Nicole Goodwin (b. 2004) is a female artist based in the north of Ireland, currently in their final year of Fine Art studies at the Belfast School of Art. Their work centres around mortality, using the human body to question how comfortable we are with our own bodies and what's inside of them. Her current practice focuses on sculptural and performance processes to create work  based on personal reflections of her body as a young woman and how healthcare and medicine has evolved throughout history impacting women for better or for worse.

Image credit: Sandra Johnston, BIFPA 25

Sara Andrade Monteiro (b. 1978, Lisbon, Portugal) is a Northern Ireland–based artist currently studying Fine Art at Belfast School of Art. Working across performance, sculpture, sound, and lens-based media, her practice is grounded in lived experience and informed by trauma theory, with particular attention to embodiment, memory, dissociation, and endurance. In recent years, she has increasingly focused on performance as a primary mode of inquiry, using the body as both material and site.

Her work explores states of containment, vulnerability, and transformation, often engaging  with repetition, duration, and non-verbal forms of expression. Drawing on influences from ritual, horror cinema, dark humour, and contemporary performance practice, she creates environments that hold discomfort while allowing space for reflection and care. Through these works, she invites audiences into slow, emotionally charged encounters where meaning emerges over time rather than through spectacle.

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Sarah McLean (b.2004) is a multi-disciplinary artist in her second year of fine art at Ulster University’s Belfast School of Art. McLean focuses on sculpture and performance with a playful and inquisitive approach to her practice. Working through an absurdist lens to explore body politics and consumption, McLean uses sculptural props to coax audiences into cautious intrigue. Creating awkward scenarios that work to derive humour from the confrontation of common taboos, encourages further questions and relatability through audience involvement.

Currently working with themes of labour and ownership, her most recent line of inquiry is the limit and definition of prostitution. What it takes to own and sell one’s body, what it takes to consume another’s, and what forms that sellable and marketable product might take.

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Belfast School of Art

Kayla Fourie - Since arriving in this country, my life has shifted dramatically. These rapid changes have opened an unexpected space for my practice to evolve, allowing my art to take on an entirely new form. Living in a state of transition has made me acutely aware of how fragile the foundations of identity, ideology, and memory truly are. What once felt solid now tilts on uncertain ground, and this instability—both unsettling and liberating—feeds my creative process.

My work is driven by continuous reflection: a negotiation between past and future, between what I once understood and what I am still learning to name. I find myself comparing old frames of reference with new realities, confronting the dissolution of familiar ideas and the emergence of unfamiliar ones. This tension shapes my exploration of philosophy, social psychology, and the shifting nature of ideology—its construction, its preservation, and the ways it can fracture under pressure.

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Áine Crawford (b. 2003) is a Belfast based multi-disciplinary artist specialising in drawing, sculpture, and performance, currently in their final year studying Fine Art at Belfast School of Art. 

Through memory driven recreations of being socially conditioned as female, their work explores themes of misogyny, surveillance, and restrictions placed on the female body in the domestic sphere.

Their current body of work examines marginalised human/non-human relationships within structures of injustice, through taxidermy and repurposed materials, by using death as a motif. 

Image credit: Sandra Johnston, BIFPA 25

Síofra McCarthy is a multi-disciplinary artist currently in her second year of study in BSOA. She works with a wide range of media, focusing on ceramics, sculpture and video work, while also producing written pieces.  She uses figurative work to explore human connections, with reference to intimate emotions of the individual, and the universal understanding of our inevitable ends. Transience is a key aspect of her work, and she often utilises the materiality of clay to present this, allowing it to deteriorate to its natural state as the viewer witnesses its slow symbolic destruction. Her imagery aims to understand the anxiety that attaches itself to time and advises the viewer to take action in spite of this. 

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Leo FitzSymons is an Irish artist in his third-year studying Fine Art at Belfast School of Art. He works with multiple disciplines, using performance, video, and collage to explore ideas of human connection and communication. Leo is currently looking at language, narrative, storytelling and how memories shape our communication. 

Image credit: Sandra Johnston, BIFPA 25

Erin McManus is a visual artist based in Belfast exploring themes of feminine sexuality through mediums such as photography, sculpture, textiles and performance. Using these mediums, Erin aims to challenge patriarchal society's by reclaiming feminine bodies and sexualities back from
the male gaze.

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