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Der Greif Studio x Ashville HERE: Photography Curation for a Bristol Workspace
Ashville is a real estate and investment company, transforming UK buildings into thoughtful workplaces. HERE stands on Bath Road in Bristol’s Arnos Vale, its studio past still legible in the steel and corridors that now hold a community of around 300 businesses, the Royal Photographic Society among them. To root the building in its city, Ashville invited Der Greif Studio to bring eight Bristol- based, or closely connected, artists into its shared spaces.
The Brief
Ashville asked Der Greif Studio to give HERE’s key spaces a single, coherent curation with local creative connections at its heart. It was to reflect the sense of community created by the diverse businesses at HERE, alongside the landmarks and vibrancy of the city, with every work by an artist with roots in Bristol. The 28 works run from reception and the café through the connecting spaces and meeting rooms.
The Concept: "City of Layers"
Der Greif Studio’s curation brings together eight artists from its community who have lived, studied or made their work in Bristol: Chris Hoare, Emily Graham, Lauren Kaigg, Laura Gardner, Laura Foster, Emrys Thurgood, Jasmine Ashley-Locke and Aaron Schuman. Together they show Bristol as a city in layers, shaped by the water that keeps moving through it.
Each artist lays one thing over another, and across the curation there is a sense of suspense, of glimpsing a scene, with the memory of water running through. The tidal Avon sets the city’s rhythm. You are always crossing it, and when the sun comes out everyone goes to the water. Its tidal range is among the largest in the world, and until the Floating Harbour opened in 1809, ships settled into the mud twice a day. The Frome was buried beneath the streets and flows there still. What lies on the surface, and what moves beneath it, is the city’s oldest story.
The Curation
The selection brings established and emerging voices together. Aaron Schuman, who leads the MA Photography at UWE Bristol, and Chris Hoare, whose work is held by the Martin Parr Foundation nearby, hang alongside recent graduates and curators from the city, reflecting the depth of talent in Bristol and the sense of community at HERE.
The artworks were conceived as a whole. To-scale mockups of every wall, worked through with the Ashville team, were central to that: they let each work be considered in relation to the others and to the building, never in isolation. Reception carries the largest, sized for the sightlines from the entrance, so the collection announces itself as soon as you arrive. From there the works continue through the shared spaces, corridors and meeting rooms, hung in dialogue with one another, sometimes in balance, sometimes in contrast, their tones chosen to sit together. A single black frame runs through all 28, holding the collection together across the building.
The Artists
Chris Hoare (b. 1989, lives and works in Bristol) is a photographer drawn to areas of society he feels are overlooked, working increasingly in the register of speculative documentary. He studied BA (Hons) Press and Editorial Photography at Falmouth and MA Photography at UWE Bristol. Two portraits from his series »The Worst Poem in the Universe« were finalists in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 2019, the same year he was selected for Paris Photo’s Carte Blanche. His work »Keyword« is held in the Martin Parr Foundation collection, and he lectures at Coventry University. In Bristol he photographs the harbour, the Avon and the Frome, and the overlooked corners in between: masts, rigging and hulls, painted walls where nature breaks through.
Emily Graham (b. 1983, lives and works in Bristol) is an artist, educator and producer whose practice deals with elusive subject matter and the narratives people build to make sense of the unknowable. She studied BA (Hons) Photography at the University of Brighton and MA Photography with Distinction at UWE Bristol. Her first monograph »The Blindest Man« (VOID, 2022) was named a Best Photobook of the year by LensCulture and is held in the National Art Library at the V&A and the MoMA Library. She was shortlisted for the Grand Prix Images Vevey in 2025, selected as a Futures Talent in 2021, and awarded third prize in the BJP International Photography Award, with solo presentations at Landskrona Foto and FORMAT. For »Echo« she walked to coordinates she did not choose, finding the city arranged like a set, ordinary corners saturated and lit as though something is about to happen.
Lauren Kaigg (b. 1992, lives and works in Bristol) uses photography and moving image to re-examine the overlooked aspects of the everyday, blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined. She graduated from MA Photography at UWE Bristol in 2024. She received the LensCulture Critics’ Choice Award in 2024 and a Photoworks New Year Commission, and exhibited with LensCulture at Photo London in 2025. Her work was selected by Aperture editor-in-chief Michael Famighetti for a Der Greif Guest Room in 2024. Her Bristol works turn the same attention to the city’s harbour and waterways.
Laura Gardner (b. 1993, lives and works in Bristol) is a multidisciplinary artist, editor and creative producer working across performance, photography and independent publishing. She graduated with a First Class BA (Hons) in Documentary Photography and Print from Boomsatsuma with Bath Spa University in 2026. She is founder and editor of Club Sandwich, an artist-led print and web platform. She was shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition in 2023, nominated for the Photo London Student Award in 2026, and placed in the Top 100 at the Hamburg Portfolio Review, exhibiting at Photo Frome and Centerspace Gallery, Bristol. In »Another World« she exposes one frame over another so parallel worlds share the same ground: at Netham Lock Bridge, the marks of the past and the fog above it hang together in one image.
Laura Foster (b. 1998, lives and works in Bristol) is a fine art photographer whose research and practice explore the relationship between mental health and photography, and the arts as a therapeutic tool of expression. She holds a First Class BA in Photography from Bath Spa University and an MA Photography with Distinction from UWE Bristol. She was shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition 165 and for Blurring the Lines, the international graduation award, in 2023. Her work featured in »Embodied«, a Wellcome Centre and World Health Organisation exhibition that toured UK universities and showed at UN City Copenhagen. Her works here bring figures caught mid-movement and light gathering on wet ground.
Emrys Thurgood (b. 2002, lives and works in Surrey) is a photographer who employs storytelling and the unreal to consider intangible experiences, with play central to their approach. They graduated from UWE Bristol in 2025. They received consecutive Silver Awards at the AOP Student Awards in 2024 and 2025, were a finalist at Photo North, shortlisted for the South West Graduate Photography Prize, and selected for the Photoworks Youth Photo Book Open Call. Their work has been exhibited at the UWE Photography Degree Show, the Arnolfini, Bristol, and Copeland Gallery, London. »Blue Boat« looks down onto saltmarsh, where a small boat seems engulfed until a closer look reveals it is paper.
Jasmine Ashley-Locke (b. 2002, lives and works in Norwich) makes work that sits on the border between truth and fiction, exploring how human experience both shapes and is shaped by place. She studied BA Photography at UWE Bristol. She won first prize in the Photo North Student Competition in 2023 for »When Sea Becomes Sky«, and exhibited »Sans Terre«, begun in Bristol, at the UWE Photography Degree Show at the Arnolfini, Bristol, and Copeland Gallery, London. The series holds a tree and its reflection in one frame, so the fan of trunks seems to grow in both directions.
Aaron Schuman (b. 1976, lives in Frome) is an American photographer, writer and curator based in the UK, and Programme Leader of MA Photography at UWE Bristol since 2017. He holds a BFA in Photography and Art History from New York University. He was founder and editor of SeeSaw Magazine and is the author of the monographs »Slant« (MACK, 2019) and »FOLK« (NB Books, 2016). His work is held at Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the MoMA Library, with exhibitions at the ICA and The Photographers’ Gallery, London. »Vale« was made in Vallis Vale, one of England’s last temperate rainforests, where a kaleidoscopic veil of growth closes over you.