Introducing the 2025 Emergent resident and cohort Emergent is a hybrid residency and bursary programme delivered in collaboration with Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts, Gateshead. Each year, the award is given to an emerging disabled artist with a socially-engaged practice and a small cohort of shortlisted artists are offered tailored support. This year's recipient of the three month residency and £5k bursary is Elleanna Chapman. What is Emergent? Emergent 2025 homepage The applications We were thrilled to receive over 100 applications for this fourth instalment of the Emergent programme. This success did, however, make the selection process the most challenging yet, as we were inundated with applications of outstanding quality. Each year, we take on board learnings from previous Emergent programmes. This includes reviewing the range of barriers artists describe to us and refocussing our offer of support to align with this, updating our application process where possible to increase accessibility, and promoting the opportunity in new spaces to attract more diverse voices and audiences who might have been previously underrepresented in the project. Our priorities for supporting artists remain centred around building sustainable careers, integrating accessible solutions, and connecting artists to mentors and networks from which they may benefit. We appreciate the effort and time each applicant put into their submission, we value the creative brilliance displayed and endeavour to keep track of artists who may not have made the shortlist, but whose practices we are interested in. Whether through Emergent now or in the future, or a different area of our programme, we try our best to find ways to support as many artists as we can. Make sure to subscribe to our mailing list and follow us on social media to stay in the loop and find out about any upcoming artist opportunities. The resident: Elleanna Chapman 2025's Emergent residency and bursary has been awarded to Elleanna Chapman. Elleanna Chapman is a communist and artist. She explores the political potential of art to catalyse class struggle, framing her call for revolution through the kitsch, cute, and pop-cultural – contrasting militancy with the fabulous and familiar. Working across media, with a particular fondness for installation, she attempts to bring the true nature of class society to the fore, delivered to the viewer via a litter of scrumptiously cute kittens or the glittering hand of a diva. Image: Lenin (Working Class Hero) (2024). Photo courtesy the artist. Find out more about Elleanna The shortlist Rosie Aspinall Priest Rosie Aspinall Priest is a queer, neurodivergent artist working across sculpture, sound, ceramics, and socially engaged practice. With a background in facilitation and participatory art, they create spaces for others to make, reflect, and resist through collaborative artistic processes. This commitment to care, co-creation, and justice is central to their evolving practice, which increasingly centres their own sculptural and sonic work. Image: Shrine (2025). Image courtesy of the artist. Find out more about Rosie Dylan Esposito Dylan Esposito is a Glasgow-based artist whose sculptural works often take the form of utilitarian objects that have been rendered unfit for purpose, playing with ideas of functionality & normalcy. He uses humour to subvert negative stereotypes of neurodivergence being something negative or needing 'fixed'. He is particularly interested in sculpture's capability to engage with various audiences of all abilities & identities through our different senses. Image: Without Words (2024) - Jesmonite, Steel and Timber. Public sculpture in Mount Stuart / Kerrycroy, Isle of Bute. Photo credit: Finn Dove. Find out more about Dylan Lauren McDougall Lauren McDougall is a multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. Her practice navigates the intricate depths of feminist theory, exploring the evolving relationships between women, selfhood, nature, and societal constructs. At the core of her practice is a surreal reinvention of the female form, drawn from the archives of art history, advertising, and pornography. Through recontextualisation, she interrogates androcentric Western representations of femininity and womanhood, deconstructing both historical and contemporary portrayals to expose and rewrite the narratives embedded in social consciousness. Image: bathtime (2021). Image courtesy of the artist. Find out more about Lauren Else/Xun Zhang Else/Xun is a researcher and artist who works primarily with moving image and creative-critical writing. Inhabiting chronic times, their practice-based research investigates the politics and potentials of care in the systematic carelessness of neoliberal societies. Fabulating dialogues that attend to the functioning of language and power relations, they tell stories to trace alternative modes of belonging and becoming centred around interdependency, care, and radical kinship. Image: The Snow to Fall, single channel moving image installation, 2024 © Else/Xun. Find out more about Else/Xun Banner image: the point, however, is to change it (2025) - Elleanna Chapman, exhibited as part of DGTL GRL at Galleria Objets, London. Photo courtesy the artist. Description: Photograph of a large artwork installed in a gallery with exposed brick walls. The artwork is a tall, wall-like structure and fits into the corner, forming a right angle. Printed onto its surface is a kitschy image of lined notepaper, like you might find in a journal, with letters comprised of different fonts and bright colours, reading 'the point, however, is to change it'. Accompanying the text are two Hello Kitty stickers. Manage Cookie Preferences