Naoibh McNamee is a queer autistic multi-disciplinary artist from Birmingham. Naoibh’s practice focuses on queer and disabled themes; following their own personal experiences in an attempt to understand and explore their position within the world.

Naoibh’s practice invites the viewer to enter camp, colourful new worlds that transcend and subvert heteronormative and neurotypical societal expectations. They use their work to embrace and celebrate their lack of assimilation, demanding their own agency and spaces to exist authentically. Naoibh’s work plays with viewers’ expectations and perceptions of disability and queerness, drawing attention to the very things that other them in society. The artist’s most recent works have explored their queer autistic existence, using alien and non-human forms to illustrate their very human experiences.

They work four days (30hrs) a week and their salary is paid at the Real Living Wage.

Naoibh’s Website

Contact them on naoibh[at]eastsideprojects.org

Ruth is an artist who makes things. Sometimes those things are artworks for exhibitions or public artworks and sometimes they are resources like the Birmingham Art Map, programmes like Workshop Birmingham, infrastructure like STEAMhouse or multiverses like Eastside Projects.

She works with Gavin Wade to make things happen, imagine and run the organisation, find the money, curate and produce projects and exhibitions and develop strategic plans. She leads on the development of artists support programmes including EOP, The Syllabus and  STEAMhouse.

She is a Company Director and one of Eastside Projects’ founders.

She works four days a week and her salary is £29,429 (£36,786 pro-rata)

ruthclaxton.info

Contact her on ruth[at]eastsideprojects.org

Lucy is an artist based in Coventry. Her current thoughts are interested in using shifting and gesture as compositional devices where potentialities are imagined. Through language and architecture works combine to reconsider modes of production as a rehearsal space where thoughts slip, slide, refuse, relate and hold.

In July 2022 she was a graduate researcher with Paul Mellon Centre x Yale School of Art where she organised COMMON-NOTE(S) – an experimental ground for unpublished thinking and writing. She has previously published in Art Review Oxford and Must Use Critical Knowledge (M.U.C.K).  Currently, she is a Research Associate with the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry between 2023-2025, and runs ‘flatGROUND’, a curatorial project existing within and between structures, doors, windows, gas pipes, and drains.

She works four days (30hrs) a week and her salary is paid at the Real Living Wage.

Lucy’s website

Contact her on lucy[at]eastsideprojects.org

Jaz is an artist-curator and writer, interested in Speculative Blackness, community collaboration, and culture-building. She loves storytelling, and her work is an ongoing process of sense- and memory-making. Jaz also runs creative support group BRMTWN.

She works four days (30hrs) a week and her salary is paid at the Real Living Wage.

jazmor.com

Contact her on jaz[at]eastsideprojects.org

Zoë is a curator and creative practitioner currently working between Birmingham and Leeds. In her role as Offsite Curator at Eastside Projects she develops and curates EP’s projects and programmes beyond the gallery.

She previously worked as Curator at Project Space Leeds and The Tetley from 2007-17, commissioning and producing large-scale commissions, exhibitions and events with artists including Simeon Barclay, Joseph Buckley, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Dora Garcia, Lubaina Himid and Rehana Zaman.

In her independent practice she initiated and ran theartmarket + Kunstfreund Gallery in Leeds from 2006-12 and has been a co-director of practitioner-led collective Mexico since co-founding it in 2011. She is a director of Corridor 8 art writing platform and an advisory board member of the East Leeds Project.

She works two days a week and her salary is £12,500 p/a (£31,250 pro rata).

Gavin is an artist-curator, Director of Eastside Projects, and Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham City University. His (co)curated exhibitions include ‘Sonia Boyce: In the Castle of My Skin’ (2020), ‘This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things X’ (2018), and ‘Display Show’ (2015–16), Temple Bar Gallery/Eastside Projects/Stroom den Haag.

Gavin makes/has made art on twitter, in public squares, shopping malls, naval frigates, cathedrals, Commons, Parks, The London Underground, Dudley Zoo, and the future Smithfield Market in the centre of Birmingham (2025). His books include ‘Upcycle This Book’ (2017) and ‘Has Man A Function In Universe’ (2008), both published by Book Works. He is a Company Director and one of Eastside Projects’ founders.

He works full time and his salary is £41,531 p/a.

Contact him on gavin[at]eastsideprojects.org

An Endless Supply is a design studio in Birmingham, UK, established in 2011 by Harry Blackett and Robin Kirkham. They work with artists and organisations making websites, printed matter and identities.

An Endless Supply work with us on a freelance basis on print and web design.

endless.supply

Matt is from a fine art background and began his career working with gallery technical teams. He established Plane Structure in 2011 to fulfil a need for skilled art fabricators in Birmingham. Since then the company and its workshop has grown to deliver specialist carpentry and joinery as well as gallery installation.

Matt regularly works with us on a freelance basis to realise exhibitions and projects.

plane-structure.co.uk

Rose has been helping us keep Eastside Projects clean and tidy since 2020. She is paid the Real Living Wage and contracted through DST Cleaning Services.

Suzi is a freelance art technician and maker based in Birmingham who studied sculpture at the Slade School of Art. She is a maker of functional ceramics and a member of Modern Clay co-op; a co-working and public project space run by its artist members.

Neisa is an independent ICB bookkeeper with over 20 years’ experience, providing a range of accounting services for Freelancers, startups, small to medium businesses and Not for profit Organisations. Neisa and her colleagues work with us two days a month, on a freelance basis.

She has been keeping our finances in order since 2012.

ntrbkservices.com

Roo Kaur Dhissou is a British, Indian, (British Asian, Punjabi, and all things in between and beyond) multidisciplinary artist based in Birmingham. Her practice explores the relationships and connections we have with one another and the land, through notions such as culture, belonging and identity.

