What happens when you refuse to shrink yourself into the tidy little boxes society builds for you? Simple. You break them. You step over the rubble and you make something entirely your own. A Class of Their Own is a fierce, vibrant, emotionally charged exploration of class, identity, and the radical act of thriving in the in between spaces, the ones nobody designed for you, but you claim for yourself.
Artists Natalie Mills and Maya Davis Stokes come together through shared lived experience, mutual admiration, and a refusal to be defined by the structures that try to contain them. Their work speaks to anyone who has ever felt “other”, anyone who has had to build their own belonging from scratch, anyone who has survived by creating beauty in the cracks.
About the Artists
Natalie Mills
Mills’ work is a glorious riot of colour, texture and instinct. Think paint, spray, collage and ink layered until it becomes its own living, breathing thing. Her practice is instinctive and emotionally led, embracing chaos, grit and the honesty of mistakes. Influenced by street art and graffiti, her confident marks and recurring symbols speak to transformation, voice and the act of surviving systems never built for you.
Maya DavisStokes
Davis Stokes distorts portraiture with intention, curiosity and a wicked sense of truth. Her oil painted faces, sometimes drawn without looking, unravel beautifully, revealing how easily reality shifts when seen from only one angle. Blending figurative and abstract elements, her work explores identity, neurodivergence, health and the absurdity of the stories we’re told about ourselves. She paints to make people think, feel, question and reconsider what they believe is “real”.
Both artists agree “We create our own space removed from class structures, flourishing in between.”
The Exhibition
Together, Mills and Davis Stokes create a space that is their own, defiantly bold, yet tender and honest. Their work challenges class structures not with concepts, but with lived experience. This is an exhibition for anyone who has ever felt out of place, and for anyone who has learned to build home in the gaps where others never thought to look, the same in between spaces where these two artists have found belonging, momentum and a community that sees them. Marie Hutton, Seventh Circle Gallery Director shares “This exhibition is exactly why we exist as a gallery. Natalie and Maya are artists who have carved out their own place in Birmingham’s art scene by sheer force of honesty, grit and talent.”
Exhibition Details
Dates: 29th August – 13th September 2026
Private View: Saturday 29th August 6pm (All welcome, RSVP encouraged)
Venue: Seventh Circle Art Gallery, C3, 2 Bowyer Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B10 0SA
Gallery contact – Marie Hutton – Gallery Director – mariehutton@svnthcrcl.com
0121 270 6352
www.svnthcrcl.com