Gherdai Hassell

About the Create! Magazine 10th Anniversary Book: Create! Magazine is honored to celebrate a decade of contemporary art by publishing a look back at previously selected artists: their achievements, career growth, and more since being published. Stay tuned for the book launch in fall 2026, and join our newsletter to stay up to date.

Gherdai Hassell, featured in both Create! Magazine and the Create! Magazine10th Anniversary Book, is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist, independent curator, and researcher based in Manchester, UK. Her work investigates memory and nostalgia to construct and deconstruct identity. She uses mixed media techniques to thread and weave layers of history and the complexities of Caribbean heritage, postcolonial narratives, and identity through painting, fashion, and collage.

Her work typically centers hidden labor, women’s work, simultaneously existing within realms of past, present, and future. Her work is ultimately about migration, a gradual process of being and becoming the future. This work does not just position which futures are imaginable; it is also about what pieces of our collective past would survive in such a future. Her work is an exploration of identity as an exploration of materials.

Her artwork is a part of public and private collections across the world. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and biennials across the world. She is a 2026 British Council Venice Fellow, a 2025 Arts in Medicine Fellow, and a 2025 Women in Art Prize recipient. She won the 2023 Dr. Eva Hodgson Racial Justice Award. She is a three-time Best of Bermuda Award – Visual Art recipient and the 2021 Women’s United Art Prize recipient. She is one of the first artists selected for the 2023 Jerwood at HOME residency, a 2022 Manchester Open Award winner, and the 2021 Masterworks Museum’s Charman Prize winner for distinctive style. Gherdai is a graduate of the China Academy of Art.


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