Broadway's Near Now Fellowship is our artistic and professional development programme which, through curiosity and discovery, helps pioneering artists to explore and realise bold new ideas.

Now in its sixth iteration, the Fellowship continues to attract some of the UK’s leading artists, thinkers and makers working across arts, design and technology.

Our fifth cohort will benefit from a period of funded research and development activity, supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

We're pleased to announce our newest fellows:

• Katharina Fitz (with support from Fellowship co-producers Future Makers)
• Sophie Huckfield

Broadway's Near Now Fellowship is a tailored programme of support, helping Katharina and Sophie to research and develop ambitious new work, reach new audiences and progress their careers.

We'll be sharing insights into their work and updates about their projects throughout the year.

Katharina's Fellowship is supported and co-produced by our friends at Future Makers, Nottingham’s new hub for entrepreneurial artists, designers and makers, as part of our ongoing collaborative project Repurposing Waste Plastic.

Using basic equipment installed at Future Makers, we have built a DIY plastic repurposing studio to start learning how to manipulate waste plastic. Working in residency, Katharina will spend time testing the tools and materials, working with us to develop a model for supporting artists/designers to make artworks, products and desirable objects from plastic waste.

Based in Nottingham, Katharina Fitz mainly works in the field of sculpture and installation, often in reference to industrial processes and architecture.

The physical engagement of the body is notably present in her practice, where traces and props of making draw the viewer into an exploration of the work. She questions the hierarchy and value of objects in a mass-produced, slick, and highly globalised world, embracing imperfection, provisionality and human touch. Fitz pushes the act of manual labour into the exhibition space to bring the energy and intimacy of making into contact with the audience. Her work explores the vision and understanding of our environment, offering a new reading of how it could be animated, changed, or extended into something else.

Her photographic work looks at issues surrounding the changes, phenomena, and structures that we find within the city and how they affect our coexistence within urban space.

katharinafitz.com

Through the Fellowship, Sophie is exploring the histories and futures of labour and technology in the East Midlands, drawing on research into local histories and stories relating to worker movements such as the Luddites and research related to the implementation of automation technologies.

Sophie’s Fellowship will culminate in a body of research and contribute to the development of new artworks to be exhibited in 2023.

Birmingham/London-based Sophie Huckfield (she/they) is an artist. Her practice draws on contemporary research and histories related to technology, labour, craft, social-class and industrialisation. She incorporates layering and cutting as a conceptual tool to reframe these complex socio-political histories, to develop multidisciplinary works which reimagine and reconfigure ‘production’ contexts and challenge the dominant narratives employed to frame specific stories, histories and experiences. Her practice aims to re-purpose the tools and technologies of production, both materially and culturally, to make space for redefining how we produce values, relations and traditions which are in turn embedded into the objects and stories we make.

sophiehuckfield.com

• Sophie Huckfield: Meet the Fellow talk — Broadway, 18 March 2023
• Sophie Huckfield: Lady Ludd workshop — Broadway, 18 March 2023

Banner image: Break the Frame, Sophie Huckfield (2020)