A new exhibition in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds showcases work by five graduating MA Fine Art students.
In The Inside and Outside of Belonging, artists Annie Greenwood, Hsin Tien, Huayu Zhang, Kirstin Harvie and Isobel Richards present an exploration of what it is to belong.
Open to the public until 6 September, this year’s MA Fine Art Degree Show is a culmination of the artists’ time studying at Leeds.
The exhibition delves into the complexities of belonging, not belonging, and simultaneously belonging inside and outside of place, class, institution, memory, seasons and society.
Independently organised and curated by the five graduating MA Fine Art students taking part, The Inside and Outside of Belonging features individual solo shows across the studios on the first and second floors of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, with a group show in the downstairs Project Space.
From landscape painting and portraiture, to abstraction, moving image, sculpture and site-specific installation, the work on display weaves its way through these complexities as we all travel a journey of questioning what it means to belong.
In creating the show, the students have focused on the connections they have with each other and the wider world, and how “a sense of belonging is a vital part of life for everyone. It is a process comprised of multiple layers; it is to feel familiar, have shared experiences, and know we are among people and places who know us.”
The exhibition follows on from two iterations of this year’s MA Fine Art Interim Show I Never Agreed to Lend My Voice in Project Space (February) and Hyde Park Book Club (May). Taking place annually, the interim show is an opportunity for all of the artists on the course to take stock of their practice so far, to experiment and find connections between one another.
The five graduating artists showing work in their final year degree show this September are a mix of full-time (those studying over one year) and part-time MA Fine Art students. The part-time route is popular with artists who wish to combine their studies with work or family commitments, allowing them to take the course over two years.
Annie Greenwood
Part-time MA Fine Art student Annie Greenwood is an artist and educator based in Leeds.
With a focus on her family home in rural West Yorkshire, Annie Greenwood’s practice is concerned with the relationship between place and memory.
Predominantly working with moving image, she combines slow moving visuals with digital text to tell fragmented, self-reflective stories. The narratives that emerge linger in ambiguity, as they loop back on themselves and resist resolution, unravelling the remembered, half-remembered and forgotten..
Annie’s solo show in Purple Studio invites visitors to immerse themselves in a room laid out with soft furnishings, warm lamps, living room chairs, lavender smells, empty photo frames and lace curtains. It unravels how homes, objects, smells and sounds carry memories and trigger emotions.
A second video installation in Project Space is set in rural West Yorkshire, where she grew up, exploring the relationship between place and memory. Annie said:
“The MA Fine Art Degree show has been an incredible opportunity to embed my audiovisual work within a site-specific installation.
“The space in Purple Studio is centralised by a ten minute film with sound, split into two acts and across two screens. The film, Just Five More Minutes, unravels the feeling of being stuck – within memory, time and place.
“My installation is flooded with a nostalgic feel, containing carefully chosen ornaments, smells, furniture, curtains and an ever-present cat.”
Hsin Tien
Hsin Tien is a Taiwanese painter and full-time MA Fine Art student. Hsin’s works are concerned with the surrounding life, exploring how fragments of memory resonate with current emotions, and deeply delving into how memories influence her perception of objects.
During her time studying in the UK, she has not only captured many of the uniquely British sceneries that have felt novel to her, but also continued to document emotionally stirring moments while traveling through Europe.
A range of Hsin’s paintings are on display in the expansive space of Grey Studio and in Project Space.
All four walls of Orange Studio are taken up with Jun 2024 – Jul 2025 – an acrylic and oil pastel painting on a 14m long canvas roll. Intended to be viewed from right to left, the painting highlights places Hsin has explored over the past year in the UK and in travels across Europe.
Hsin said:
“My painting themes consistently focus on the landscapes surrounding everyday life.
“These unfamiliar first encounters often carry an inexplicable sense of familiarity. For instance, stumbling upon a bench on a vast, boundless prairie that resembled the one in my grandmother’s backyard would instantly pull me into a whirlpool of memories, forming a magical connection between the present and the past.”
Tien excels at discovering such connections among different scenes – finding a droplet of memory in a sea of unfamiliarity:
“Perhaps it stems from a strong sense of homesickness, or maybe it’s the mischievous play of memories in my mind.
“This game of seeking belonging in new environments, transforming them into blurred, fantastical landscapes that lie between imagination and reality, gradually became a central theme in my creative journey.”
Huayu Zhang
Huayu Zhang is a realistic painter from China studying full time on the MA Fine Art course. His primary focus has been on oil painting, emphasising artistic expression through material and technique, which he developed during his studies in China.
A range of Zhang’s paintings and ceramic sculptures are on display as a solo show in Blue Studio and as part of the group show in Project Space. Huayu said:
“While at Leeds, I have shifted my focus to exploring my perceptions of my environment, experimenting with diverse media to convey my feelings about the changing seasons.
