Fine Art alumna Hannah Guy showcases new work at Assembly House as part of the Accelerator Bursary 2025
A new exhibition featuring photography by fine art alumna Hannah Guy opens at Assembly House in Leeds on 16 October.
Catching Forty Winks is an art exhibition spanning photography, sculpture, textiles, and sound, showcasing work by Hannah Guy, Reece Kelly and Alegria Repila Smith – all Accelerator Bursary recipients for 2025.
The Accelerator Bursary is a new programme which supports early-career artists in Leeds following their undergraduate degrees. It is funded by Leeds Art Fund and delivered by Leeds Art Gallery in partnership with Assembly House – an artist-led community arts organisation, project space and artist studios located in a Victorian mill in Armley, Leeds.
Since January 2025, all three winners have shared a studio space at Assembly House. Taking place over two weekends this October, their Catching Forty Winks group show is an active dialogue between the artists' diverse practices, exploring the intersection between memory, emotion and the unknown.
Hannah Guy, Reece Kelly and Alegria Repila Smith: recipients of the Accelerator Bursary 2025. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Blending personal experience with dreamt realities, hidden obsessions and history, each artist dives below the surface of the collective consciousness.
Fluidity is their defining feature: identities, categories and interpretations are all at sea, as they dredge up artefacts and narratives that articulate the sunken passions which make each of us fallible, nuanced and ultimately human.
Hannah Guy, The Messenger, 2025. Photo © Hannah Guy.
Hannah Guy is a fine art photographer concerned with the photographic retelling of memories, the tangibility of our dreams and the symbolic potential of light for storytelling.
Meticulously staging long exposure photographs, Hannah works with family, friends and strangers to bring her dreamscapes to life by creating large-scale photographic tableaus enriched in narrative.
Hannah Guy graduated with a BA Fine Art from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies in 2024. Her work has been featured in Light Night 2023 and Ones to Watch 2024, in addition to a number of solo and group shows.
Hannah Guy's Light can also Rhyme, projected onto a building on the University of Leeds campus for Light Night 2023, co-created alongside Katherine Lacey and with music composed by Ashruta Mani. Photo by Hannah Guy.
Hannah said:
“Over the past year I have been continuing to develop a participatory body of work that translates fragments from shared dream journals into staged, long-exposure photographs.
“I have had the pleasure to develop my practice in Assembly House, with mentoring from photographer Hannah Starkey whilst working alongside Reece Kelly and Alegria Repila Smith.
“Emerging from collaborative processes with friends, family and strangers across Leeds, the project inhabits the unstable ground between memory, fear and imagination.
“Each photograph is shaped through encounters that range from open call dream submissions, solicited via stickers placed on bus stops, in pubs and on shop shelves across Leeds, to extended sessions of conversation, collaging and listening with photo participants and friends alike.
“The resulting images operate as dreamscapes: unstable, intimate, simultaneously private and collective.
Hannah Guy, Of Water and Its' Memory, 2025, 2025. Photo © Hannah Guy.
“The project situates dreams as shared texts: unstable, affective materials that resist homogenisation and allow difficult emotions to find a visual presence. What is at stake is not only the production of images but the development of a methodology that treats emotional realities as forms of knowledge.
“My aim is to contribute to current debates on photography as a participatory and epistemic practice. At stake is a simple but unresolved question: what futures become possible if emotional realities are treated as knowledge, and if dreams are taken seriously as collective social texts?
“The project positions photography as a tool for participatory inquiry. Rather than treating the unconscious as spectacle, I approach it as a shared terrain where emotions can be acknowledged, negotiated and reimagined.
Hannah Guy's light box installation for Sardines BA Fine Art Degree Show at the University of Leeds, June 2024.
“I’m incredibly grateful to have been selected for this bursary. It has been an incredibly formative year both in graduation experience and also assimilating and transitioning into an artist beyond an academic environment. I thank the tech team at Assembly House, the curators at Leeds Art Gallery and Leeds Arts Fund for funding the exhibition.
“As I look to finish my bursary, I will be keeping a space at Assembly House with hopes to apply to residencies and grants in the future with a potential MA in socially engaged photography on the cards!”.
Anna Douglas, Lecturer in Fine Art in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, said:
“Since graduating, Hannah has achieved so much.
“Receiving an Accelerator Bursary and being mentored by British photographer Hannah Starkey is a real testament to her commitment to art photography.”
Catching Forty Winks launches at Assembly House Project Space with an opening event on Thursday 16 October, 6:30pm to late. It’s free to go along and all are welcome.
More information
The exhibition is open from the 17 to 19 October and for a second week on the 23 to 27 October. Find out about the Catching Forty Winks exhibition on the Assembly House website.
Follow Hannah Guy on Instagram.
Find out more about the Accelerator Bursary.
Feature image
Hannah Guy in her studio at Assembly House, Leeds. Photo © Hannah Guy.
