Spike Island is delighted to announce the four recipients of this year’s Graduate Fellowships: three graduates from UWE Bristol’s Fine Art programme and one from Bath Spa University’s Fine Art programme.
Each year, Spike Island offers fellowships to promising emerging artists selected through an open call to graduating students. Fellows are awarded a studio at Spike Island for one year, giving them space and support to develop their professional practices within Bristol’s vibrant artistic community.
The 2025–26 Graduate Fellows are:
Nahraine Al-Khafaji graduated with a First-class degree in Fine Art from Bath Spa University in 2025, and was awarded a Graduate Fellowship at Spike Island from 2025–26.
An Iraqi-British artist raised between England and the Middle East, Al-Khafaji’s work is deeply informed by contrasts in culture and her study of ancient Iraqi history in relation to the Western world she inhabits.
Her practice explores the fragility of regional histories following catastrophe and conflict, reflecting on how once-documented pasts become unintelligible. Troubled by the destruction of archaeological sites and artefacts, her paintings echo these profound cultural losses, inviting viewers to fill the gaps with their own narratives.
Al-Khafaji is also the winner of the 2025 Freelands Painting Prize.
Aphra Beart-Albrecht graduated with a degree in Art & Writing from UWE Bristol in 2025, and was awarded a Graduate Fellowship at Spike Island from 2025–26.
Working across media including metal, textiles, and writing, Beart-Albrecht frequently brings these elements together in sculptural and installation-based works. Her practice emerges from a feminist, experiential framework, often centring on the body and its political and cultural entanglements.
She is particularly interested in craft as an embodied form of knowledge, foregrounding tactility and the act of making as a way to question relationships between body, labour, and value. Through the subversion of materials and processes, her work introduces unsettling undercurrents that invite viewers to dwell in ambiguity.
Noah Cole graduated with a First Class degree in Photography from UWE Bristol in 2025, and was awarded a Graduate Fellowship at Spike Island from 2025–26.
Cole is an interdisciplinary artist working in short-form video, using technology, lived experience, and experimentation to evoke disruption and nostalgia. His recent audio-visual series culminated in an interactive seven-screen installation at Arnolfini.
Looking ahead, Cole aims to combine ceramics with comedy, surrealism, form, and colour—creating connections between audio-visual practices and the physical.
He is also a co-organiser of The Loovre, a collective running a gallery in the toilet of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, where toilet humour meets serious artistic celebration.
Taiki Nakagawa graduated with a degree in Fine Art from UWE Bristol in 2025, and was awarded a Graduate Fellowship at Spike Island from 2025–26.
Nakagawa’s practice is rooted in “form of life,” engaging with perspective, duration, and the elemental through inversion, projection, and parallelism.
“It wish to touch the thing that touch it. Within the módulo, it envisions the mutation.” – Taiki Nakagawa
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