For artist Jennie Bates, the 2025 Freelands Studio Fellowship at Birmingham City University has become a testing ground for her ongoing fascination with the logic and illogic of systems. Her practice, which sits somewhere between diagram and dreamscape, investigates how we try to make sense of a disordered world – layering drawing, painting, and sculpture to expose the tension between chaos and control.
Utilising the art school’s programme of workshops, Jennie’s experiments with scale and structure have grown, letting her two-dimensional works unfurl into the physical studio space. The mentorship and collaboration available through the Fellowship further encourage small disruptions; conversations that bend her thinking, reflect it back and stretch the parameters of what her work can hold. This dynamic gives rise to a practice that feels increasingly relational, grounded in the everyday gestures that inhabit an art school – learning, sharing and building community. Her process becomes a quiet rebellion against overload; a deliberate slowing down, and an embodied way of thinking through material.
Beyond the studio, her engagement with Birmingham’s art ecology, with spaces like Eastside Projects, extends this sense of dialogue outward. The Fellowship becomes not just a residency, but a rehearsal for belonging: a space to reimagine how art making can connect, disarm and quietly reshape the environments it inhabits.