This session offers the opportunity to hear from artists connected to the West Midlands who have undertaken the Freelands Studio Fellowship; to provide insight and information to anyone considering applying to the current call for fellows 2027/28.

Artists Lou Blakeway and Ellie Spink will share their fellowship experiences, and Freelands Foundation Curator Rosie Hermon will introduce the programme, with time for questions from attendees.

The Studio Fellowships provide artists with a studio in an art school, access to research, technical and workshop facilities, mentorship and opportunities to develop their teaching practice. Fellows receive a bursary of £28,000 for the year.

A Studio Fellowship creates an environment in which the artist, faculty, and art students can build a symbiotic relationship. As well as offering art students insight into the practice of an early career artist, working alongside students can also afford an artist the opportunity to examine their own working methods and practice.

The Freelands Studio Fellowships are open to artists with a studio-based practice, who have received an undergraduate or master’s degree from any of the partner art schools: Birmingham School of Art, Bath Spa University, Belfast School of Art, Cardiff School of Art & Design, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee, Falmouth School of Art, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen.

Event Access

• This session will be recorded.
• There will be opportunity for questions.
• Online event, closed captions will be available during the session.
• Please contact colette@cvanwestmidlands.co.uk with access queries.

About the Artists

Lou Blakeway is a Midlands-based painter who holds an MA in Painting from the Manchester School of Art. She completed the Turps Banana Correspondence Course in 2022 and has a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Birmingham School of Art. In 2023 she was awarded a bursary from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and was the 2024/25 Freelands Studio Fellow at University of Brighton. She is the Senior Painting Technician at Birmingham School of Art.

Her work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show; Fitzrovia Gallery, London; Irving Contemporary, Oxford; New Art Gallery Walsall; Rabley Drawing Centre; Mall Galleries, London; RWA, Bristol; Rugby Museum; Hastings Museum and Art Gallery; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland. She currently has solo shows at the Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum and the Herbert Gallery, Coventry.

Ellie Spink is the current Freelands Studio Fellow at Birmingham School of Art. She holds an MA in Fine Art Ceramics from Bath Spa School of Art (2024), where she received the Southall Award for Sustainable Community Engagement, and a BA (Hons) from Camberwell College of Art (2018). Working within sculpture and installation, Ellie examines physical, social, and imaginative spaces by creating staged worlds where our surroundings are explored, catalogued, and memorialised in playful way.

Her making is influenced by instinctual material exploration, largely investigating clay dug from the earth and the ability for this material to encourage interaction and co-learning. This aspect of her practice often arises within workshop facilitation, including for Futures Festival: Doing Together for the Future 2025, and Art in the Docks.

About the Freelands Studio Fellowships

Launched in 2021 as a Painting Fellowship, and expanded in 2023 to encompass wider studio practice, the Freelands Studio Fellowships build on the legacy of art school

fellowships. Often providing a first step into teaching, fellowships enable artists to develop their own practice while fostering a symbiotic relationship between teaching and art-making that enriches the artist, art students and wider art school community.

A fellowship provides a rare yet vital environment in which an artist and art student can build a co-learning relationship. For students, the presence of a Fellow offers immediate insight into the practice of an early career artist. For an artist, working alongside art students gives them the opportunity to examine their own practice within an educational context and to build their own approach to teaching.

The Freelands Studio Fellowships is an annual programme in partnership between Freelands Foundation and UK universities who co-develop the programme. Fellows are selected by the partners in annual callouts to alumni of the participating universities.