About Us
Creative Hive Collective was founded by Rochdale-based artist Robin Rehman in 2024. The Collective is a group of like-minded young artists who are invested in nurturing art and creativity in Rochdale.
Our events are designed for anyone interested in exploring and making art. We are fostering a welcoming space where people can come together, experiment with different artistic techniques, and find inspiration. Creative Hive Collective is committed to strengthening Rochdale’s creative scene and ensuring artistic opportunities are accessible to all.
We launched monthly creative socials in October 2024 to provide local artists with a dedicated space to connect and create. Our creative socials not only provide free access to the arts, they also contribute to fostering a sense of belonging and strengthen Rochdale’s creative network. We have seen new friendships form, collaborations emerge, and a thriving community take shape. We have welcomed a growing community of returning attendees from Rochdale and beyond, gathering valuable feedback and witnessing first hand the impact these events have on people’s well-being.
Robin
Grace
Freya
Bobbie
Each member of Creative Hive Collective is a practicing artist with their own specialisms and research interests. Fine out more below.
Robin
Director
@Robinrehman.art
Living in a consumer capitalist society, which places great significance on work, there is a call for an appreciation of the everyday. To do this we have to consider what is left when we take work out of the equation. What we have left is what French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre described as moments. These moments are opportunities to find joy, clarity, importance, and pattern in our everyday lives, and cannot be codified or commodified.
My work focuses on using textiles, digital and physical collage, printmaking, and elements of felt sculpture to elevate the moments in life that change and disrupt everyday routine. I am creating a new and deconstructed remnant of my existence. My works feature an anthropomorphic rat avatar, Levi, who restages these banal events that I choose to elevate through their representation as artworks. They become an exaggerated narrative set apart from my own life. Moments have become an opportunity to escape into a world I am building with my avatar, a world in which Levi exclusively experiences moments.
I graduated from the University of Salford with a 1st class honours in Fine Art BA(Hons) in 2023. Then I went on to create and direct Creative Hive Collective. I established the group in September 2024 after seeing a gap for up and coming artists in Rochdale. The aim of the collective is to connect creative people in and around Rochdale and give them a place to belong and explore their creativity.
Grace
@Holmes.in.art
“Sound thus performes with and through space …it escapes rooms, vibrates walls, distrupts conversation” (Brendon LaBelle, 2016)
Captivated by sound, my work aims to explore the relationship between sound and space.
The notion that sound is something that can never be contained, never private and intrusive, but can also be misinterpreted as noise depending on each individuals perspective, encourages me to experiment with this medium.
I began to question the limitations of what actually makes an instrument. And at what point noise, may become sound and vice versa.
I suspend and amplify strings in any way that's accessible in the moment, whether across a room, or small and contained.
Regardless of size, I openly encourage interactions with my work, and allowing the audience to step into the role of the conductor.
Freya
@Freyadonaldd
I explore the concept of beginnings and growth as a facet of the human experience, informed by my expereince as a Student Midwife on the labour wards and community placement. I use a wide variety of both digital and physical, textile processes to convey the experience. I combine these methods to create an intentionally ambiguous, abstract visual reading, and for the viewer to gain an understanding of my work based on their own relationship to beginnings. The ambiguity and abstraction of the signifiers and motifs on the theme of birth and human connection and experience is important. The material; thin satin and soft coloured inks for my textiles-based work, and film photography zommed in to focus on grainy granular detail, lend a softness to my work, indicative of skin, flesh, human texture. When exploring sensitive, emotive topics such as birth experience, I feel an element of levity is beneficial, hence the introduction of my long-limbed dancing people drawings.
Bobbie
@Robin.Standring
I am a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores my own gender identity & transgender experiences through the lens of being 'stealth' in today's society, using a variety of mediums and processes. In contemporary terms, to live as the gender you identify with but not being openly out as trans is known as being 'stealth'. Transgender individuals often find it necessary to have a stealth identity in order to avoid discrimination. Through the use of an avatar in my own self-image, I am able to place him into everyday environments & experiences, where he might exist regardless of race, gender or class. Being open about being stealth is contradictory, and I am choosing to make my identity public."