Naiya (she/her, UK) treats living materials as active co-agents in her installations, hovering at an edge of sight where places are sensed before they are fully seen, images are misremembered, and boundaries slip in and out of view. She is a multidisciplinary artist in her final year at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and her practice spans across installation, textiles, moving image, and writing.

Growing up on a narrowboat on British canals informs her sensitivity to fluctuating watery systems and sets the rhythms of her making: field margins, floodplains behind carparks, not quite rural not quite urban, hemp against steel against lichen. Naiya is cultivating speculative environments that emulate the natural as if it were an artefact that has been excavated or inherited, dug up and passed down, where mythic presences like the will-o’-wisp surface as ways of thinking through our estrangement from nature. Through collective sensing workshops, she reimagines cartography as a communal, performative process, asking how we might attune to landscapes where water is constantly redrawing the map.

Naiya’s work is driven by an investment in process: meditative, repetitive acts of making emerge from walking and bodily sensation, held in tension with materials that shift, erode, and resist her control. She wonders if her textiles are psychic terrains where each pick of the weave is a pixel, slowly loading into a frayed memory, never fully resolved.