“Unlike China’s four distinct seasons, the UK has a more humid and windy climate, prompting me to use various materials such as acrylics, wool and clay to express my emotional response to this different climate.”
Kirstin Harvie
Part-time student Kirstin Harvie is a painter whose work confronts the relationship between violence, identity, and representation.
Originally from London and now based in Leeds, she studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics before pursuing an MA in Fine Art. Her academic background informs a research-led practice that interrogates how complex moral issues are mediated and consumed.
Kirstin’s MA exhibition focuses on 107 individuals serving whole life orders in the UK.
A whole life order is the most severe sentence of imprisonment with no possibility of release. These people are often reduced to symbols of monstrosity through their media mugshots.
Harvie reworks these images into fragmented, layered forms that both reveal and obscure, questioning how identity is constructed, distorted, and erased in public discourse.
Her exhibition brings together two strands of practice: brightly coloured paintings and monochrome prints. In their differences, one insistent and one reduced, they create a deliberate clash that makes each seem more extreme.
The exhibition is staged as an encounter that unsettles familiar ways of looking and opens a space in which viewers must form their own response.
Kirstin’s solo show is located in Yellow Studio, with a number of works exhibited in the group show in Project Space. Kirstin said:
“The prints collapse the faces of all individuals with whole life orders into composites, referencing Cesare Lombroso’s pseudo-scientific ‘atavistic form’ from 1876, which attempted to define criminal types.
“Although criminology has moved on, prisons still lag behind. Printed in chronological order and stacked into a single structure, the works reduce people into confinement.
“The paintings insist on presence through scale and colour. Clashes of complementary hues and the contrast between precise underpainting and gestural marks create tension, while fragmentation disrupts recognition. Sections are removed or reinserted out of place, altering the subjects as they are altered by their crimes and media portrayal.
“Placed alongside the prints, the two strands clash, intensifying their contrasts and opening a space for reflection. Each work is approached in deliberate neutrality to resist sensationalism and allow viewers their own response.”
Isobel Richards
Born and raised in Cumbria, now living and working in Leeds, part-time MA Fine Art student Isobel Richards is heavily influenced by the outdoors and her experiences both traversing it and being part of it.
Richards’ art practice is an ongoing journey built from a patchwork of walks. She uses them to explore her personal relationship to places and what external factors impact these relationships.
Through walking, she explores space: how geographical spaces and those who travelled them throughout history have changed, place: how we form relationships with spaces, and the importance of moving through them to be able to do so, and belonging: who is allowed to travel and be in them now.
By showing a combination of personal response pieces, documentary style pieces, zines and institutional text styles, Richards invites us to think through our relationships to spaces and how they are impacted by the power dynamics of ownership and collective memory.
Isobel Richards’ installation Right to Roam is showcased in Green Studio on the second floor, with further paintings and zines on the ground floor group show in Project Space. Isobel said:
“The two years I’ve spent doing this MA have provided such a challenge and opportunity to explore what my practice can do and how I can do it. It has developed enormously and taken me in many unexpected directions.
“Particularly over the last year, it has been exciting to see the work come to fruition, in little sneak peaks and tests in our interim shows in the Project Space and at Hyde Park Book Club in collaboration with Hyde Park Art Club.
To take something so central to my practice, and yet so external (walking), and play with it in a gallery space has been interesting, particularly in tandem with the themes that thread their way through my practice and interests.
“By responding to walks in a gallery space I foster playful tensions that tug at ideas of access, power and belonging. Handwritten text of prosaic instructions juxtaposed with institutional text with personal and expressive in content question the voice of the artist and the power of the artist within the institution.
“Drawing on the landscape and experiences while walking – and rooted in feelings and experiences being neurodivergent – I have created an archive of works that engage different senses. The works invite you to experience the joy of tuning into these senses, and the questions around access and belonging that arise from these experiences.
“Creating a bright and open space in Green Studio – full of large works and small surprises – I have pushed myself to create an experience that engages everyone personally and uniquely, where you are free to explore and discover what the work brings to you.”
Dr Cesar Cornejo, Associate Professor Fine Art and MA Fine Art programme lead in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies said of the exhibition:
“The works presented in this show are the product of five deeply personal journeys.
“These journeys have taken the artists from the confines of treasured personal memories to the abysms of the human mind; from the white sandy beaches of the North Sea to the bright green hills of Yorkshire; and from the quiet confines of home to the busyness of the city streets.
“They have produced and curated a multilayered experience through different media, including drawing, installation, painting, sculpture, sound and video.
“The students have all taken advantage of the school’s resources with the support of the technical staff to produce what will be a memorable exhibition.”
Professor Joanne Crawford, Head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, said:
“With this final exhibition, these five artists give us the privilege of entering into a phenomenological and emotional interaction with both them and their work.
“Engaging with their worlds, within the complexities of the natural and constructed, intimate spaces open up as we encounter places and people we may never meet or know.
