Niamh Birch is a multi-disciplinary artist from the West Midlands. Their practice is guided by their sustainable approach to making, sourcing factory waste, skip ‘junk’, and scrap metal to create auto-biographical work. Her work explores the relationship between sub-cultural practices within the queer community and working-class culture. More specifically, examining the socio-political and historic culture and iconography of queer bodies in industrial spaces.

Their materials and processes of making are industrial and symbolic of factory production, reflected by the mundanity and repetitive nature of metal work. Birch attempts to communicate personal experience of queer and working-class culture through laborious processes of making. Mapping memories, moments, and sensations from messy nights out and underground clubs. Whilst simultaneously paying homage to her ‘Brummie’ heritage, with a family history of steel fabrication. Utilising the permanence of metal to immortalise otherwise fleeting moments of euphoria. Birch depicts the clashing realities that operate inside factories and warehouses through opposing themes such as: pain and pleasure, struggle, and endurance, and hard and soft. Reflecting on lineages of factory workers, and the agony, pain, and bodily gestures of labour in comparison to the queer utopia industrial spaces symbolise to her.