THE E8 ART TRAIL 2025 THROUGH THREE ARTISTS

Every June and December, 28 local hackney artists get the opportunity to open up their homes or studios to showcase their work, meet fellow artists and connect with their local community for the biannual E8 Art Trial for its third year running.  From wooden sculptures to oil paintings to ceramics, there was a variety of work on display with a handful of female artists showcasing work in response to the community around them.

Amy Haynes, The Obscured Mother, 2025

First up was photographer Amy Haynes, whose work primarily focuses on the complexities and tensions of motherhood. Classically trained as a violinist and after 15 years of working as a music teacher, Amy now puts all her energy into photography. 

A specific project she pointed me towards during a visit at her house in London Fields challenges traditional views of motherhood and draws on the tension of giving up work to become a full time mother. “I started this as I was just so angry about going to work and just being forced out, not through anything that I've done,” Amy said. 

Photography courtesy of Amy Haynes

This series of portraits depicts different local mothers and their young children in relation to their place of work. “If you look back through history, women have always worked and had their children alongside them, like the weavers and all of that kind of history. It's all there. Women have always done it. So why do we pretend that it's not okay?” she said, referring back to her own experience of being shut out of her music career. 

The series first started with a self portrait of Amy. The photograph shows her with her three children standing in a field near to the working farm she grew up in Northampton, with an old, slightly decaying piano at the centre of the shot to symbolise the music career she was forced out of. 

Another photograph shows a woman sitting in a chair looking directly at the camera —- a style similar to corporate headshots — but below her, her child is playing with bricks and toys at her feet. “That would be a headshot for a corporate website, but there's all the evidence of actually, here's her life down here,” Amy explained to me, pointing towards the photograph. “Quite often, mums are left out of photographs because they're the ones always taking the photograph,” she added. 

Outside of this portrait series, Amy has photographed a community of women at her local lido at London Fields, called Mumma Swim, which was set up by Bridget Flynn around ten years ago and aims to empower mothers and share the load of childcare. The series shows snapshots, quick, fleeting stills of local mothers, posed quickly and authentically before diving into the still water, —  a style Amy calls “document portraiture.” 

Photography courtesy of Anna Brown

A couple of roads away is painter and art teacher Nicola Hepworth’s studio, which has a beautiful view of London Fields. Here, Nicola toured me around her studio, which she shares with two other artists, and talked me through her latest painting series which focus portraits of different women in nail salons around east London. 

“I really like this sort of idea of these interactive spaces where we interact with people. I suppose what I'm looking at is all the colorful creative acts, you know, she's painting, and making work on people's hands,” said Nicola. 

Photography courtesy of Anna Brown

She described how she spent time sitting and sketching in different salons around Hackney, observing the myriad of different women that would come in and the interactions they had. “They're quite intriguing. And I started going to this one with my daughter as well. And, I just thought they're such visually exciting places,” she said. 

Nicola thrives on painting portraits of women in different environments, from her nail salon series to gardens and allotments: Another painting she showed me was inspired by Botticelli's infamous Primavera painting showing the Three Graces, in which she painted three women in similar poses in London Fields just outside her studio. As for what’s next, Nicola noted she’s considering doing a similar series of portraits of women in hairdressing salons. 

Illustrations courtesy of Becky Baur

A stone’s throw away, Becky Baur showcases her prints and paintings every week during markets on Broadway Market in London Fields and Chatsworth road in Clapton, also taking inspiration from lidos, similar to Amy’s photography. 

After studying art at Brighton and being a textile designer for twenty years, lidos are a prominent feature of Becky’s paintings. She often exhibits her paintings and prints at different lidos around London, including London Fields and Parliament Lido, creating a cyclic effect to her work. “You know, each pool kind of has different times of day and different times of year. It just looks so different. So I kind of really got a lot of pleasure in doing it,” Becky said. 

Becky Baur, Large London Fields Lido painting view towards the Fields

Working at local markets allows Becky to tap into the community around her, often being visited by the same cohort of people, she told me, adding that Broadway Market is more “transient” compared to Chatsworth road. As well as lidos, Baur has illustrated a number of children's books and is working on other painting series — her latest obsession is painting bread, she laughed. 

These three women were just a handful of the artists taking part in the group trial last month, which is a perfect way for creatives to tap into their local community and showcase their work. 

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The E8 Art & Craft Trail is a twice-yearly celebration of creativity in London’s Hackney E8 postcode, typically held each June and December. It offers a self‑guided walking tour through private homes, studios, cafés and community venues where local artists and makers showcase a diverse range of work, from fine art, illustration and photography to ceramics, textiles, jewellery and video.

Anna Brown is a journalist for the Financial Times paper Endpoints News and also an art writer and painter.