Meet the YSI Sculpture Network Artists
About the YSI Sculpture Network
Yorkshire Sculpture International (YSI) is a partnership between Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Art Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield, and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, celebrating Yorkshire as a hub of sculptural excellence.
Our joint professional development programme, YSI Sculpture Network, focuses on nourishing creative practice and pathways in Yorkshire. Since 2020, we’ve supported more than sixty artists working across expanded and interdisciplinary approaches to sculpture.
We’re delighted to launch this year’s programme and announce the artists we’re supporting as part of Sculpture Network 2025. Find out more about the artists below!
Meet the artists
Ailish Treanor
Ailish Treanor is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Barnsley, South Yorkshire. Treanor’s sculptural practice is process-led, working imaginatively she explores the sculptural potential of paper. Often these explorations in paper evolve into working in other mediums such as ceramics, textiles and metal-working.
Ailish has exhibited in various venues across the UK, including two institutional solo exhibitions: Ulterior Motifs at Barnsley Civic, 2024-25; and Tableau Retro at 87 Gallery (Artlink Hull), 2022. She is currently working as a mentee to the artist Daniel Jones, as he produces a major new public artwork for Barnsley Council.
Alana Lake
Alana Lake is an artist and PhD researcher, working at the intersection of sculpture, psychoanalysis, and queer identity. Based in Todmorden and currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at Manchester School of Art, her project Towards a Pathology of Desire explores the relationship between addiction and desire through material engagement with glass, ceramic, metal, and expanded drawing. Lake’s sculptural works draw on destruction as a methodology, embracing the liveliness of matter to reflect on compulsion, desire, and embodiment.
She has received numerous awards and funding, including a DYCP from Arts Council England, 2024/25; Research Scholarship and Project Space Award from Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, 2022, 2018; NEUSTART Stipendium from Deutscher Künstlerbund, 2021; and the Dunoyer de Segonzac and Michael Moser Awards from the Royal Academy of Arts, 2008, 2009.
Aliyah Hussain
Aliyah Hussain is an artist based in Todmorden working across ceramic sculpture, sound and collage. Inspired by feminist science fiction, speculative storytelling, and plant-thinking, she makes expressive sculptural objects designed for reconfiguration and remixing in different spaces.
Her practice explores the connection between ceramics and sound, using embodied analogue sound capture methods to create soundtracks using recordings of the disrupted surfaces of her sculptures. Aliyah’s work engages with the physicality of sculpting with clay, and incorporates labour-intensive processes. Extruding, twisting, stretching and rolling clay into elongated coils that resemble drawing, exploring how these elements interact and evolve from gestural movements.
Her most recent work is a series of biomorphic surrealist forms that deal with ideas around transformation, radical botany and herbal knowledge. Since 2018 Aliyah has also collaborated with other artists to create soundtracks for worldbuilding projects including exhibitions, VR animations, computer games, RPGs, and performance.
Anne-Marie Atkinson
Anne-Marie Atkinson is an artist based in Leeds. Her practice takes an expanded, interdisciplinary approach, incorporating lens-based and digital media, drawing, collage, text, and sculptural installation.
She is interested in unfixed processes, layering, deletion, and continual motion to investigate points of encounter, shifting power relations, and alternative futures. Recent experiments have involved using ceramic to ‘invent’ natural objects, and mark-making referencing asemic writing to reflect on how knowledge is constructed, distorted, and held. Socially engaged approaches are also an important strand of her practice, including facilitating inclusive, relational projects with learning disabled people and other culturally marginalised groups. Often situated outside gallery settings, these are shaped by ethics of access, co-production, and representation.
Socially engaged approaches are also an important strand of her practice, including facilitating inclusive, relational projects with learning disabled people and other culturally marginalised groups. Often situated outside gallery settings, these are shaped by ethics of access, co-production, and representation.
Chanelle Windas
Chanelle Windas is a multidisciplinary artist based in Hull, East Yorkshire. She graduated at Central Saint Martins in 2022, after being the first in her family to attend university.
Chanelle is passionate about uncovering working class histories and narrative through art and is the co-founding director of the Working Class Creatives Database. She sees art as a powerful tool for self-expression and protest, with the potential to drive positive change and growth both individually and on a broader societal level. Her work adopts various approaches and strategies, which explore her own family narrative and working class history. These are sometimes bold, most times tender, serving as gentle acts of protest.
Dawn Woolley
Dawn Woolley examines consumer culture using a queer, anti-capitalist lens which encompasses performance, photography, video, sculpture and installation. She is interested in the commodified construction of gendered bodies, and gendered experiences of visibleness. This concern has become more pressing with the rise of social networking sites and smart phones with cameras, both of which contribute to the popularity and pervasiveness of self-portraiture.
Dawn’s current project #Rebel Selves is an interdisciplinary project that aims to queer the visual language of selfies and self-portraiture. Recent exhibitions include #Rebel Selves, Castlefield Gallery: New Art Spaces Warrington, 2024, RupturEXHIBIT, Hampton Wick, 2024 and Left Bank Leeds, 2024; Joy and Revolution: Rebel Selves, Diskurs Gallery, Berlin, 2023; and Consumed: Stilled Lives, bildkultur, Stuttgart, 2022 and Perth Centre for Photography, Australia, 2021.
Grace Clifford
Grace Clifford works underneath an old factory in Sheffield. Labour is intrinsic to her making, led by an innate subconscious desire she believes has been carved out for her by her forebears. Currently working with scrap metal, the body, horses, chocolate and plastic water bottles, Grace forms her own language of storytelling and unspoken rituals.
In 2023, Grace was in residence at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, supported by Working Class Creatives. In 2024 she was in residence at Yorkshire Artspace and took part in Abingdon Studios WORK/LEISURE programme, culminating in her 2025 solo show Thine is the Kingdom.
