Steph Assez

My work explores the stories that emerge through layering—of materials, memory, and meaning. Working primarily with mixed media collage, I combine vintage paper, found photography, and text, with some works incorporating hand embroidery as both a material and a form of mark-making.

Drawn to overlooked images and discarded ephemera, I recontextualise fragments of the past to explore themes of identity, nostalgia, consumer culture, and the complexities of contemporary life. I am interested in the conversations that unfold when historical imagery is placed alongside modern concerns, creating visual narratives that stitch together past and present.

In works that feature embroidery, I embrace a medium long associated with domesticity and women's labour, reclaiming it as a contemporary artistic language. The slow, deliberate act of stitching contrasts with the immediacy of photography and collage, introducing ideas of care, repair, and resistance while physically binding disparate histories into a single surface.

Whether through collage alone or in combination with embroidery, my practice is rooted in juxtaposition—humour alongside discomfort, beauty alongside unease, the ordinary alongside the political. I hope my work invites viewer...

King's College London - MA in Film Studies
Sciences-Po - Erasmus Year
King's College London - BA in French with Film Studies
New York Film Academy - Diploma in Investigative Broadcast Journalism

Havelock Walk Open Studios
Women in Art
Guilford Festival of the Arts
Affordable Art Fair - Battersea
The Old Lock Up Gallery