Extra Credit: Alumni Exhibition. Meet the Artists Part 2!

22/9/2025

We hope you're loving the exhibition so far, You've got until Wednesday to check it out. In the meantime, come get to know our artists through their words.

Annie Tombs, 2025

Annie Tombs:

I’m a 2025 BA Commercial Photography graduate, with a strong focus on fashion photography and creative direction. My work thrives on experimentation; pushing boundaries and working collaboratively to create striking, original imagery. It was through these collaborations with stylists, designers, and fellow photographers that my love for creative teamwork truly flourished, most recently in my project Fashion Obscure Part 2.

This series, inspired by photographer William Ernult, was developed in partnership with stylist Caitlin Piper as an extension of our previous collaboration. Together, we explored lighting, layering, materials, and levels to expand on the initial concept. The result was a visually powerful outcome that reflected both our shared vision and the strength of creative collaboration.

Zara McDermott:

Zara is an illustrator and artist based in Plymouth, graduating from Arts University Plymouth in 2024. Her recent exhibition, Seeking Apricity (Field System, 2025), explored the transition into the winter season, reflecting on how we can embrace change, and harness the warmth and light during the darker months.

These pieces of work revolve around the exploration of pattern and rhythm. The importance of listening to the inner cycles of self and syncing to the patterns of the natural world. Finding the similarities of all our unique patterns. Since graduating, she has continued to develop her practice, exploring themes that bring joy through creation and connection.

@zaralily_illustrates zaralilymcdermott.com

Nia Benham

Nia’s work is inspired by the natural world. She likes to use her creative practice as a way to immerse herself in the landscape and to deepen the experience of being outdoors. Her process is very fast paced and playful, using physical media including watercolours, wax pastels to make layered. She has recently been working on an ongoing project of making ‘Journey Posters’, showcasing fast paced reportage drawings that she makes while travelling.

Alfie Jack Bailey Lallem

Video game design and journalism inspire me both as an artist and writer. My goal is to eventually publish; adding to the great many existing voices within the field of games who are observing an responding to the ever-evolving technological capabilities within the arts, opening up new avenues for storytelling in games. I also love making art both digitally and traditionally, creating paintings and in-game worlds - typically exploring themes of identity, mental health and societal issues.

Grace Beswick:

I am a printmaker from Staffordshire, currently based in Plymouth. I graduated from Arts University Plymouth in 2024 with a BA (Hons) in Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking. Since 2023, I have been developing The Blossom Series, an ongoing body of work that explores blossom through printmaking, painting and drawing.

Autobiographical themes are explored in my work as I observe the people, places and things around me. I typically respond to my photography, often using digital software to experiment, generate ideas, and prepare designs for traditionally produced printmaking outcomes. My work moves between levels of abstraction and figuration to challenge alternative ways of representing the original photographs.

I recently completed an artist residency in Plymouth with Real Art Make Print. My work has been shown in group exhibitions including the Thelma Hulbert Gallery Open (Honiton) and Artober (Plymouth), and will soon be exhibited in the Ironbridge Printmaking Competition (Shropshire).

Christina Camborne-Paynter

As someone who lives in Cornwall I always have a very difficult time in the summer. The crowds, the noise, the heat I don’t like any of it. I find myself getting burnt out quickly and becoming very irritable. This is why I have such a love for Autumn. The season feels like a warm hug and a deep breath. This piece stems directly from that feeling. Reminding myself that even in the hard parts I have a warm cup of tea, a frosty nose and a cosy sweater waiting for me on the other side.

Mal Bielecka

Mal graduated BA Animation in 2022, building a 2D character rig (digital puppet) for their FMP. Since graduating, they animated a short film for Yellow Mouse Studios (Beanka, 2023) before shifting their interests into illustration, ceramics and analogue photography. Mal's current work in MA Fine Art explores emotional processing as a neurodivergent adult, through a ritualistic personification of feelings and affects.

Charlotte Henry Stumpe:

Charlotte's multidisciplinary practice draws on memories, matrilineal connections, mythologies and censored histories. Examining personal lived experiences in contemporary British society with wearable assemblage ephemera and hand-sewn art objects, she subverts methods of control, reclaims linguistic narratives and attempts to shed a light on outdated symbology, traditions, reductive language, gendered epithets.

This work details the process of idea generation and project starting points- observing, recording and making tactile ephemera.

Rebecca Mills:

As an autistic artist I follow my sensory desires to underpin my practice. I position

autistic special interests as play to encourage engagement in joy as an opposition

to oppression. Predominantly working with textiles, my works emerge from an

intuitive trusting of what has so long been questioned and undermined.