Artist Spotlight: Meet the creators shaping the future of art at the Beyond 2025 Creative Mixer

Korean-Chinese theatre maker and socially engaged artist Isabella So works across performance, food and storytelling vividly explore identity, memory and belonging. Working with migrant and intergenerational groups, her practice platforms community voice through participatory and sensory-led experiences.

Her latest project, Dishing Out Memories, developed with Lowry, Touchstones Rochdale and New Earth Theatre, fused live cooking, multilingual narrative and projection mapping to consider the myriad ways in which food shapes collective memory.

For Beyond, Isabella presents a new commission created through Createch Artist CoLab, in collaboration with Hattie Kongaunruan. The work, Best Before Memory, is an installation that transforms a broken fridge into a ‘living archive’ of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) collective memory, presented as a profound symbiosis of food, technology and storytelling that unpacks how technology can preserve and bring new dimensions to cultural memory.

Based at Levenshulme’s Bankley Studios, award-winning painter Joe O’Rourke creates captivating, emotionally charged works shaped by chance encounters – overheard conversations, fleeting street scenes and objects found in everyday life, with a layered, approach spanning multiple scales and mediums, grounded in the responsiveness and boundless potential of the act of painting.

At Beyond, Joe re-examines his painting I Want You Here in collaboration with fellow CoLab participant Lizzie King, who projects footage of local environments onto the surface of the work, producing a hybrid of painting and moving image that creates an encounter between landscape, memory and materiality.

A multi-sensory installation by Simon Fisher Turner and Daisy Dickinson, WETRIP drifts between sound, cinema and brooding abstraction. Shot on 8mm and digital film, the piece moves across fragmented landscapes and disquieting horizons, beckoning audiences into a hypnotic corridor where forms collapse and time itself unspools.

Presented as part of FaT OuT’s 2025 programme, WETRIP continues a long-running collaboration between the Salford-based experimental arts organisation and filmmaker Dickinson. Developed through From the Other, the work builds on the earlier film triptych Three Hundred and Thirty Three, commissioned by the Glasshouse International Centre for Music and Mediale.

Working with sustainable photographic processes and sound, Lizzie King explores ecological entanglements between humans, species and place through alternative artistic methods. Her participatory audio installation Wetlands/Floodlands captures the sonic life of the River Irwell overflow at Kersal Wetlands, a man-made reserve where wildlife and recreation continually intersect.

Using plant co-created recordings and binaural sound, audiences are invited to shape and layer the evolving soundscape in a direct encounter with the living instruments of the wetlands and its shifting environmental rhythms.

Artist, facilitator and producer Hathaikan (Hattie) Kongaunruan creates socially insightful and digitally curious work that explores ritual, folklore and spiritual motifs through an eco-feminist prism. Blending physical making with open-source and DIY digital methods, she invites audiences to uncover hidden narratives embedded in domestic objects and cultural rituals.

Drawing on her Thai heritage, Hattie’s approach reconfigures our relationship with common waste and everyday objects  for contemporary contexts, imagining new means of interacting with the overlooked.

At Beyond, she shares insights into her shift into digital work, supported by Arts Council England’s Develop Your Creative Practice fund.