Artists Announced: Nine artists to illuminate North Shields with new artwork
Nine artists from across the country have been selected to create new, temporary artwork. The work is being commissioned for Lowe!, a weekend of illuminating creativity in March 2027.
Artists creating new work responded to the theme of light and how it connects to North Shields. Each artist will examine this in a unique way; whether to shine a light on unknown communities; spotlight hidden architecture in the town, or simply to illuminate the many spaces reflecting the imagination that thrive there.
Lowe! will take place in numerous locations across North Shields from Friday 5th to Sunday 7th November 2027.
Clockwise from top left: Sana Burney, Slowslowzo (aka Zoe Clifford), Jay Halim (& work), Lizzie Lovejoy, Harald Smylka (reprojecting), work by Nicola Lynch & Sally Southern, Beccy Ware, Sana Obaid.
About the Artists
Sana S Burney is a visual artist and art educator originally from Karachi, Pakistan, and now based in Lancashire, UK. Her interdisciplinary practice explores identity, belonging, displacement, colonial and postcolonial histories, cultural memory, and the ways histories and visual traditions move between places. Working across analogue and digital collage, photography, mixed media, pattern, site-responsive interventions and participatory practice, she is particularly interested in how place and lived experience shape personal and collective identities. Burney holds an MA in Fine Art from the University of Lancashire and a PGCert in Higher Education from the University of Nottingham, completed with Distinction. She has more than 15 years of experience in art and design education alongside her artistic practice. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally, including at the London Art Biennale, and includes public-art interventions, artist publications and site-responsive projects. Her publication Patterns of Pakistan explored iconic architectural forms from across Pakistan, reinterpreting them through pattern and tessellation. Living between cultural contexts continues to inform her interest in how histories, identities and forms of cultural knowledge are carried, fragmented and reinterpreted across places.
Slowslowzo (aka Zoe Clifford) is a multi-tasking carer/artist; making art & writing in the fragments of time between looking after her dad and juggling caring, domestic and creative work. Slowslowzo's first solo exhibition of Lino & Riso prints, The Contortionist, was shown at the Museum of Chelmsford in 2025. Slowslowzo makes work concerned with Care, Aftercare and Self-care, and focuses on mental health when making zines to challenge our expectations. Slowslowzo gained a BA (Hons) in Drawing at Camberwell College of Art (UAL), and is a member of The Hive Studios, Chelmsford.
Jay Halim is a North Shields based artist and graphic designer whose practice has developed from graphic design into projection, live visuals and immersive light based experiences. His interest in projection began during university, where he developed Shipyard. A projection project centred around Jay's family history in the heavy industries introduced him to the possibilities of working with light, moving image and physical space. Following university, Jay received Arts Council England's DYCP funding, which supported experimentation with projection, audio reactive visuals and live visual performance. This development led to a series of live visual and projection projects at King Street Social and Globe Gallery. Since then Jay has created and projected visuals for Gensyn (South Korea), North Shields 800 (North Shields), Freight Island (Newcastle) Heidi Curtis, Benefits, North Shields Orchestra, Tyneside Cinema, Wylam Brewery, Ouseburn Event Space, Afterglow (London), and DJs including Carbiou/ Midland/ The Blessed Madonna/ Palms Trax, Crazy P, Optimo, Gerd Janson and Man Power. These experiences helped Jay build his technical understanding of projection and explore how graphic design, animation and visual storytelling could translate into physical environments. As a neurodivergent artist, Jay finds that projection and light give him the freedom to experiment constantly, and to keep learning new techniques and technologies rather than settling into one fixed way of working. This restless, exploratory approach runs through his practice, pushing him to keep pushing the edges of what graphic design, light and space can do together. These experiences have shaped a practice that combines Jay's graphic design background with projection, light and spatial experimentation.
Gobby Lass, Lizzie Lovejoy, is a working-class poet, performer and picture maker. This vocal-local has spent their life listening to peoples words, and now Lizzie translates local narratives into creative works. Lizzie received the New Writing North Sid Chaplin award 2025 and NE Visual Artist of the Year 2023.
