Naseem Darbey

Naseem is the creative lead for our charity and acts as the link between fellow studio holders and staff and with the board of trustees.

She has been with the organisation since its founding, in 2019, teaming up with Gemma Hobbs in the early days in the Hanover Street building, intent on involving the public and setting up a public gallery. She helps oversee the running of the studios.

She said: “It’s interesting for me because I get to see who’s out there and who wants studios. The landscape for artists is quite interesting at the moment because there is a loss of space. Artists’ spaces are important.

“Lots of them are, like Keighley Creative, in ‘meanwhile’ spaces.” These are short-lease occupations in vacant buildings, but it means the creative organisations can be asked to leave with as little as one month’s notice.

“I also help with the artists’ programme: the artist get-togethers. Cat Murray [the Keighley Creative events manager] and I will be working together to determine what artists need to function.”

Naseem specialises in textile sculptures. She grew up in Thornton, Bradford, and has a first degree and master’s degree from Bradford College. She creates installations that incorporate embroidery and three-dimensional sculptures, telling a story and engaging with people in immersive spaces, often in museums and galleries, including Cliffe Castle. She said she wants to develop large-scale installations that people can walk through.

She has undertaken lots of work with schools and also devised, with Keighley Creative, the Mega Drawing Box, the major Keighley Creative Presents project in 2023 that drew hundreds of members of the public, plus professional artists, to the event in a former department store in the Airedale Shopping Centre.

Wider afield, Naseem has toured her Between the Lines exhibition at the Bowes Museum in County Durham; her We Are Saved by Loss work at the National Centre for Craft and Design, the 20-21 Visual Arts Centre and the Carriageworks Theatre, Light Night, Leeds. She has also had residencies and projects in London at The Gordon Museum, King’s College, and at the Textiellab in Tilburg, Netherlands.

Latterly she has collaborated with Yorkshire Peat Partnership in the Bog in a Drawing Box project on Denton Moor, culminating in the Pledges to the Landscape event looking at wild places around Keighley with communities in the area.

Naseem also deals with the schools programme, which allows schools to come and look round the studios. “That’s how you get your new studio holders and your diversity. You demonstrate to the kids of the district that this is a job they can do, so those are your potential studio holders.”

“We’re very passionate about the success of this; making it work.”

She has ideas to develop the Drawing Box and make it evolve into the next showstopper version and scale up her work, but always with drawing at its heart. “Watch this space,” she added.

Photo credits: Bob Smith Photography