I propose to develop a new body of work exploring contemporary amulets; small-scale bronze castings rooted in stories, protective gestures, and material memory.
I would begin with a research residency in Darlington, hosting workshops and conversations with local communities and artists. Together, we’d explore questions like: What do you carry for luck? What protects you? What do you gift, hide, or inherit? What objects hold memory or legacy? What local symbols recur in your life? Participants would be invited to bring in items, materials, or stories, and to design their own amulets in aluminium.
I’m interested in holding space for these kinds of conversations, for myself and others, as my practice explores the non-museological archive as a site of resistance and revaluation. I want to spend time developing new cast works that translate personal narratives into sculptural language, continuing my exploration of talismans as both objects and gestures.
This would build on my recent cast aluminium tokens from Signals, an intervention at Big Pit National Coal Museum (made during a four-day workshop I designed), and bronze cast amulets from Agimat at Llantarnam Grange.
The £10,000 bursary would fund:
one-to-one mentoring with artists, curators, or local historians, identified through conversations with the Dover Prize team, to help situate myself during the R&D period
a dedicated research and residency period in Darlington developing my designs
workshops and informal gatherings to co-create charms through small metal casting
dedicated studio time
materials, tools, and fabrication costs for metal cast works
This award would allow me to take my practice, often gallery-based or research-driven, into a more embedded, collaborative, and tactile direction with more dedicated, unrushed studio time. I’m excited by the possibility of making something both materially ambitious and emotionally intimate over a sustained period, grounded in the textures of Darlington and shaped by the stories of its residents. The resulting work would function as both artwork and archive: a playful, collective act of meaning-making, and an invitation to world-build and mythologise place and personal history.
Darlington’s history of engineering, craft, and working class histories offers a foundation for rethinking how objects carry meaning across time. My practice, which I would like to further develop towards amulets and small metal castings, draws from this kind of material history, but reroutes it through the personal, symbolic, and intimate.
Through workshops, conversations and collaborative making, I would invite Darlington residents to engage with their own everyday objects, memories, and rituals of protection. These sessions would create space for alternative archives where emotional value, inherited stories, and private symbols are given the same weight as institutionally collected histories.
In addition to my own cast amulets, the small cast sculptures made by local residents would raise the profile of creative arts in Darlington by showing how contemporary sculpture can be socially grounded, materially ambitious and a means to continue to grow and narrate the history of a place. I also hope the project as a whole, with its postcolonial lens of thinking of the archive and the object as activating rather than static, will foster conversations around what counts as heritage, who defines it, and how the arts can hold a town’s collective memory with care and opacities.
b. 1995, London
based in the Ebbw Valley, Wales Sadia Pineda Hameed is a Filipina Pakistani artist and writer whose work explores latent ways to speak about collective and intergenerational trauma through inherent anticolonial strategies of dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets. Using film, installation, text and performance, her work further imagines what future tools for resistance, value and communication springing from these strategies might look like. Her practice is led by a process of cross-disciplinary semiotic and associative journeying in resistance to western processes of historicisation and displacement. Mythmaking, melodrama and decoy become playful devices to speak through a ‘delirious discourse’ where personal archives and collective experiences converge. Sadia has shown with the Brent Biennial 2022, London, Iniva, London, The Crypt Gallery, London, Bluecoat, Liverpool, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, Mostyn, Llandudno, g39, Cardiff, Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea and others. She has also had residencies most notably with the Peak Cymru, Abergavenny, Cittadellarte, Biella, Tangent Projects, Barcelona, g39, Cardiff. She was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists 2021, Freelands Fellowship 2022-24, British School at Rome Fellowship 2023-4, and Arts Council Wales Perspective(s) Fellowship 2024. My most recent solo exhibitions include Agimat at Llantarnam Grange, Cwmbran, which explores the history of colonial and folk charms.Through a collection of objects, sculptures, and video, Sadia considers the histories of alternative value, tokens, anting-anting (the Filipino belief in amulets and talismans), and the National Museum’s Edward Lovett charm collection, and their displacements into the museum collection. These works explore how a token can simultaneously inhabit and memorialise; gesture protest against; and protect from extraction and land violence. My other exhibition Signals develops a new body of film, sound and sculptural work to explore how radical movements of the past exist in international solidarity with movements today. Through considering the collection, conversations and community of the museum with an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and ecological lens, Signals forms connections between Wales’ history of mining and strike, and resource extraction and labour movements worldwide today. Agimat and Signals are part of Perspective(s), a collaboration between Arts Council Wales and National Museum Wales, supported by the Welsh Government.
Do you have a degree in visual or applied arts at undergraduate and/or post-graduate level? Please provide details. (200 words)
No, I have a degree in English Literature (BA) from Cardiff University
No, I have a degree in English Literature (BA) from Cardiff University
Yes, I have notably received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists 2021, Arts Council Wales Stabilisation Fund 2021 and Colwinston Award 2025
I co-created LUMIN (www.lumin-press.com), a print, radio and curatorial project supporting decolonial and experimental art and writing. The project commissions underrepresented artists in Wales and beyond to develop work-in-progress with editorial and curatorial support, to show in print, radio and gallery exhibitions; as well as designing and running a co-created alternative syllabus with local communities called LUMIN Syllabus.
I also designed and delivered Visual Arts Group Wales (VAGW)’s Interlude bursary and mentoring programme, a year long programme for early career artists of colour in Wales. Notably, during this process, I designed an equitable application wherein every applicant received an interview closer to a studio visit with at least one notable curator from Wales, with follow-up of personalised responses to their practice and opportunities. In addition to researching and selecting appropriate mentors and workshops for the 5 successful artists in conversation with them, I also provided 1-1 mentoring throughout.
Lastly, I co-developed the Artes Mundi Held Space Network for Welsh artists of colour, an autonomous peer support network that received mentoring, workshops and artist support meet-ups with the financial and admin support of Artes Mundi.
Yes, notably by Arts Council Wales and National Museum Wales for the Perspective(s) Fellowship 2024 (exhibition/intervention at the Big Pit National Coal Museum), Brent Biennial 2022 (public art), Newtown Council / Robert Owen Museum 2022 (public art), Cardiff University 2025 (film), World Wildlife Federation (WWF) 2023 (workshops/syllabus) and The National Trust 2018 (performance).
Yes, exhibitions I have been a part of have been featured in Art Quarterly, Elephant Magazine, and the BBC Radio Wales Arts Show and HOAX (online curated platform)
Yes, the Arts Council Wales Perspectives Fellowship 2024 and British School at Rome Fellowship 2023-4, g39 Freelands Fellowship 2022-24, Jerwood UNIT(e) 2021, and Unidee 2021 (Cittadellarte).
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