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About Me

For over twenty years, my practice as a community artist has centred on participation, storytelling, and collective making. Through recent Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund, I have focused on my personal creative work.

 

I draw on the symbolic language of animals in myth and folklore, using them as recurring figures through which transformation, migration, and belonging can be explored. Folklore sits alongside personal family narratives, allowing imagined and inherited histories to converge. By contrasting Chinese and European stories, I examine how myths change through translation, distance, and retelling. Echoing the ways memory itself alters across generations.

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Embroidery, painting and cyanotype provide material metaphors for these ideas: exposure, layering, and repair. Stitching connects me to the Peranakan heritage within my family, while cyanotype’s play of light and shadow mirrors the revealing and obscuring of family memory. Painting, by contrast, offers a sense of fluidity, a space where identity can merge and reform, reflecting my experience of biracial heritage.

I accept commissions for artwork, murals and workshops

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or email CassyOliphant@hotmail.co.uk

Education & Qualifications

​2022 Introduction to Permaculture for Artists and Creatives
 

2017 Intensive Interaction Introduction Course 
 

2016 Non Violent Communication training
 

2011 Permaculture Design Course

2010  Pyramid of Arts – In House Training

          C3 Creative Communities Course – (Artworks

          Creative Communities, Bradford)

2007 Crawford College of Art and Design – Cork Art 

          Therapy Summer School

2004-2007 2:1 English Literature with art modules,

                   Leeds University

2002-2003 Central Saint Martins College of Art and

                     Design - Foundation Certificate

Artist Grants

2025-2026

  • Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP​) - Arts Council England

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2020

Exhibitions

2025

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  • Ones to Watch 2026, Sunny Bank Mills, Leeds (Upcoming)

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    Chinese Diaspora Exhibition 2026, Westminster, London (Upcoming)

    Solo Show - Scattered Stories - Left Bank Leeds (Leeds, UK)

  • Leeds Summer Group Show, Leeds Playhouse (Leeds, UK)

  • Artists of Heart, (Headingley Enterprise and Arts Centre, Leeds, UK)

  • Fronteer Gallery, (Sheffield, UK)

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2019

  • Fernie Brae, (Portland Oregon, USA)

  • Kirkstall Art Trail (Leeds, UK)

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2018

  • Creative Mothers Project, Aire Place Studios (Leeds, UK)
    Curated and exhibited

  • Love Arts Festival, Leeds City Museum (Leeds, UK)

  • Pyramid Sculpture, Armley Mills Industrial Museum (Leeds, UK)
    Ceramic tile sculpture project with Pyramid of Arts

  • Humankind, Rites of Passage
    Curated and exhibited

  • York River Art Market (York, UK)

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2017

  • Elemental Arts Event, All Hallows Church (Leeds, UK)
    Sustainable arts, music and food event)

  • Stories from Wild Women, Aire Place Studios (Leeds, UK)
    Curated and Exhibited 

  • Kirkstall Art Trail (Leeds, UK)

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2016

  • Artonomy (Leeds, UK)
    Exhibition of personal work

  • York River Art Market (York, UK)

  • Shoddy Exhibition, Live Art Bistro (Leeds, UK)
    with Pyramid of Arts High Rise Group

Artist Residencies

2020

  • Studio Garonne (France)
    Parent Artist Residency postponed due to Covid. 

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2018

  • Hollybush TCV (Leeds, UK)
    Developing the theme of folktale and nature-based painting and illustration at a weekly residency in an environmental conservation centre.​

Murals

2020

  • Hyde Park Source (Leeds, UK)
    Dandelion Mural

  • Bramley Community Centre (Leeds, UK)
    Wild Flower Mural

  • OWLS - Older Wiser Leeds Seniors, (Leeds, UK)
    Window Front

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2019

  • ​SOMA Yoga Space, (Leeds, UK)
    Mandala Mural

 

2018

  • Little Free Libraries throughout Yorkshire

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