SHAYLA MARSHALL

Shayla Marshall is a Miami and London-based contemporary multidisciplinary artist working across mixed media, using world-building to reimagine histories and futures shaped by others. Her upbringing in a culturally diverse, predominantly Black community in Miami, where self-expression was celebrated, continues to inform her practice.

After moving to California, Marshall encountered a different reality of Blackness, prompting a deeper interrogation of identity, place, and perception. This shift now underpins her work. Rooted in storytelling, Marshall’s work draws on multiple timelines to construct immersive, expressive worlds, inviting viewers into richly layered narratives of Black life.

What are three things that inspire you at the moment?

Shayla Marshall: Ghetto Futurism in Black Culture, time, and Zora Neale Hurston

Is there one skill an artist needs to develop?

Shayla Marshall: To lean into education as a way of evolving your creative practice. As both humans and artists, we don’t possess all the tools, and our perspectives can be inherently limited. For that reason, we should always remain students. It’s this mindset that has expanded my own practice, opening me up to new ways of thinking and new possibilities.

FAVOUR J

Favour Jonathan – from Benin City, Nigeria – is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Her sculptural practice is rooted in historical research and storytelling, exploring themes of identity, memory, and cultural legacy.

Working primarily in sculpture, Jonathan honours figures from Black African and Black British history, using public art to spark dialogue, remembrance, and connection. Her sculptures invite viewers to see history not as something distant, but as a living force that continues to shape identity and inspire collective memory.

What does reimagining craft mean to you?

Favour J: Observing creativity and traditions within your culture and heritage, and integrating what you’re drawn to into your everyday life. This could be reimagining or breaking down what things mean to you in the current time, giving traditions functionality in the current time, for example

Practising your culture in busy London or creating objects, shapes, patterns, or infusing materials from your culture into household objects, spoons, belts, clothes, furniture, paintings or decor to keep you close to your heritage.

What are three things that inspire you at the moment?

Favour J: Traditional medicine and healing practices and what nature has to offer.

Is there one skill an artist needs to develop?

Favour J: Learning to put as much care into themselves as they do into their practice. Understanding that looking after your health, body and mind is vital to producing work in every aspect. Constantly working for years in a burnout state can do a lot of damage in the long run.

SOLA OLULODE

Sola Olulode is a British-Nigerian artist living in London. Her practice explores materiality and intimacy, using textile craft with figurative mixed media painting. Constructing a spacetime of care and tenderness, in which her figures can be away from the harsh realities of our world and in which relations are tethered through warmth and tactility.

What does reimagining craft mean to you?

Sola Olulode: Central to my practice is Nigerian textile craft. Combining the process of resistance dyeing methods influenced by Adire cloth making with figurative mixed media painting to create scenes encapsulating joy and tenderness. I need to keep these processes alive and think of different ways of using these skills in art. For me, it’s an exploration of different traditions that have influenced my practice in a way that also reflects my upbringing and the West African and European histories I’ve studied.

Experimenting with these different styles to create something new and different is a playful way for me to express my personal background and be in touch with my sense of self.

Three things that inspire you at the moment

Sola Olulode: Love songs, Black women, and transformation

Is there one skill an artist needs to develop?

Sola Olulode: I think every artist should be patient. Take their time learning and refining their craft, and really discovering the uniqueness of their own creativity. And then also apply that patience to their career goals; there isn’t a rush, it’s good to consider the many different pathways there are for artists. No particular formula is going to work for everyone. Believe in yourself, take your time, and enjoy the journey!

TYREIS HOLDER

Tyreis Holder is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, visual storyteller and community arts practitioner from South London, with heritage stemming from Jamaica and St. Vincent.

She works heavily in mediums pertaining to installation, textiles, performance, poetry, sculpture and sound. Her practice centres around explorations of selfhood, Black Caribbean British identity within the diaspora, identity politics, queer identity, generational/ancestral healing, heritage, archive, and the relationship with the mind, particularly with regard to navigating colonial spaces.

What does reimagining craft mean to you?

Tyreis Holder: I believe it’s about honouring tradition and those who came before me, whilst engaging with it through a new lens shaped by perspective, audience, and privilege. When it comes to craft that has existed for generations before us, what has shifted is our ability to bring these practices into new spaces, shaped by socio-political change, while embedding our own voice – whether it’s through subject, material, or process. To reimagine is not to replace, but to listen. To understand your place within the lineage – in relation to those who came before, and in responsibility to those who will come after. And it's important to allow your ancestors to work through you when in need of guidance, because that connection is what has kept the thread of heritage and craft alive in the first place.

Three things that inspire you at the moment?

Tyreis Holder: The Sun Shining, Jill Scott, and Kerry James Marshall.

Is there one skill an artist needs to develop?

Tyreis Holder: Learning to surrender to the journey of the creative process.

AJAHEE SEKKM-MILES

Ajahee Sekkm-Miles is a Brooklyn-born, London-based nomadic cultural arts curator, producer, and multidisciplinary artist committed to amplifying narratives of the global majority. Rooted in care, culture, and critical imagination, her practice bridges archival research, cultural traditions, and contemporary artistic expression to connect Afro-diasporic communities worldwide. She builds inclusive, transformative environments that promote authenticity, grounding, collective freedom, and reimagine how and why art lives in the world.

What does reimagining craft mean to you?

Ajahee Sekkm-Miles: To me, reimagining craft means relearning history, seeking references, and understanding how this information fuels contemporary culture. We cannot envision a future where the past is not considered. Still, by holding on to and allowing history and tradition to guide us, new generations adapt and become the catalysts for continual worldbuilding. Holding on to our heritage through craft and creating is a tangible evolution of the dreams of our ancestors.

Three things that inspire you at the moment

Ajahee Sekkm-Miles: SAINT HERON; BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions and Singeli.

Is there one skill a curator needs to develop?

Ajahee Sekkm-Miles: Not overintellectualising people’s livelihoods. Many times, experiences are simply meant to happen and be felt in the moment. The ‘deeper meaning’ lies within the ordinariness of it all.

Resurgence: Craft Reimagined is open to the public at The Gallery at Hackney Downs Studios from Friday 13 March until Thursday 2 April.