She is due to begin her PhD in interdisciplinary Arts and Cultural Studies in 2021, exploring the representation of South Asian women from the Diaspora in 21st Century Britain. She is an EOP member.

She joined the Advisory Board in 2021.

https://roodhissou.com

Anita Lawlor is a communications expert with over ten years’ experience working in galleries and arts organisations, on a range of curatorial projects, campaigns, events programmes and publications.

She currently works as Communications Manager at DACS.

She joined the Advisory Board in 2021.

Paul McKeown is a Director at BDO Accountants where he is Head of Valuations in the Midlands and the North with 30 years of experience. He is a keen art collector and joined the Advisory Board after discovering Eastside Projects and the work of EOP members at a Contemporary Arts Society event in London.

He joined the Advisory Board in 2012 and provides financial expertise and diligence.

Bushra Mohamed is a British-Kenyan architect. She is the Director of Msoma Architects, a London-based architecture and research practice that centers peripheral identities, cultures and people within the built environment.

Her practice is entangled with academia, where she develops decolonial pedagogical frameworks at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Kingston School of Art, and the University of Cambridge.

Bushra has contributed to several publications, including Sound Advice’s NOW YOU KNOW, the Architectural Review, the AA Files, and the RIBA Journal. In 2020, she was named a RIBA Rising Star.

She joined the Advisory Board in 2023.

msoma.co.uk

Andrea Phillips is a writer and organiser in contemporary art. She is Director of the BXNU Institute which develops research, events and exhibitions as part of Northumbria University’s partnership with the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.

She joined the Advisory Board in 2017.

Jazz Swali is a contemporary art curator. He is currently the assistant curator of exhibitions at Backlit Gallery (Nottingham). His work with contemporary art, museums and galleries is embedded with curatorial activism, cultural and equality strategy, socio-political focuses, and alternative queer and experimental practices.

His recent exhibitions as a curator include The Joy of Destruction (2023) and, in reality, these things need to be said (2021). Working with artists such as Rebecca Allen, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Robert Yang, De’Anne Crooks, Kim Thompson, and Rene Matić. Swali has developed projects such as the Outcome programme with Backlit Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, and the University of Nottingham (2021-2024).

He joined the Emerging Curators Group programme with the British Art Network, Tate, and Paul Mellon Centre in 2023 and has recently been awarded two Arts Council England project grants for independent curatorial programmes (2020-2023).

He joined the Advisory Board in 2021.

Nathan Tromans is Associate Professor and Head of Birmingham Institute of Creative Arts at Birmingham City University. He has worked in the School of Visual Communication for over 20 years, as a visiting tutor, lecturer, Course Director and Deputy Head and was appointed to the role of Head of School in 2015.

He is a Photographer with a keen interest in contemporary art and music.

He joined the Advisory Board in 2020.

Eastside Projects has been a Not for Profit Company Limited by Guarantee Reg: 6402007 since 2007.

Eastside Projects Ltd’s founding Company Directors were Simon Bloor, Tom Bloor, Ruth Claxton,  Celine Condorelli, James Langdon, and Gavin Wade

The current company directors are Tom Bloor, Ruth Claxton and Gavin Wade and legal responsibility for the company lies with them.

Gavin Wade (Artist-Curator) and Ruth Claxton (Artist Maker) co-lead Eastside Projects and run the organisation on a day-to-day basis.

Sophie  is an artist, curator and organiser based in Leeds. She is interested in world-building, ecology, science fiction and forged histories. Her recent works have created narratives about imagined worlds. Often using drawing as a way to begin a project, she is currently making drawings of killer plants, inspired by John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids. Sophie co-founded the artist-led organisation Freehold Projects. Based in Leeds city centre, Freehold Projects aimed to bridge the gap between education and larger institutions in Yorkshire. It also offered a space for collaboration and exhibition-making for the 10 artists who ran it. Sophie works as an invigilator, technician, receptionist and learning facilitator across multiple
galleries in Yorkshire.

sophiebullen.com

Rhiannon is a visual artist based in North Oxfordshire. She came to art practice after working in commercial agricultural botany and as a consulting Medical Herbalist. She often uses constructed or everyday objects to provoke action, conversation and coincidence to create and re- mediate personal and collective archives – physical, digital and embodied. Explorations of  private, personal, local and on-line relational spaces emerge in the process. Recent works re-form fragmented, dynamic imagery developed from integrated and embodied circuits, systems and networks, human anatomy and botanical microscopy.

vectorcatalyst.wordpress.com

Rene is a multi-disciplinary who recently moved to Birmingham to Gateshead. She uses drawing, live performance, poetry and sculpture. The internal structure of music and how a track is built is similar to how she builds performances, drawings and writings: the rhythm, the repetition, the chorus, the sourness, the loop, starting again, *new track*.  She is interested in moments of subversion, disruption, and glitch, (and softness and tenderness within this). She was an artist-in-residence at YARD Art House in Ladywood for 3 months, as part of MAIA’s Life Affirming Infrastructure season. Rene is currently making a quilt telling the story of ‘imagining a park that has everything everyone needs’; the quilt has been co-designed with members of the public who attended a workshop I hosted at YARD.

Tesha Murrain–Hernandez is a Jamaican-Montserratian wellness artist, interested in themes of community space, herbology, Blackness, Afro-Spiritualities & Cosmologies, and somatic movement. Based in Birmingham, her background is in teaching, autism awareness training, and managing behaviours that challenge in learning spaces.

As a Black woman with Migraine disability, Tesha is interested in finding ways to make art more accessible to herself and her wider community, through community gathering, intuitive practices & experimentation, consulting, and collaboration.