The South West Showcase was established by Hannah Rose in 2013, to support talent development and increase professional exhibition opportunities for artists in the region. The project supports visual artists living and working in the South West through a year-long programme of mentoring and support, and the development of an exhibition.

Artists have had access to first class facilities and workshops, along with support from the incredible technicians at Arts University Plymouth. This has been truly transformative, with artists working at scale and exploring entirely new processes including ceramics, glass, textiles, printing, film, sound and more. Practitioners have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible, and new works have been created by throwing horse hair into a kiln, making giant ceramic pasties, and producing floor-to-ceiling banners using photochemical processes. Artists have worked alongside students; sharing their experience, and demystifying how artists work and the journey of an idea that becomes a body of work presented in a public gallery.
A close curatorial relationship is established over the year to support artists in creating a significant body of work for exhibition. Mentoring, time, facilities and support with skills development are the key components of the South West Showcase.
Between 2013-2024 I supported 15* artists to develop ambitious new work and solo exhibitions.
*Some in part due to maternity leave

Harriet Bowman, taking care of the yolk (2024)
The exhibition looks at the boundaries of materials in relation to human and non-human entities

Ben Sanderson, Ouroboros (2024)
The exhibition consisted of wall-like works composed together to create temporary rooms. The walls were created by reusing old paintings in various states: primed and painted, dyed, cropped and quilted back together again, pulped and pressed into rag paper.

Huhamaki Wab, Yonaoshi (2022)
Wab explores our relationship to the idea of world renewal throughout the exhibition, taking imagery of the Namazu from Edo woodblock prints and our relationship with the more-than-human as a starting point.

Maud Craigie, Indications of Guilt, pt.1 (2021)
Indications of Guilt, pt.1 examines the structures of American police interrogation and their relationship to fictional screen representations of law enforcement.

Eleanor Duffin, A Phantom Limb (2020)
These elements are extensions of an ongoing project, titled Phantoms of Form, which takes as its central point the idea of the “other” woman.

Simon Bayliss, Meditations in an Emergency (2018)
Meditations in an Emergency takes its title from a poem by Frank O’Hara, written as prose-like musings on the subject of cultural identity and romantic heartbreak, spiked with landscape imagery.

Laura Phillips, I Felt Like the Sound of a Harp (2018)
For Phillips’ inaugural solo show, the artist presented a new body of work which takes its impetus from a building in Bristol, which from 1799-1802 was a medical research facility known as The Pneumatic Institute.

Stuart Robinson, Promontory (2017)
Stuart presented a new sculptural installation featuring frameworks, structures and illuminated elements that explore our experience of the everyday and how the world is presented to us.

Oliver Sutherland, And then…(2017)
Exploring possibilities for agency in digital production and the anxieties that spawn from submerging a body within technology, this new work presented dislocated narratives that pull in and out of focus, coming together and falling apart as an artificially intelligent camera encounters them.

Marie Toseland, pushin’ sumthin’ nice (feat. Kinlaw) (2015)
For pushin’ sumthin’ nice (feat. Kinlaw), Marie presented a series of discrete though interlocking new works, produced in part with the musician Kinlaw, as the opening scene of her latest project – an experimental opera in which objects are given voices and cast as characters.

Kit Poulson, The Guests (2015)
The Guests explored the feeling that all these works contain diverse fragments of the artist’s mind and of the particular moment they were constructed. Later these strange objects might not be easy to reconcile into unified statements, but rather exist as a constellation, individual orbits pulling and pushing at each other, generating strange convergences.

Abigail Reynolds, New Light (2013)
A reflection on the city of Plymouth, a view of which operates as the fourth wall for the gallery. Plymouth is a relic of the ideal post war city as designed by Abercrombie in the 1940’s. Reynolds contextualises Plymouth by placing it as a vision for the future alongside other realisations of communal ideologies striving to shape a better future.

Bryony Gillard, In the boom of the tingling strings (2013)
In the boom of the tingling strings considered how domestic music making can operate as a social activator, the role of the amateur musician within society and more specifically, the cultural and social significance of the piano, as an emblem of social mobility and aspiration.

Hannah James, The Outline Seems Indelible (2013)
Photography and print both record a moment: an action placed in time. However, both media also cause slippages in time, unsettling a clear distinction between past, present and future.