Meet the artists reshaping creativity through joy, visibility & inclusive design

Each year, the V&A’s Adobe Creative Residency programme opens its studio doors to three creatives who bring new perspectives to the museum. But the residency isn’t simply about giving artists a place to work; it’s about testing how museums can evolve, whose voices get amplified, and how creativity can reshape the ways we experience collections.

The 2025 residents – ceramic artist Ciara Neufeldt, multimedia photographer Michael Akuagwu and inclusive design practitioner Jessica Starns – have each spent the last twelve months not only making new work inspired by the V&A’s collections, but reinventing how audiences engage with art, design and heritage. Their practices differ wildly, but together their work shows an exciting shift in how we experience museums that is joyful, accessible, and grounded in real people’s lives.

Supported by the Adobe Foundation, the programme pairs each resident artist with a curatorial mentor working within the museum’s studios at South Kensington, using the collections as a springboard to reimagine design for contemporary needs. The programme also asks each resident to work closely with a specific audience group, from schools to families and young people. What the 2025 residents have shown is that creativity becomes more powerful when shared, and that the museum can be a space designed for inclusion as much as it is for displaying art.

For Ciara Neufeldt, joy is both her method and her philosophy. Her practice is rooted in transforming ordinary, functional objects into tactile, colourful ceramics that evoke curiosity and creativity. During her residency, she immersed herself in the V&A’s mosaic and ceramics collections, especially the decorative surfaces embedded in the museum’s own historic buildings. From these references, she developed work that foregrounds collective making and the emotional charge of play. 

Her “quilted jelly” stools take the ornate forms of historic jelly moulds from the V&A Wedgwood Collection and reinterpret them into tactile and playful seats. Several of the stools were decorated in collaboration with children at the V&A’s Spring Family Festival, turning a simple object into a vessel for communal joy. If a jelly wobbles to entertain, Neufeldt’s stools wobble conceptually, making us reconsider why everyday objects shouldn’t be colourful, silly or celebratory.

Her “Make a Wish” fountain takes this further. Passing the V&A’s Medieval and Renaissance galleries each day, Neufeldt noticed how visitors threw coins into an austere historical fountain. She saw the gesture as hopeful, but the object as joyless – “a missed opportunity,” as she put it in her exhibition text. Partnering with the rehabilitation charity Fine Cell Work, she held workshops for people with lived experience of incarceration, inviting them to shape tiles that now line the collaborative fountain. The result is an artwork that is both personal and profoundly public. “Joy lies at the core of my practice… bringing people together through a series of joyful workshops which highlight themes of care and community,” she explains. 

A self-taught multimedia artist, Michael Akuagwu is known for his surreal self-portraiture and commentary on identity and society. At the V&A, he began his residency by asking a simple but powerful question: Do we know the work of Black British artists well enough, and how has their historic under-representation shaped the creative canon? 

Treating the Black British photographers in the V&A’s collection as his own “Old Masters,” he studied documentary photography from 1950s to 1990s to understand how earlier generations captured the nuances of Black British life. “I have been inspired to create my own collective of ‘Old Masters’ using the works of Black photographers within the V&A Collection as a foundation,” he said at the start of his residency.

Across the year, he built a constellation of cultural reference points – books, photographs, and textiles – reflecting the vibrancy of African and Caribbean diasporic life in Britain. His portraits of photographers across generations, such as Eddie and Aliyah Otchere or Jennie Baptiste and Latoya Okuneye, reimagine the traditional artist portrait by weaving in African portrait cloths and lenticular printing. These works acknowledge lineage, honour influence and reveal how artistic identity travels across time.

Akuagwu also facilitated intergenerational conversations between early-career and established Black British photographers for his film Through the Lens. These discussions open up the realities of working in creative industries still shaped by inequity, while celebrating the resilience and creativity of those who have carved their own paths. In a second short film, Reference Point, he turns the question inward, exploring where Black designers find their cultural frames of reference in a landscape that historically hasn’t centred them. 

Jessica Starns transforms the residency into an experiment in access. Her work focuses on disability, neurodiversity and inclusive design, leading her to explore how the museum’s collections could reveal, and challenge, the histories of design that have excluded and empowered disabled people. Her practice is participatory at its core, and she spent the residency collaborating with schools, young people and support workers to imagine new ways of designing for a broad range of lived experiences.

Starns delved into objects in the “1900 to Now” gallery and the Rapid Response Collection, researching adaptive design and items created by disabled people for disabled people. “I shall be researching adaptive design in the V&A collection as well as exploring the design processes within occupational therapy,” she said early in the year. Her projects are grounded in historical objects, while responding directly to the needs of real users today.

For her “Adaptive designs and prototypes” display, Starns worked with the That’s Effortgroup to prototype accessible objects, including magnetic clasp jewellery, fidget tools and a hands-free, arm-worn water bottle designed for Marcus, a workshop facilitator who uses a walking stick and wanted a bottle that wouldn’t affect his balance. The result is a practical, elegant example of how inclusive design begins with listening.

Her work on food avoidance expands this approach. Cookbook that’s not a Cookbook confronts the assumption that cooking is universally joyful, proposing instead a flexible, customisable tool for people for whom eating is fraught or inaccessible. Plates made to accompany the book are decorated with imagery Starns found in the V&A’s collection, connecting past design histories to present-day needs. It’s a deeply empathetic project, grounded in occupational therapy research, that shows how design can meet people where they are rather than forcing them to adapt.

Together, the 2025 Adobe Creative Residents reveal a future for museums that is participatory, emotionally intelligent and alive to the complexities of contemporary life. Now at the end of their year-long residency, their work has been unveiled in new V&A displays this week that will continue to live on in the museum until November 2026.

Enjoyed this story? Help keep independent queer-led publishing alive and unlock the BRICKS Learner Platform, full of resources for emerging and aspiring creatives sent to you every week via newsletter. Start your 30-day free trial now.