Henry Cottam
Henry Cottam is a Leeds-based artist working across sculpture, moving image and print. His practice explores Scunthorpe and Redcar’s steel industries and their deterioration. His work aims to question what is considered valuable in an industry rooted in extraction, examining what is saved and why during the decommissioning of these industries. He develops new ways of experiencing and preserving their histories through methods of documentation, material investigation, archiving and sculptural interventions.
Henry is a founding member of LAX (2024-ongoing) and Freehold Projects (2019-20), artist-led programming and exhibition collectives based in Leeds. In 2022, he co-curated Soundness, a digital programme commissioned by 2021 Visual Art Center in Scunthorpe. In 2022 he undertook an Arts Council funded DYCP Project, which was followed by the Cost of Innovation Artist Residency awarded by Invisible Flock in 2023.
Joseph Goddard
Joseph Goddard is an artist and teacher based in Leeds. His practice is situated within the post-industrial Yorkshire and is rooted in his upbringing in Dewsbury. He would spend weekends with his father, who was a designer and manufacturer, helping him screen-print and operate machines. While these devices were mysterious to him at the time, they later held an abstract, exotic power – as if they were already redundant in a world where global markets would supplant small businesses like his father’s.
Since 2022 his series Heritage has developed these ideas, resolving interests in urban spaces and resistance movements into works that combine public monuments, construction sites and temporary signs of political dissent.
Lucie Kordačová
Lucie Kordačová is a multidisciplinary artist from the Czech Republic, now based in Sheffield. Primarily working across sculpture, costume, textile and performance, Lucie’s diverse practice connects with, and responds to, the communities she lives within, both human and more-than-human.
Recent work focuses on the transformation of landscapes and species and the storytelling and mythmaking that reflects these changes. Lucie always seeks new materials to work with, and her latest pieces have incorporated found or reclaimed materials, including bog-cotton and seaweed.
Lucie is an artist at GLOAM in Sheffield and has worked with cultural organisations including Cinema For All, South London Gallery, and A4 Space for Contemporary Culture in Bratislava. She has recently received grants from The Eaton Fund and Creative Europe Fund.
Lucie has an MA in Fine Arts from J.E Purkyne University and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts (Porto) and the Academy of Fine Art and Design (Bratislava).
Luke Beech
Luke Beech makes sculpture from the social. Based in Hull, he works with performance, installation, and education to investigate queerness, madness and care. His practice unfolds in discomforting, participatory spaces where bodies leave traces, systems are gently unsettled, and new relational languages might emerge.
In Winner Breaks First, Humber Street Gallery, he transformed a gallery into a queer snooker room – blurring the rules of sport, nature, and identity. In Crucible, Humber Street Gallery, his body marked a wall in blue, turning futile gestures into operatic score. In The Talent Inside, Scarborough Art Gallery, the gallery was repositioned as a site of care, visibility, and public connection – centring unheard voices.
Luke is co-founder and co-director of Feral Art School and an art tutor in secure settings. Across these contexts, he approaches pedagogy as sculpture – where listening, organising, and resisting are materials in their own right. His work is not about answers, but about asking better questions together.
Molly Newham
Molly Newham is an artist and long-distance runner whose practice investigates the temporality of natural environments, using unstable materials and weathered surfaces to reflect shifting geographies. Through embodied movement in the landscape, she explores endurance, erosion, and mapping.
Molly is a curator and co-founded Mandy Apple Collective, a grassroots arts space in Scarborough. She is currently completing an MA in Fine Art at the University of Leeds part time.
Rhubarbs
In the vibrant world of Rhubarbs, art is a playground where boundaries are meant to be pushed, norms are meant to be challenged, and seriousness is always tinged with a hint of playfulness. Rhubarbs is the mischievous spirit of garish pinks and brooding Castleton greens, confronting the academic norms of the art world.
At the heart of Rhubarbs’ artistic practice lies a celebration of the interplay between creativity and nonconformity. Embracing the artist’s intersex condition as a source of inspiration, Rhubarbs deftly weaves a narrative that transcends the conventional boundaries of identity, urging the viewer to engage in a dance of curiosity, fertility, and ritualistic madness, questioning preconceived notions and revelling in the beauty of diversity, the odd and the eerie.
Rhubarbs sparks discussions about identity, gender, and the fluidity of existence, all while maintaining a light-hearted and accessible approach.
Simon Le Ruez
Simon Le Ruez was born in Jersey, CI and currently lives and works in Sheffield, UK. He has exhibited his work widely and internationally. He employs a multimedia approach, including sculpture and installation, which revels in aesthetical concerns that aim to bend the concept of the norm and of a given expectation.
Simon often works with materials which might be deemed conflicting, in order to create friction, and to push against mainstream standards of beauty. Conventions are further challenged through his use of colour, which is employed as a material to emphasise a physical presence and amplify a playful confrontation with space and time.
Recent pieces find inspiration in biological forms and architecture, and try to imagine new relationships between the built and the natural world.
Recent developments include a two month Testing Ground residency at Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield, 2024, and a commission for Sheffield Museums, 2025, which has recently been installed in Graves Gallery, Sheffield.
Simon Raines
Simon Raines is an artist based in Huddersfield. His work involves the construction of finely crafted elements, part sculpture, part object, combined in organic systems that draw their theme from the exploration and interpretation of landscape and architecture.
These simple-looking sculptures have a sense of craft and workmanship, using a minimalist vocabulary of curved, rounded cylindrical, and conical forms. They are created and developed using accumulative and labour-intensive processes, often using materials sourced from skips and workshop off-cuts. These recycled materials are cleaned and repurposed, locked together in an engineered precision.
