ITV Creates

We all have busy lives and often busy minds. Finding moments to pause, breathe and connect can be a challenge but is integral to developing mindfulness and wellbeing. Designing and creating is Saj Fareed's way of channelling these thoughts and feelings, taking inspiration from slow art and mindful art throughout her creative process.

Stitching, unravelling and drawing are Saj's approaches to switching off from the everyday and allowing her hands to connect with the moment. Growing up in the 70’s as a second generation British Asian it was rare to buy ready-made traditional Pakistani garments, so it was a necessity to learn to sew. Saj loved sewing and these skills became integral to how she works as an artist today.

Since graduating in BA Hons Fine Art in Cardiff, she has developed her career as a visual artist and artist educator in a broad range of art education projects. Saj has worked for museums, galleries and other establishments for over 23 years including: Fabrica Gallery, Towner, Arts Council England and Creative Partnerships, Sussex and Surrey.

Saj Fareed was introduced to ITV by Quiet Down There, a Community Interest Company that specialises in amplifying the everyday.

As a self-proclaimed ‘obsessive collector’, Anna is fascinated by pop culture and the idea of the readymade. Her work is inspired by the old, the new, the mundane and humorous, and often questions the notion of luxury.

Anna graduated from the Royal College of Art with a Masters in Printmaking, after studying a BA in Illustration at the University of Brighton.

She has worked on a range of design and installation projects, including retail spaces & windows for Hermès and Selfridges, experiential events for Converse and the Hong Kong Mall, and runway sets for designer Sadie Williams. Moving image projects include art direction and set design for clients such as AnOther Magazine, Aldo, Chambord, Clarks, Hermès, Kenzo, Nike, and Squarespace.

Melanie trained in illustration at Birmingham School of Art. She is passionate about creating visual narratives involving marginalised spaces and communities, both human and natural.

Melanie is fascinated by spaces which are often neglected, found hidden between urban and rural places, often overgrown yet full of life. She observes and notices small details weaving true stories about these into elaborate and often complex sculptures. Her intention is to honour the stories of the overlooked through making things that are full of emotion and vitality.

Melanie's creative process involves using original illustrations printed onto metal, often combining these with other materials or found objects. Multi-layered, detailed and colourful, her pieces can be seen as three-dimensional illuminated manuscripts. Documenting a moment in time they focus on a central narrative but also feature intriguing details in the margins or secrets such as handles which operate moving parts or hidden compartments.

Hattie Newman builds and directs animations and images that live in advertisements, magazines, galleries, websites, books and many other places around the world.

Hattie’s studio is a place where sketches and ideas quickly outgrow their pages and leap to life. Although based in East London, projects regularly call Hattie away to work in New York, Paris, Milan and other cities far from her original home of Devon, England.

Away from her work with brands, Hattie is a lecturer and author on the topic of paper craft.

Faith Bebbington has been a professional artist since 1994, with a studio base in Liverpool. She has a BA Hons. Degree in Fine Art: Sculpture from Winchester School of Art 1986 and a Postgraduate Teaching Certificate in Art from Liverpool John Moores University 1992.

Faith creates "dynamic figurative sculpture which capture movement and can humanise public spaces. After many years of creating 'human figures in action' recent public commissions have led [her] to create life size sculptures of animals - including exploring the contribution made by the horse to canal life and highlighting the plight of an endangered species like the wild tiger."

Faith now focuses on re-using recycled waste materials mainly for large scale works and modelling with polymer clay for smaller scale work, and exploring sculpting with papercrete (concrete & paper). Her artwork for ITV has been made out of recycled milk cartons.

Dan Rawlings is a contemporary British artist. Born in Watford in 1979, he grew up in Essex and currently lives and works in Gloucestershire.

A sympathy for unloved and forgotten relics and a fascination with nature’s resilience have inspired Dan to create visions of a world where man’s impact is being slowly reclaimed by nature. Dan considers no technique or substrate out of bounds in achieving his intended results, but is probably best known for his manipulation of metal and light, conceived with intricate hand-plasma cutting. Recently he has been introducing sign painting and motion to his works.

Notable projects include the sculpture ‘nature delivers’ based on the wreckage of a ford transit van and the huge ‘mighty oak’, based on a 16 ft farm yard silo constructed for the affordable art fair’s 15th birthday in Battersea park. His signature works cut from vintage hand saws and street signage can be found in collections around the world.

Sam Curtis is an artist and curator based in London. Collaborating with a range of people from diverse areas of work and life, he develops projects that provoke, question or subvert our ideas around creativity, economy and labour. Building relationships and trust are key to the conversations he fosters; from which unexpected collaborations grow.

For over 10 years he has used his day jobs as platforms or starting points from which to develop practice and projects. This has been a useful way to navigate precarity and has become a vehicle for inhabiting the grey areas and permeable boundaries between art and life.

Informed by two years working as a fishmonger in Harrods, he now runs the Centre for Innovative and Radical Fishmongery, an organisation that explores how fishmongery intersects with art, individuals and society. During a six-year period working in education as an outreach tutor within the homeless sector, he co-founded and facilitated Seymour Art Collective (2009-on-going), a group of artists who have experienced homelessness. He currently work as a curator at the Bethlem Gallery situated within the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the gallery supports artists with lived experience of mental illness.

Sam graduated from Goldsmiths MFA programme in 2008 and has exhibited across the UK, Europe and the USA. His work is represented by Division of Labour.

Anna Berry is a UK artist, most known for creating socially- and politically-conscious pieces, creating large installations, and often working with paper.

More broadly, Anna's work is often concerned with the way cognition shapes reality, and hence how reality differs from what we perceive. This includes toying with politically-charged cultural notions like gender, race, nationality, and religion.

Anna's interest stems from living with a brain that works a little differently, which means she 'quite literally inhabits a parallel world to the rest of humanity.' This different and very particular perspective leads to work that probes and undermines the fabric of reality. Much of her work also relates to outsiderness, the marginalised voice, and disenfranchisement (political and otherwise).