At Aylesbury High School, year 9 students are challenged to create a “Natural World” themed textile mixed media piece. They start with creating an inspiration board and choosing which four textile techniques they will use to complete the piece, ensuring they display the range of skills they learnt across years 7, 8 and 9.

Some of the more popular techniques students like to use are hand embroidery, applique, free machine embroidery and sublimation printing. The outcomes are highly skillful and creative. 

Forth is an ongoing project that gives voice to the housing schemes of North Edinburgh through a series of screenplay-influenced short stories. Rooted in the language, rhythm, and resilience of the area, the work explores how place and identity intertwine within communities often overlooked or misrepresented. Blending cinematic storytelling with literary form, Forth captures moments of humour, struggle, and quiet defiance, offering an authentic portrait of life on the margins. The project continues Smith’s commitment to representing peripheral voices with empathy, precision, and a deep sense of belonging.

Paul Sebastian Smith (b. 1979, Birmingham, England) is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, text, and narrative form. Moving to Edinburgh at the age of seven, Smith’s creative outlook was profoundly shaped by his upbringing in the city’s north – a landscape marked by social and economic marginalisation yet rich in community and resilience. His work explores the lived realities of peripheral societies, interrogating how inequality, class, and cultural identity intersect to form both personal and collective experience.

Working within the expanded field of photography, Smith fuses documentary and poetic approaches to question the politics of representation and the visual language of power. His text-based projects often emerge from the same terrain, tracing the relationship between image, memory, and voice in the construction of social narrative. More recently, while studying Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge, Smith has turned his attention to screenplay-influenced short stories, developing hybrid works that blur the boundaries between cinematic and literary form. These stories extend his long-standing interest in storytelling from the margins, offering intimate, character-driven portraits shaped by rhythm, dialogue, and visual detail.

Paul Smith’s work has been widely published and exhibited both nationally and internationally, earning recognition for its sensitivity to the overlooked and its insistence on the humanity within the periphery.

A selection of drawings and paintings by students from Aylesbury High School.

10 practising artist-artpsychotherapists, working with varied clients and groups come together in this show. Visitors are invited to join workshops and talks to increase the understanding of art therapy in the community. 

“We invite you to explore a shared curiosity and playfulness, in the materials, processes, and techniques, which draws us down into ourselves, and parallels the therapeutic journey we make with our clients. Art therapy is multi-layered and can offer a healing transformation where words may be hard to find.” 

Participating artists:

 Alley Akoh, Rona Begum, Martha Evans, Lorna Giezot, Ruth Goodman, Belinda Hunt, Chris Lyle, Miriam Muldal, Shin-shin Ngiam and Stephanie Taylor.