Twelve Moments from a Year at Artstory
A year at Artstory is rarely defined by milestones alone. Instead, it is shaped by the spaces where conversations happen, the artists whose studios we enter, and the small discoveries we make along the way.
Some of the most memorable moments of 2025 emerged through encounters, such as standing in the halls of Mar Hall as Icelandic artist Baldvin Ringsted’s cross-stitched collages were installed, their repurposed fragments of embroidery carrying both memory and vibrancy. Our collaboration with artist Anthony Fryer opened a window into the quieter backstreets of Hong Kong – the narrow lanes and overlooked passages that inform his pared-back compositions. His use of locally gathered stone as a tool gives his works a direct link to the city’s fabric.
There were other conversations too – with Bethany Holmes in her colour-saturated studio, where paintings grow through layering, sanding back and instinctive mark-making; and with Rebecca Whitaker in Salt Lake City, whose hand-woven works showed how fibre, structure and technique can shape the tone of a space. These collaborations marked the year not as a sequence of commissions, but as an ongoing dialogue with material, process and place.
Across 2025, the Artstory team travelled between project sites at different stages of development. We spent time inside the iconic Admiralty Arch building beginning its next chapter as a hotel, looking out over Trafalgar Square. Further south, research for an art collection at the Noss on Dart Hotel began with the archives of the former boatyard: documents, old photographs and material traces that helped us understand the site’s history before shaping its visual future through art.
We visited the newly opened Treehouse Hotel in Manchester, where our curated art collection complements the playful, texture-rich interiors, and saw the opening of Miiro’s first UK hotel, where our research process was informed by the creative history and greenery of its Kensington location.
Some projects unfolded more quietly, including styling work that sharpened our attention to smaller details. Others were larger in scale, such as the Dock Shed commission, in collaboration with Conran and Partners, where room dividers were reimagined as vast woven screens.
Closer to home, 2025 was also a year of consolidation. Our move to a new Studios HQ in Leamington Spa brought research, fabrication, prototyping and technical development into one space. Few art consultancies hold an in-house workshop, and the ability to test materials, framing approaches and bespoke commissions at full scale continues to bring new opportunities to our process.
Alongside the headline projects, much of the year unfolded through trial pieces and material studies pinned to the workshop walls – quiet experiments that often guide the direction of a project long before its details are fixed.
These twelve moments trace the contours of a year shaped not only by outcomes, but by the creative, multi-faceted work that happens in between – the work that continues to define Artstory.