Foundations is a 9-month mentorship programme providing six UK-based early-career visual artists with bespoke development support.
Through regular meetings with a mentor from the Cement Fields team, the programme offers practical advice and support to help the artists address specific challenges they are facing in their practice. It is designed specifically for artists who are currently underrepresented across the contemporary visual art sector and/or face barriers to accessing opportunities and developing their career.
Cement Fields sees North Kent as a place for exploration and through our work we welcome artists to use its unique contexts to explore bold questions and new ideas. We have a long history of supporting early-career artists through our artistic programme and are committed to creating generous and supportive environments where artists can be ambitious and take risks.
Recognising the precarious nature of sustaining an artistic practice in the current climate, Foundations is intended as a space for artists to receive bespoke support that addresses their specific needs, build new relationships and networks to support their ongoing work, and progress with their creative practice.
Our Foundations artists are: Caitlin Hazell, Jas Dhillon, Liberty Hodes, Nikta Mohammadi, Seren Metcalfe, and Zelda Solomon.
Foundations is delivered in partnership with Open School East’s Alumni Springboard Programme, with one place reserved for an alumni of the OSE Associates Programme.
Caitlin Hazell makes artefacts, relics and props that intertwine imagined and exaggerated aspects of everyday life with myth, folklore and ritual. They often use absurdity to draw parallels between real and speculative narratives, in a range of everyday and historical materials. Caitlin studied BA Fine Art at Kingston University in 2017, and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries. They have shown in exhibitions at The Art Workers Guild, Block 336, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Steam Works. Caitlin recently completed an MA in Sculpture at The Royal College of Art, where they won the 2024 Kenneth Armitage Postgraduate Sculptor Prize.
Jas Dhillon is a self-taught artist and artist-curator with a multi-disciplinary practice. She uses her Punjabi, Sikh, Indian heritage, and a deep reverence for nature and spirituality, to create spaces for a tender and sensitive reflection on ideas of identity, rootedness and belonging.
Deeply inspired by her heritage, Jas is interested in unveiling the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the idea that art is not separate from life, but that life, nature, and spirituality, are all art, and as such we are all artists.
Through objects, spaces, memories, stories, and feelings, Jas strives to create moments for thoughtful reflection and connection.
Liberty Hodes is a multi-disciplinary Artist based at The NewBridge Project in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Their work balances itself between Performance, Sculpture and Video, in a way which is fizzy and ideas-first, underpinned by a strong sense of place. They are interested in the history of performance as tradition, communication and a tool to bring people together, and the ways in which the language of British folk-culture can be used to make sense of the contemporary world.
Nikta Mohammadi is an Iranian artist and filmmaker based in West Yorkshire. Her practice is rooted in her dreams. It examines the border between personal and political, private and public, documentary and fiction. Her work situates internal landscapes within external ones, questioning and problematising our relationship with ‘place’. She often deploys mythology and folklore as points of entry in the creation process with a particular interest in creating cross-cultural/disciplinary dialogue. She has a playful approach to how language is constructed & used in my work, emphasising the inevitable abstraction that arises from the act of translation between cultures and geographies.
Recent work examples includes Memory Stone (2024), a film installation presented as her first solo exhibition at The Lowry, Salford, Leave to Remain (2023), an audio-visual performance developed with composer Babak Mirsalari commissioned by and presented at Opera North, Leeds, Indefinite Dreams: I am alive! (2022), a performance developed with composer Atefeh Einali & presented at SOUP, Manchester, and Windcatcher & Gargoyles (2022), a film commissioned by The Tetley, Leeds. She has an upcoming residency at Prospect Cottage, former house of Derek Jarman.
Seren Metcalfe is a Yorkshire-born artist, writer, and curator based in London. Her multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, sculpture, performance, installation, and text, exploring themes of time, television, and technology. Seren draws inspiration from Yorkshire landscapes, urban architecture, and pop culture, using her work to question societal structures and highlight the theatrics of everyday life. Her approach views art as a process rather than an outcome, capturing both individual and collective human experiences.
As founder and director of The Working Class Creatives Database, Seren has curated exhibitions, residencies, talks, and workshops for working-class creatives across the UK, collaborating with institutions like Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Factory International. She is dedicated to making art accessible to all, not just those who can afford it.
Zelda Solomon is a writer and artist based in Margate. They have an MA in Race, Media and Social Justice from Goldsmiths and an undergraduate degree in Art History from Edinburgh. They specialise in inclusive play practices; digital media and representation; and using inventive methods to engage with absence. They edit for publishing house 9vtbackslash5 and currently work for mental health disability artist/activist, ‘the vacuum cleaner,’ as well as ‘See Me Play,’ a play scheme for neurodivergent young people in Thanet. They are interested in disability justice, ghosts and recreational poetry.