By Tessa Nolan
By Sara Bright
The conventional art school pipeline – foundation, BA, MA, group show, gallery representation – still produces its graduates. But the most compelling work emerging from British and Dutch studios right now comes from people who took detours so improbable they would strain credibility in a novel. A quantum physicist who learned to code for art. A chemist who became a photographic archivist of fictions. A self-taught painter who found her audience through a smartphone screen at forty-eight. The tension between formal training and self-taught practice has never been more visible – or more irrelevant to the quality of the work produced.
Libby Heaney: From Particle Physics to Quantum Art
Dr Libby Heaney holds a PhD in Quantum Information Science and spent years as a post-doctoral researcher at Oxford and the National University of Singapore. She is also, by her own account, working-class – a background she foregrounds rather than obscures. After completing an MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, she became the first artist to use quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium.
Her signature work, Ent- (2022), is a 360-degree immersive installation that reinterprets the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490–1510) through quantum algorithms. Heaney writes her own code, which distorts and animates scanned watercolour paintings within a destabilising virtual environment. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and premiered at Schering Stiftung in Berlin, Ent- won the 2022 Lumen Prize Immersive Award and the Falling Walls Art-Science Prize. It has since appeared at ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica in Linz, CPH:DOX, and as a public projection in Seoul.
Her 2024 solo exhibition Quantum Soup at HEK Basel was followed by Heartbreak & Magic at Somerset House and Shadowscapes at Orleans House Gallery in 2025. A monograph was published by Hatje Cantz. What distinguishes Heaney is that she does not reference quantum physics – she operates within it, using superposition and entanglement as conceptual frameworks for non-binary thinking. Her recurring motifs of quantum hybrids and slime are arguments about reality, rendered in watercolour, virtual reality, and public sculpture.
Arjan de Nooy: The Chemistry of Fictional Photography
Arjan de Nooy, born in Goes in 1965, studied chemistry at Leiden University and completed a PhD at TU Delft before turning to photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. His scientific background shapes his method: de Nooy approaches photography as a system to be investigated, catalogued, and then subverted.
He works with original photographs and found images – postcards, online images, photo simulations – constructing fictional histories and pseudo-scientific archives. His ongoing project De facto (2009) presents a fabricated history of Dutch photography, complete with invented oeuvres for photographers who never existed. With collaborator Anne Geene, he has produced several award-winning books: Ornithology (2016) won the Golden Letter for international best book design; The Universal Photographer (2018) resulted in an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
His solo book Photology (2023, Blind Finch Books) was selected by De Volkskrant as one of the ten best photobooks of the year, presenting photography through twenty propositions inspired by Vilém Flusser. In 2024, The Great Moon Hoax (with Geene) fed descriptions from the 1835 New York Sun hoax into DALL-E, producing “a hoax of images on the hoax from 1835.” Exhibitions span Het Nederlands Fotomuseum, Fotomuseum Den Haag, Marres, and the Biënnale Drenthe.
De Nooy’s art is fundamentally about how context – not content – drives photographic meaning. His chemistry training gave him the patience for taxonomy and the scepticism to question received narratives.
Unskilled Worker: Helen Downie’s Late Start
Helen Downie began painting seriously at forty-eight. She had raised four children, struggled with substance abuse, and survived cancer before picking up a brush. She works under the moniker Unskilled Worker – a name she chose because it accurately described her relationship to formal training.
Her breakthrough came through Instagram. In 2017, Gucci collaborated with her on a 40-piece collection, with her paintings displayed on art walls across London, New York, Paris, Milan, and Shanghai. But her portraits – wide-eyed, haunted figures in chalk pastel and gouache – owe as much to Lucian Freud and Chaim Sreetine as to contemporary street culture. Her subjects, predominantly young men, carry a timeless quality that resists categorisation.
Her work has appeared at Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, D Museum in Seoul, Hauser & Wirth alongside Antony Gormley, and Flowers Gallery’s annual Small is Beautiful. In 2021, W1 Curates displayed her work on one of the world’s largest permanent digital public art installations. In 2025, she exhibited Off By Heart at Luca Tommasi Arte in Milan and Hiraeth at Patricia Low Contemporary in Venice. As she told Metal Magazine: “Everything is happening all at once – the joy, the beauty but also the terrible horror.”
What These Paths Share
None of these artists followed the route the establishment prescribes. Heaney brought quantum mechanics into the gallery. De Nooy brought chemistry into the archive. Downie brought survival into the portrait. What connects them is not style – their work looks nothing alike – but a shared refusal to accept that knowledge gained outside the art world is less valid than that gained within it. In an era where technology reshapes how art is made and experienced, these unconventional pathways are not exceptions. They are the future.
