Elleanna Chapman: Working Class Heroes (Baltic x Shape Arts Emergent)
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Shape Arts are pleased to present Working Class Heroes, a weekend showcase by Elleanna Chapman, recipient of the 2025 Emergent residency and bursary.
Working Class Heroes will reimagine and reclaim working-class icons – both real and imaginary – reactivating them for contemporary audiences and situating them within our turbulent political climate. The installation will comprise a series of new rhinestone works including life size figures and a collection of quotes from several icons, brought together to create a collaged, pop-cultural manifesto.
The showcase is intended as a development of Chapman's wider practice, in which she investigates the political potential of art as an ally to class struggle, framing her call for revolution through the kitsch and pop-cultural. Working across media, with a particular fondness for bedazzling and wheatpaste, Chapman attempts to bring the true nature of class society to the fore, delivered to the viewer via the glittering hand of a diva. This showcase builds on her first public artwork with Focal Point Gallery, Do Somethin’, in which the political content is derived primarily from pop culture.
Drawing from the artist’s sincere love for so-called ‘low art’, Chapman looks to disrupt class and taste hierarchies, collaging found material together with her own bedazzled creations, and stealing from society’s expansive image (and pop) culture as a basis for proletarian subversion. Ultimately, Working Class Heroes creates a new form of Agitprop that will have you looking twice – when the revolutionary is put forward vis-à-vis celebrities and the surreal, the demand to oust capitalism altogether does not appear so outlandish, after all.
Artist Talk & Guided Tour
Saturday 12 December | 16:00-17:00
Free/drop in
Elleanna Chapman will discuss her work and showcase with Meg McWilliam (Radge Magazine) and Meg Molloy (Working Arts Club) in a guided tour of Working Class Heroes
About Elleanna Chapman
Elleanna Chapman (b. 2002, Essex) is a working-class and disabled artist who investigates the political potential of art to catalyse class struggle, framing her call for revolution through the kitsch and pop-cultural. Chapman graduated with First Class Honours from the Ruskin School of Art in 2024 and is currently an Associate Lecturer on the Fine Art foundation course at Oxford Brookes University. She has exhibited work with the Saatchi Gallery, Eastside Projects, Focal Point Gallery, and Teaspoon Projects, and undertaken residencies at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Acme Studios, Good Eye Projects, Bow Arts, and Cambridge Art Space, and the Koppel Project.
Chapman is the recipient of the Emergent Prize (Baltic and Shape Arts, 2025), the Creative Bursary (The Supporting Act Foundation, 2023), and the Eaton Fund (2025). Her work has been featured in The Art Newspaper, Whitewall, FAD, Plaster, Fetch, and émergent magazine. In late 2026, Chapman will present a solo showcase at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.
About Shape Arts
Shape Arts is a disability-led organisation breaking barrier to creative excellence. They 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. Their aims are supported through the delivery of the Adam Reynolds Award, the Shape Open, and archival projects including 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. Shape Art’s programme is informed by the Social Model of Disability.