“This is a wonderful exhibition which demonstrates the intensities of thinking and making that are necessary to make work of this high calibre.
“I am sure that each and every one of the finalists this year will go on to marvellous things – as a school we are very proud of what they have achieved so far.”
An evening private view on Tuesday 2 September gave invited guests the opportunity to meet the five artists taking part and find out more about the pieces on show in the exhibition.
Find out more about this year’s MA Fine Art Degree Show and the graduating artists.
More information
The Inside and Outside of Belonging runs from 2 to 6 September in the studios and shared spaces of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies on University Road at the University of Leeds.
Open weekdays 1.30 to 5pm and on Saturday from 10am to 5pm. The exhibition is free and all are welcome.
Visit the degree information for full details: insideandoutside.leeds.ac.uk.
Follow the artists on Instagram @_inside.and.outside_
Images
1. The artists from The Inside and Outside of Belonging in Project Space, September 2025. From left: Isobel Richards, Hsin Tien, Huayu Zhang, Annie Greenwood, Kirstin Harvie. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
2. A visitor to The Inside and Outside of Belonging group show in Project Space explores Instructions for a Walk/Walks/Walking, a zine by Isobel Richards. Other works on display are paintings by Isobel Richards and Kirstin Harvie. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
3. Annie Greenwood’s Just Five More Minutes (2025), an audiovisual installation in Purple Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
4. Visitors to The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show with Hsin Tien’s Where Trees Form Hills and The Flattened Range in Grey Studio. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
5. The artists featured in the MA Fine Art Degree Show – Huayu Zhang, Hsin Tien, Kirstin Harvie, Annie Greenwood and Isobel Richards – outside the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
6. Annie Greenwood with Just Five More Minutes (2025), an audiovisual installation in Purple Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
7. Installation shot from Annie Greenwood’s Just Five More Minutes (2025) in Yellow Studio, at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
8. Annie Greenwood’s installation Just Five More Minutes (2025) spills over into the corridors on the second floor at The Inside and Outside Of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
9. Still from The Further I Go (2025) by Annie Greenwood. On display in Project Space, The Inside and Outside of Belonging, September 2025. Image © Annie Greenwood.
10. Still from Annie Greenwood’s film Just Five More Minutes (2025), part of site specific installation in Purple Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, September 2025. Image © Annie Greenwood.
11. Hsin Tien with Jun 2024 – Jul 2025 in Yellow Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
12. Yellow Cross (2024), a painting by Hsin Tien in Grey Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
13. Selection of works by Hsin Tien in Grey Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
14. Hsin Tien’s Where nothing happens, 2025. Acrylic, colour pencil on canvas. The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
15. Hsin Tien talks with visitors to the private view of The Inside and Outside of Belonging. In the background are Tien’s paintings Red Rest and The Hill Beside the Sea. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
16. Huayu Zhang in Blue Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
17. Huayu Zhang talks with an exhibition visitor about his solo show in Blue Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
18. A visitor to The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show explores works by Huayu Zhang in Blue Studio. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
19. Kirstin Harvie with some of her work in Yellow Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
20. Kirstin Harvie, Robert Maudsley, 2025. Acrylic on board. On display at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
21. Works by Kirstin Harvie in Yellow Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, September 2025. From left: Damien Bendall, 2025; Everyone (II), 2025; John Straffen, 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
22. Kirstin Harvie’s Everyone (II), 2025 (screen print on acrylic sheets) in Yellow Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
23. Kirstin Harvie’s solo show in Yellow Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
24. Isobel Richards with Trespass (2025) in Green Studio, The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show at the University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
25. Visitors to The Inside and Outside of Belonging engage with works by artist Isobel Richards in Green Studio, School of Fine Art, History of Art and University of Leeds. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
26. Isobel Richards’ zine Instructions for a Walk/Walks/Walking in Project Space at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, September 2025. Photo by Isobel Richards. Image © the artist.
27. Detail from Right to Roam installation by Isobel Richards, Green Studio, The Inside and Outside of Belonging, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
28. Paintings by Isobel Richards viewed through a gap in a canvas installation, Green Studio, The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
29. Detail from Right to Roam, an installation by Isobel Richards in Green Studio, The Inside and Outside of Belonging, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
30. Right to Roam installation by Isobel Richards, Green Studio, The Inside and Outside of Belonging, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
31. Installation shot from Annie Greenwood’s Just Five More Minutes (2025) in Yellow Studio, at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, University of Leeds, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
32. Work by Huayu Zhang in Blue Studio at The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show, September 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
33. Guests at the private view of The Inside and Outside of Belonging view Kirstin Harvie’s Everyone (II), 2025. Photo by Mark Bickerdike. Image © University of Leeds.
34. Poster for The Inside and Outside of Belonging MA Fine Art Degree Show at the university of Leeds, September 2025. Image: Annie Greenwood, Still from Returning to Sundays, digital video with sound, 2025. Poster design by Isobel Richards and Hsin Tien.
