Announcing: Syllabus VIII artists

Syllabus is a codesigned learning programme in its eighth year, supporting ten artists across ten months.   

Syllabus offers time for artists from across the UK to discuss ideas, work, life and approaches to practice, while building community and taking risks. Syllabus creates an environment of mutual learning and exchange between the artists that is responsive to each cohort.  

The programme has secured a landmark grant of £500,000 from Freelands Foundation which will enrich the support available for artists across the next chapter, funding bursaries and access costs for artists, a new online element, an annual Artist Advisor position, robust evaluation and a dedicated Syllabus coordinator.  

Beginning in June 2025, Syllabus VIII will be built around a series of six intensive in-person weekend gatherings and an online programme. The ten selected artists will collaboratively develop the curriculum, with curators and artists from partner organisations Wysing Arts Centre, Eastside Projects, New Art Exchange, Spike Island, Studio Voltaire and Site Gallery, the Syllabus Coordinator, Freya Yeates, and Syllabus VIII Artist Advisor, Wingshan. 

About the artists: 

Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin is an artist practicing in solace and connection through installations, sculpture and poetry. She engages in aesthetic exploration, academic research, collaborative initiatives, and communal exchange. Recent presentations of her work include In Contiguity, Sherbert Green, London (2024); Experimentica, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff (2024); and Constellations, Neven Gallery, London (2024).

Emma Bentley-Fox is an artist living and working in Leeds. With a trauma-informed and multidisciplinary approach, they work with analogue photography, installation, writing, archiving, bookmaking, as well as undertaking participatory projects. Recent projects include The Queer Pleasure Archive, Helix Arts,North Shields (2025); Safelight, The Baltic, Newcastle (2023) and Confessions of a Party Mum, Hyde Park Art Club, Leeds (2023).  

Emma Brennan is an artist working through performance, moving image and installation.  Her practice investigates the grotesque in mythology, examining oral histories using queer and feminist methodologies. Recent projects include It Is & I Am, Belfast Exposed, Belfast (2024); MANTLE, Riddles Warehouse, Belfast (2024); and Girlín: The Conception of Air, PS², Belfast (2023). 

Josie KO is an artist working with mixed media and installation to present a new, reimagined depiction of the Black female body. Constructing the women with irregular limbs and glittery bodies, she glorifies the handmade and drifts from the norms of Western art ideals. Recent projects include Mekle Lippis, Quench Gallery, Margate (2025); Say No! Art, Activism and Feminist Refusal, Wardlaw Museum, St Andrews (2024) and fir gorma, 5 Florence Street, Glasgow (2024). 

Hannah Leighton-Boyce works across sculpture, collage, drawing, and print, often developing site-responsive installations. Her practice is informed by material and sensory relationships, reflecting on the connections between bodies, objects and place. Her works sift and weave together corporeal, somatic, and material processes in response to her experience of cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Recent projects include: Articulations, The National Festival of Making, Blackburn (2022) and A Precipice, Creative Lives, Sheffield (2022). She received an Axis Fellowship in 2024.  

april forrest lin 林森 is an artist, curator, and film programmer investigating image-making and world-building. They interweave moving image, performance, installation, and writing in a commitment to centring oppressed knowledges, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care. Recent projects include (Tending) (to) (Ta), Museum of the Moving Image, New York (2024); now close my eyes the world i see is so beautiful, LACE, Los Angeles (2024) and For My Inner Fledgling, CCA Glasgow (2023). 

Anouska Samms is an artist working in sculpture, tapestries and moving image. Her practice provokes conversations around matrilineal memory, waste and women’s bodies in relation to the domestic. Recent projects include Hair.wav, Listen Gallery, Glasgow (2024); Beyond Clay, Batsford Gallery, London (2024) and Sum, Sarabande Foundation, London (2023). 

Sym Stellium is a performance artist, facilitator and ritual maker. Their work revolves around bodily autonomy, healing justice, ancestral and psycho-somatic roots to physical pain, furthering collectivity, and possibilities of liberation. Recent projects include kin(dling), Mimosa House, London (2025); touch me not, Graves Gallery, Sheffield (2024) and Darling, Your Meat Suit is Leaking, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2024).  

Alexander Stubbs is an artist and researcher with a text-based practice. His work explores the ways in which text, images and archives can be reanimated in new contexts as socially and politically radical objects. Recent projects include YAK! Collaborative Reading Group, Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds (2024-Present) and he co-runs Creel Project, which examines how emerging artists are platformed through experimental exhibitions in spaces such as shopfronts and gardens.  

Kaiya Waerea is a writer, publisher and academic. Alongside Sophie Paul, he is founder of Sticky Fingers Publishing, an intradependent feminist press based in south east London. Recent projects include Permanently Differed: A Bibliographic Opera, Arcadia Missa Publishing, London (2024); No Future for Bad Crips! Other Forms, Berlin (2024) and Access Questions for Self Publishing, Pagemasters, London (2024).