Selectors
Every year, artworks are selected by a panel of artists and experts from our local community.
Jemisha Maadhavji, Artist
Jemisha Maadhavji lives and works in Leicester. She has a master’s degree in Fine Art, 2020-22, and a BA degree in Fine Art, 2015-18, both from De Montfort University, Leicester.
Jemisha's work is hugely influenced by bold colours, patterns and fashion. She explores individuals from different cultural backgrounds, personalities, and gender through symbolism and narrative. Jemisha is not interested in painting people everybody knows or who are famous; rather she focuses on people unknown to her and to the world. Her practice explores themes of desire, luxury and gender, and questions what beauty in the twenty first century is. Jemisha’s paintings are predominantly created with oil paints on canvas with multiple delicate layers, alternating with sometimes thickly textured ones to allow viewers to feel their presence.
Jemisha featured in an episode of the BBC One Extraordinary Portraits series in 2023 and had an important solo exhibition at Nottingham Castle Museum called My Celebrities in 2023-24. She has two paintings in the collection at Soho House, Oxford, and Symphony of the Libertine, 2022, oil and jewellery on canvas, was acquired by the Ferens Art Gallery in 2023 for the permanent collection. This painting featured in the 2022 Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition hosted at the Ferens Art Gallery and the South London Gallery. Jemisha currently teaches painting (fine art) at De Montfort University.
Sarah Pennington, Artist and Director of HARI Hull Artist Research Initiative
Sarah Pennington has a Fine Art degree from Hull School of Art and Design, 1994, and a master’s in Fine Art Practice & Research from Sheffield Hallam University, 2013-16.
Sarah is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice often finds its starting points in everyday objects – once cherished or crucial, now tarnished and discarded, become symbolic. These objects may be used in multiple, taken apart, cast in an alternative material, or assembled with other artefacts. She recently made her first artist film – a visual essay with poetic narrative in response to Urban Green Spaces and their many personal and societal benefits.
In 2021 Sarah launched artist-led project HARI (Hull Artist Research Initiative). Its remit is to support research and experimentation by artists through residency opportunities, and arenas for discourse around the arts and their intersections with environment, society, and other areas of study, through events for sharing knowledge.
Her work with HARI is founded on her passion for the arts and the comprehension and expertise gained through over 20 years working as arts professional in roles such as Arts Development Manager, Arts & Health Inclusion Officer, Facilitator, Producer, Researcher, Curator and Lecturer.
Hannah Willetts, Curator, Beverley Art Gallery
Hannah Willetts has a degree in the History of Art from the University of Leeds, 2009-13. Hannah started working at Beverley Art Gallery in 2022. Her current responsibilities include managing the permanent collection displays in Beverley’s Edwardian gallery space and delivering the exhibition programme. Her professional experience includes working at the Hepworth Wakefield, Glasgow Museums, East Dunbartonshire Museums, and auction houses Sotheby’s and Lyon & Turnbull, where she specialised in Fine and Decorative Art.
Curatorial work includes the Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Making the Glasgow Style exhibition, 2018, shown at Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, the Walker Art Gallery and four US venues with the American Federation of Arts. She has also worked in Collections Management caring for, storing, and displaying both large and small-scale collections, and making them publicly accessible.
Hannah is passionate about sharing art collections, supporting local artists, and is strongly motivated by the challenge of engaging diverse audiences. She is a member of the Emerging Curators Group 2024 and has been awarded bursary funding by the British Art Network for her research project on creating an active art gallery space.
