Scratch Lab Showcase

Stanley Arts is one of South London’s premiere arts and performance venues, providing our local community with a vital home for cultural expression and discovery. As a radically inclusive space we seek to foreground under-represented voices, providing artists of colour and LGBTQ+ creatives with a platform to reach out to audiences across South London and beyond.

Annabelle Sami

Annabelle Sami is a writer and arts producer based in London. For children, Annabelle has written 12 novels and has been longlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and won the Spark! Book Award and Stockport Children’s Book Awards. For adults Annabelle writes poetry, articles, essays and short form prose, and has been featured in Writer’s Mosaic, Peaks of Colour Nature Writing Journal, Fab Prize and Fearlessly Magazine. 

As an arts producer Annabelle has worked with several prominent touring arts companies and artists, focusing on community, participatory and experimental work. 

She can often be found swimming in the sea, taking pictures of her dog or doomscrolling on TikTok.

Blessed Poetry

Blessed Poetry is a spoken word poet, singer/songwriter and playwright, who incorporates both faith and life as a young black woman from East London in her work. She has been performing for a decade and has performed most notably at the UK premiere and exclusive screenings of the movie, ‘Queen and Slim’, the Hackney Empire and the Royal Court Theatre stage. After a 2 year hiatus, she’s overflowing with creative ideas, ready to share and bring light to impact a dark world with her Christ-like mentality.

zish

Zish (b. 1410 AH/1989 AD. London, UK) is an a Brit(ish) artist and learning practitioner who aims to reconcile the past and complicate simple images in the public realm by re-looking at colonial, personal, pop-culture and music archives for moments of resonance.

Meditating on these moments, Zish uses automatic drawing, writing and collage to communicate with their subconscious and embodied ancestry. The images and words conjured, coalesce their research and are translated into expanded cinema: video, sound, sculpture, design, performance, installation and spoken word.  

Zish’s intention behind producing artworks is to create opportunities for conversations and connections regarding social justice for self and community healing.

Their work has been shown in solo exhibitions,“Kin-Aesthetic Mother Tongue” at Metroland Cultures in 2025, and group shows: New Contemporaries (2022. Ferens Art Gallery & Humber Street Gallery, Hull and South London Gallery, London), How to Lift Heavy (2021. Margate Now Festival), Show Me (2020. The Margate School, Margate) and Take Back Control Show (2019. Crypt Gallery, London)

They have also performed at: White Noise 50 (Corsica Studios), White Noise 48 (St Johns on Bethnal Green), The Life of Now (Willesden Gallery), KMT Private View (Metroland Cultures) and SAOM 19 (Avalon Cafe).

Annum Salman

Annum Salman is a multidisciplinary artist and a published Author of “Sense Me-“ a poetry collection. She writes in both English and Urdu, exploring themes of identity, race, gender, and mental health. Annum is also a theatre maker and debuted her first play Ghar Ghar in 2024 as both playwright and director. She runs Outcasts on the Mic, a poetry night spotlighting the creativity of the diaspora and platforming brilliant poets often overlooked. Annum has performed across the UK and Pakistan, including at the LOAV Festival, Nottingham Poetry Festival, Brixton House, Verses and the Roundhouse, and has judged the Young Muslim Writers Awards for four years. Find her on Instagram: @writeroholic

Denis

Originally from Donegal in the North West of Ireland, Denis moved to London to pursue a Masters in Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Since then he has worked professionally as an actor both on stage and screen with credits in London’s West End, leading Jamie Lloyd’s The Commitments and most recently The Choir of Man. As a writer his work centres around Ireland, queer culture and mental health. He would like to dedicate this performance to his late mother Margaret. 

Yvette G Santana 

She was born and raised in the south Bronx of NYC, the home of HipHop. While being in such an artistically inspiring environment, Yvette still struggled with her own mental health. She soon turned to poetry, she went from performing to creating her own project called the I AM NOT CRAZY MOVEMENT.  Her dream and passion is to bring mental health and poetry together in every space. 

Tariq

IAM Tariq is a spoken word artist whose poetry blends social commentary with intricate wordplay, rooted in his mantra of people, power, and politics. A key member of the Flo Poets and Poetic Unity, and Co-founder of the creative arts collective House of Vox, his work has featured across the UK on platforms such as Word on the Curb, TFL, and Poets Palace, championing heartfelt cultural critique. He is currently a key artist in the BBC’s Words First development programme.

frances

Frances is a poet, performer, maker from South-East London. 

She is interested in poems as living, breathing things, and has recently been working on how to bring poem and performance into the same room.

Her obsessions right now are growing pains, bodies and writing about the feeling change. 

Apart from this, you’ll find her at open mics speaking her words aloud. She is currently focusing on writing a first play, influenced by this ongoing practice and poetry’s permission to mess with form.

Solomon O.B iii 

A Spoken word and movement artist, using music and media to create their own unique brand of Performance poetry & theatre. 

Dynamic, explosive yet soulful and intricate, he finds the most fulfilment at the edge of comfort zones, encouraging audiences to join him in moments of discovery. 

Former National Slam Champion, Spoken word artist of the year and mentee of Kae Tempest & Zena Edwards, Solomon is a young yet mature artist, now realising his full voice.

Destiny

(Bio incoming…)