Sana Obaid is a Glasgow-based interdisciplinary artist. She graduated with Distinction from the MFA programme at The Glasgow School of Art (2024) as a Saltire Scholar, receiving the GSA Chairman’s Medal for Best in the School of Fine Art and a nomination for the GSA Foulis Medal. Her recent recognitions include the ArtLab Women in Print Prize at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, the Visual Arts Scotland + Bothy Residency Award, the Gilbert Bayes Sculptors Grant, and the ACPS Artist Fellowship at ArtLab Contemporary Print Studio, UCLan. She has recently been selected for the 2026 Ingram Prize, with the associated exhibition taking place at Unit 1 Gallery, London (November 2026), for Materiality 2 - No place Art’s International Exhibition at Handbag Factory, London (Sep 2026) and for the LOWE! Visual Art Commissions in North Shields, where she will present ‘We Live in Spaces as Much as Spaces Live Within Us’ in March 2027. Her forthcoming exhibitions include ‘Bound by History, Shaped by Life’ at Chester Cathedral and IMPRINT Art Fair, London. Her current practice is rooted in love, healing and a longing for peace in a world shaped by conflict and destruction. As a mother, Obaid reflects on the safety and future of children, allowing grief, tenderness, tension and quiet hope to flow into her work. Through careful, contemplative and process-led making, she creates spaces where fragility and resilience coexist, inviting connection, reflection and the possibility of renewal. Obaid is currently an ACPS Fellow Artist at ArtLab Contemporary Print Studio, UCLan, Preston, and Co-Director of Feminist Exchange Network (FEN), CIC, a Glasgow-based organisation supporting women and young women through creative and socially engaged practice.
Beccy Ware is an artist from Scarborough, driven by repetitive form and storytelling. Working across ink, textiles and digital media, she uses abstract symbols to explore the ironic and often poignant tales of life, lives and connection.
Nicola Lynch and Sally Southern are artists based in North Tyneside with over 25 years' experience each working within the community on large- and small-scale arts projects and residencies. They have a long and proven track record of working together, as well as individually. Nicola studied Visual Art and Sculpture and Sally specialised in Textiles and Surface Pattern, however their artworks are always highly specialised and incorporate a diverse range of methods and mediums that are specific and tailored to each project. They specialise in ‘place based’ art and installations, often in unusual locations that address a specific theme. Their aim is to create artwork that has genuine community ownership and inspires pride in local areas. They have worked on many large-scale residencies such as Byker Metro Station, with Newcastle City Council and with No More Nowt in East Durham. Most recently they have worked together on the Novum festival in Newcastle.
Harald Smykla studied painting in Karlsruhe/Germany (1981-86); he lives and works in London. His multi-disciplinary practice encompasses offbeat modes of image- and object-making, site- and context-specific installation and, since 1999, interactive performance in the public realm exploring collaboration, play, individual and collective experience. Currently, he reveals hidden life forms in newspaper imagery to challenge ideological narratives and toxic sensationalism. He has worked with art spaces and organisations across England and beyond, including England & Co, Deptford X, Area10 Peckham, Southwark Park Galleries, Cornerhouse Manchester and QUAD Derby. His "Reprojection" performances of interactive manual projection mapping took place in locations as varied as Berlin's Amalienpark, Chester's Roman Gardens and London's Courtauld Institute. In 2022 he was awarded the Brewers Towner International Art Prize at Towner Eastbourne.
What Next?
Some of the artists would like residents of North Shields to contribute to their commissioned work. Over the coming months there will be opportunities to take part in workshops to shape their ideas. There will be other opportunities to particpate, through talks, walks and creative activities throughout the weekend in March.
Signals of Belonging
Saturday 7th November 10am - 12pm
North Shields Library
Sana Burney invites people to contribute to her work ‘Signals of Belonging’. Join this two hour creative workshop to share with Sana ideas of belonging, whether that be to North Sheilds, your place of birth, family, familiar spaces, objects and more
Free
More detail on Events Page