We are delighted to announce that from November 2025 Harriet Bowman will be working with us as an Incidental Artist, supported by a Wheatley Fellowship from Birmingham School of Art, Birmingham City University.
Harriet begins her feasibility study phase thinking about practice as a complex web of ‘shadow collaborators’, humans, animals and machines that she is in-conversation with. In particular she is interested in the life cycle of tyres, from rubber plantations and rubber production to tread groovers, drivers and shredders, from secondary uses as playground crash mats to overseas tyre graveyards which have become ideal breeding grounds for mosquitos.
She plans to explore histories of tyre production alongside contemporary tyre recycling sites in Birmingham, find out about the machines and bodies that facilitate these processes, and spend time with low riders and carpark doughnut performers who spend years imprinting rubber on tarmac as they hone the perfect circle, precision ‘drawings’ as opposed to the collision skid, performance versus incident, distinct yet similar material collisions.
Harriet Bowman is a multidisciplinary artist born in North Devon and currently living and working in Bristol with a studio at Spike Island. Recent exhibitions include: ‘Slow Puncture’ Standpoint Gallery, London, 2025; ‘Taking Care of the Yolk’, MIRROR Plymouth, Plymouth, 2024; ‘Maybe they had an urgent call’ (touring) Exeter Phoenix, Exeter, 2023; ‘Maybe they had an urgent call‘ (touring) Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne, 2022; All Round-er (sad sale), Spike Island, Bristol 2019; putting my foot down, OUTPOST gallery, Gildengate House, Norwich, 2018.
Recent awards and residencies include: Winner of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2024, The Cornwall Workshop, Residency led by Mike Nelson at CAST & Kestle Barton, 2024; Awarded the South West Showcase, 2023/24; Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award, 2023, AXIS Fellowship Award, 2023-24; Creative Associate in the glass department at the Arts University Plymouth, 2023-ongoing; Recipient of WEVAA bursary, 2023, a Lecturer on the UWE BA Fine Art & Art and Writing course and a trustee for Spike Island.
The Wheatley Fellowship is awarded annually following an open call by the School of Art at Birmingham City University. Since 2018 we have been collaborating to create a more substantial opportunity for an artist to spend time and make work in, and in response to, Birmingham. Previous fellows include Marley Starskey Butler, Verity-Jane Keefe, Alice Theobald, Joey Holder, Harun Morrison, and Sofia Niazi.