UK Young Artists (UKYA) is a registered charity that champions the next generation of creativity, supporting collaboration and intercultural dialogue, ensuring a vibrant and diverse creative future for the UK. UKYA works with young artists (18-30) across all art forms and develops artists’ practice through providing talks, workshops and residencies that encourage cross art form collaboration; and celebrates creativity at national and international biennales and events.
For In Another Place UKYA is presenting new work by Charlie Birtles, an applied artist who graduated in 2015 after studying Three-Dimensional Design at Manchester School of Art. Birtles creates artworks of curiosity. Inspired by miscellanea, from a compulsion to find and collect, she endeavours to explore value and meaning of unsung objects. Her choice of materials come from everyday items, and combined with meticulous processes and repetitive techniques, lead her through a narrative by which she organically creates. Each object Charlie creates is carefully considered; collectively they form a ‘landscape’ of her reflective process.
UK Young Artists’ billboard, located in Nottingham, heralds its next biennale City Takeover: Nottingham in February 2019 when 200 artists from across the globe will be in the city showing and sharing their work with audiences. It will raise the UKYA’s profile with artists and stakeholders, ignite curiosity in potential participants – particularly young designers and applied artists – and encourage the general public to celebrate the wealth of talent and creativity that exists within the city and across the globe, presented right on their doorstep.
Charlie’s artwork that features in her billboard image has been made possible thanks to Nottingham City Museums and Galleries, Judith Edgar and Newstead Abbey for access to Nottingham Museum’s Lace Archive.