paintings do not offer a fixed view of place. Marks are built up, changed and reworked, leaving traces of earlier decisions in the surface. Layla has returned to postgraduate study after more than a decade of professional painting, using the MA to test scale, process and how her work behaves outside the studio.</p>
<p dir="ltr">That interest in where art is seen has also led her to create Hyphae House, an artist-led exhibition and project space in a vacant Victorian terrace house in Plymouth. The house hosts exhibitions, gatherings, performances and studio use away from the usual white-wall gallery setting.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Links: <a href="http://hyphaehouse.co.uk">hyphaehouse.co.uk</a> | Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/layla_lyons_/">@layla_lyons_</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/hyphae_house_/">@hyphae_house_</a><br /></p>
Reimagining the Void: Configurations of Grief by Kathryn Timms
<p dir="ltr">Course: <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/ma-fine-art">MA Fine Art</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Kathryn Timms’ <em>Reimagining the Void: Configurations of Grief</em> is a modular sculpture about grief, made from stacked frames, casts, clamps and concrete forms. The work looks as though it could be taken apart and rebuilt, holding a sense of damage, repair and change in the same structure.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Personal objects are built into the piece, keeping a physical connection to those Kathryn grieves. Visitors are invited to move around the sculpture and notice its weight, gaps, pressure points and instability. The work does not try to tidy grief into a clear ending. It treats it as something that has to be carried, adjusted and lived with.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Kathryn brings more than 22 years of experience as a school art teacher into her MA practice. Based near Dartmoor, where she grew up on her family’s dairy farm, she also works through Dartmoor School of Art, helping others develop confidence in making.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Links: <a href="http://dartmoorarts.com">dartmoorarts.com</a> | Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/katartizo_creative">@katartizo_creative</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/dartmoorarts_school">@dartmoorarts_school</a><br /></p>
Second Gaze by Macy Ford
<p dir="ltr">Course: <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/ma-design-communication">MA Design: Communication</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Macy Ford’s <em>Second Gaze</em> is a fashion magazine and photographic project that questions who controls the image. Responding to the male gaze in fashion photography, Macy challenges the habit of treating women as surfaces to be styled, posed and consumed.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Her shoots are built through collaboration. Models are invited into the creative process, shaping how they are represented rather than being used as passive subjects. That shift changes the tone of the images: the work is still fashion-led, but the women pictured are participants in their own portrayal.</p>
<p dir="ltr">For the exhibition, Macy presents the magazine on a clothes rail beside a mirror, with a large-scale front cover and selected double-page spreads above it. The display borrows from the fashion industry, but turns the act of looking back on the viewer.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Links: Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/macyellafordshoots">@macyellafordshoots</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/secondgazemagazine/">@secondgazemagazine</a><br /></p>
We see you by Sophie Richmond
<p dir="ltr">Course: <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/ma-fine-art">MA Fine Art</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Sophie Richmond’s <em>Cultivating Interbeing</em> and <em>We see you</em> bring lichen, glass, breath and participation together in two connected works. Using fallen lichen gathered from Central Park and Holy Isle, Sophie treats the organism as a quiet example of shared life: slow-growing, dependent on clean air, and made through relationship.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In <em>Cultivating Interbeing</em>, an earth circle holds around 75 lampworked glass “seed breaths”, each sandblasted and carrying lichen traces. Visitors are invited to take a glass breath away and leave a wooden tag in the earth with their own seed thought about breathing, connection or the more-than-human world. The work changes as people take part.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><em>We see you</em> is made from sandblasted mirrored glass fragments, positioned so viewers catch their own reflection through the lichen marks. Sophie’s wider practice moves between glasswork, meditation breathing drawings and site-responsive installation.<br /></p>
