Stand Strong, Be Yourself

Location: B Gallery at Leeds Arts University, Blenheim Walk, Leeds LS2 9AQ

This exhibition is available to view from 10:00am–4:00pm Monday to Friday by appointment only for external visitors. Please email curatorial@leeds-art.ac.uk to make an appointment. Staff and students are not required to make an appointment.

This exhibition presents artworks and an animation co-created with participants at Getaway Girls during the Online Objectification project. In collaboration with spoken word and visual artists we ran workshops with two groups of girls at Getaway Girls. During the workshops the participants devised poems and visual artworks that explore the types of negative content they experience online and the things they do to increase their resilience against them.

The online objectification project is an interdisciplinary project funded by Include+ (EPSRC) examining girls’ and young women’s experiences of viewing objectifying content online. Objectifying and demeaning content is listed as one of the top 10 harms experienced by girls and women in Ofcom’s Online Nation Report (2024).  Viewing objectifying content can also have a negative impact on well-being especially in young women who are particularly susceptible, partly because of their exposure to gender stereotypes in mass media content (Appel & Weber, 2017).

This research was undertaken by Dr Dawn Woolley (Leeds Arts University); Professor Sally Dibb and Dr Katie Thompson (Manchester Metropolitan University); and Associate Professor Magdalena Zawisza and Margot Lefevre (Anglia Ruskin University) in collaboration with youth workers and participants at Getaway Girls in Leeds. 

Thanks to the participants, Flavia Docherty (CEO) and the youth workers at Getaway Girls for making this project possible and to Paulette Morris, Denetta D3 Copeland and Marcia Brown for leading creative workshops with participants. Thanks also to Include+ for funding this project. Include+ is a network exploring how social and digital environments can be built, shaped and sustained to enable all people to thrive. Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. 

Exhibition Preview: 28 April 2026 5:00pm–7:00pm

Location: Blenheim Walk B Gallery, Leeds Arts University, Blenheim Walk, Leeds LS2 9AQ

Click here to book your place for the exhibition preview