Elleanna Chapman confirmed as Baltic x Shape Arts Emergent recipient
8 Sep 2025
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Shape Arts are pleased to announce Elleanna Chapman as the recipient of this year’s Emergent residency and bursary.
Emergent is a hybrid residency and support programme for early-career disabled artists with a £5k bursary, that is now in its fourth year. The open call welcomed applications from disabled artists and creative practitioners in the first five years of their career, who have been met with significant barriers in developing their artistic practice. The three-month residency programme combines digital and physical elements of delivery, supported by both organisations.
Shortlisting this year saw a high number of competitive applications. The residency and bursary have been awarded to Elleanna Chapman. Chapman explores the political potential of art to catalyse class struggle, framing her call for revolution through the kitsch, cute, and pop-cultural – contrasting militancy with the fabulous and familiar. Working across media, with a particular fondness for installation, she attempts to bring the true nature of class society to the fore.
Chapman will take part in the residency online and at Baltic, where, in addition to receiving expert support and mentoring to inform their practice, they will use the facilities and have curatorial and technical input to extend her current research and develop new work. A showcasing or broadcast opportunity will also be provided as part of the programme.
Baltic and Shape Arts have also offered a package of support to a small number of shortlisted artists: Rosie Aspinall Priest, Else/Xun Zhang, Lauren McDougall and Dylan Esposito.
About Elleanna Chapman
Elleanna Chapman graduated with First Class Honours from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2024. She has participated in numerous group shows across the UK and was awarded the Egerton Coghill Landscape Prize, The Supporting Act Foundation Creative Bursary, and The Eaton Fund in 2022, 2023, and 2025, respectively. She has been an artist in residence at Good Eye Projects, Hypha HQ, WOMB with Bow Arts, Cambridge Artworks and Art Space, and The Koppel Project.
Underpinning her work, Chapman is a member of the Revolutionary Communist International. Consequently, she regularly engages with working-class histories, propaganda strategies, and current affairs. Drawing from her sincere love for so-called ‘low art’, Chapman looks to disrupt class and taste hierarchies, collaging found material together with her own creations, and stealing from society’s expansive image (and pop) culture as a basis for proletarian subversion. Ultimately, the artist hopes to create a new form of agitprop that will have you looking twice.
About Shape Arts
Shape Arts is a disability-led organisation breaking barrier to creative excellence. We deliver a range of projects supporting marginalised artists, as well as training cultural venues to be more inclusive and accessible for disabled people as employees, artists, and audiences. Our aims are supported through the delivery of our Adam Reynolds Award, our annual exhibition the Shape Open, our archival projects The National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA) and National Disability Movement Archive and Collection (NDMAC), which in 2024 launched Crip Arte Spazio: The Disability Arts Movement in Venice, an international exhibition showcasing how the movement aligned art with the fight for rights, broke barriers, and ultimately affected changes in UK law, while making great art about doing so. All of our work is informed by the Social Model of Disability.
The Emergent programme is a collaboration between Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Shape Arts, with key activity taking place online and in the North East of England, where Baltic is based.
Each year, the award is given to an emerging disabled artist with a socially-engaged practice and a small cohort of shortlisted artists are offered tailored support.