<p dir="ltr">Course: <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/ma-design-fashion">MA Design: Fashion</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Jake Visser’s <em>Queered Dressing</em> is a book shaped by a year of dressing, writing, talking and paying attention. It follows Jake’s postgraduate research into why people choose the clothes they do, and why a jumper can feel right one day when a sweatshirt does not.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The project treats everyday fashion behaviour as research material: getting dressed and re-dressed, talking in smoking areas and nightclub toilets, swapping long messages with friends, and pulling meaning from gossip, comfort, discomfort and desire.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Rather than separating fashion theory from lived experience, Jake keeps the language close to the places where queer style is made, tested and talked through. <em>Queered Dressing</em> is not only about clothes as objects, but about the people, moods and social worlds that gather around them.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Links: Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jakevisser96">@jakevisser96</a><br /></p>
Babushkas from A Rural Revel by Katie GoddenGreen
<p dir="ltr">Course: <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/ma-fine-art">MA Fine Art</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Katie GoddenGreen’s <em>The Moot of monads</em> and <em>A Rural Revel</em> come from <em>The Parish of Milk</em>, the Cornish world she uses to gather stories of farming, folklore, seasonal work and rural memory. Her practice moves between clay, woodcut, textiles and storytelling, turning old knowledge into objects, images and spoken pieces.</p>
<p dir="ltr">For the graduate show, Katie has made two groups of stoneware ceramic figures she calls Babushkas. Each has its own name, purpose and story. They are shown on found rural plinths including a milk churn, step ladder, water butt, breeze blocks, wood, granite and slate. <em>A Rural Revel</em> carries the energy of celebration, while <em>The Moot</em> becomes a more serious council from <em>The Parish of Milk</em>. A sound piece, <em>In the spring</em>, written and read by Katie, adds another layer of seasonal narrative.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Katie’s work is already tied to community practice. Based near Launceston, she has shown widely through Cornwall Open Studios and regional exhibitions, and runs a weekly Sew Sew stitching group where rural participants come together to make, talk and share stories.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Links: <a href="http://katiegoddengreen.com">katiegoddengreen.com</a> | Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/katiegoddengreen">@katiegoddengreen</a><br /></p>
Fragments: Everyone will get a piece by Ashley Rudolph
<p dir="ltr">Course: <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/ma-3d-design-crafts">MA Craft & Material Practices</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">Ashley Rudolph’s <em>Fragments: Everyone will get a piece</em> looks at the temporary lives of domestic possessions and what happens when objects move from one person to another. Working with hardwoods, slip-cast ceramics, rubber, plastic, paper and thread, Ashley brings together materials that carry very different associations of permanence, usefulness and value.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The series includes three sculptural works, <em>Remnants</em>, <em>Remainder</em> and <em>Residue</em>, alongside a row of ceramic vessels and large-scale photographic prints. Objects are grouped, supported and rearranged in ways that draw attention to their materials and construction. In the photographs, changes in scale give individual forms a presence more usually associated with portraiture.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The project asks how everyday possessions accumulate memories, and what happens to those associations when ownership changes. Rather than treating inherited objects as fixed containers of meaning, Ashley considers the choices involved in keeping, displaying, dividing and discarding them, and the uncertain legacy that ordinary belongings can leave behind.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Links: <a href="http://tregoniggiestudios.com">tregoniggiestudios.com</a> | Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/studio_tregoniggie">@studio_tregoniggie</a><br /></p>
<p dir="ltr">The <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/events/ma-graduate-show-2026">MA Graduate Show 2026</a> runs from Monday 20 to Thursday 30 July at MIRROR, Arts University Plymouth, Tavistock Place, Plymouth PL4 8AT, and Studio 11, Regent Street, Plymouth PL4 8BE.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The exhibition is free to attend. Opening times are:</p>
<p dir="ltr">Monday 20 July, 10am to 6pm<br />Tuesday 21 July, 10am to 6pm<br />Wednesday 22 July, 10am to 6pm<br />Thursday 23 July, 10am to 8pm, with Private View from 6pm to 8pm<br />Friday 24 July, 10am to 6pm<br />Saturday 25 July, 10am to 1pm, with Postgraduate Open Day from 10am to 1pm<br />Sunday 26 July, closed<br />Monday 27 July, 10am to 6pm<br />Tuesday 28 July, 10am to 6pm<br />Wednesday 29 July, 10am to 6pm<br />Thursday 30 July, 10am to 6pm<br /></p>
