Event type: Exhibition

Convenience Gallery: On The Waltzers b...

“‘On The Waltzers’, an interactive and immersive arts installation created by artist and curator duo ELLSQUARED that will open Convenience Gallery’s 2024 TTITG program.

The artists evoke nostalgia for the British everyday experience, from a mini golf course, now to a fun fair. The viewers are invited to participate in a series of classic fair games for the chance to win hand-crafted prizes made by the artists with the intention of exploring how exhibitions can be more accessible and how  the audience can obtain artwork through play.

From tufted teddy bears to felt cigarettes, a homage to Hull Fair, ‘On The Waltzers’  implores the viewer to not only engage with the installation but to become a part of the work itself.

This is ELLSQUARED’s first exhibition of 2024 and will once again subvert the white cube gallery experience and how a sense of levity and tongue-in-cheek approach to their respective practices elevate not only the craft and ‘everyday’ dialogue they hold dearly, but also what is considered high and low art and how they play with the viewer within their work.”

This exhibition is part of their new arts and culture programme: ‘The Town Is The Gallery’

The Town is the Gallery (TTITG) is Convenience Gallery’s new programme of arts and culture. This is the first in a series of programmes which will take place across Birkenhead and Wirral between March and August.

TTITG programme will feature artists, artworks, socials, parties, electronic music, workshops, and so much more.

All the artists involved are paid artist fair pay, and all Town is the Gallery key events are free to take part in. This Project is a part of the Wirral Borough of Culture 2024.

Opening times are: (Times may change so please check their social or website before visiting)

Event

Wednesday: 10am – 4pm
Thursday: 10am – 4pm
Friday: 10am – 4pm
Saturday: 10am – 4pm
CLOSED: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – please contact to arrange special visitation.

Convenience Gallery: Chwarae Teg/Fair ...

Sorrell Kerrison presents “Chwarae Teg / Fair Play”

Sorrell’s new Exhibition invites you to ponder the timeless question: “When do we stop playing for the sake of enjoyment and always search for productivity? Is it a byproduct of the capitalist dilemma, or simply an inevitable aspect of aging that we forget to find joy in the simple act of playing and exploring? Through this thought-provoking exhibition, Kerrison delves into the complexities of human nature and the intrinsic value of play.

This exhibition is part of their new arts and culture programme: ‘The Town Is The Gallery’

The Town is the Gallery (TTITG) is Convenience Gallery’s new programme of arts and culture. This is the first in a series of programmes which will take place across Birkenhead and Wirral between March and August.

TTITG programme will feature artists, artworks, socials, parties, electronic music, workshops, and so much more.

All the artists involved are paid artist fair pay, and all Town is the Gallery key events are free to take part in. This Project is a part of the Wirral Borough of Culture 2024.

Opening times are: (Times may change so please check theirr social or website before visiting)

Event

Wednesday: 10am – 4pm
Thursday: 10am – 4pm
Friday: 10am – 4pm
Saturday: 10am – 4pm
CLOSED: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – please contact to arrange special visitation.

Saturday Town

Saturday Town is a photography series by the award-winning photographer Casey Orr. Since 2013 Casey has travelled throughout the UK with her pop-up portrait studio photographing young people on Saturday afternoons. The project explores fashion, identity and the self-expression of young people on Saturday afternoons on the high streets and public spaces of towns across the country.

This is the largest show of Saturday Town and Casey Orr’s first retrospective show.

Bronwyn Andrews, exhibition assistant curator and creative producer at Open Eye Gallery, said: “Are we different now? How do you picture yourself? How does it feel to belong, or rebel? What makes you feel like you?

Saturday Town acts as a mosaic of youth subculture, fashion-dialects and self expression in the north of England over the last 11 years. Through a tumultuous period which has seen a global pandemic, the dissolution of the gender binary and the death of the highstreet, Casey Orr holds up a sign which reads ‘These young people are important!’

Open Eye Gallery are thrilled to host Casey Orr’s first retrospective and platform the unique fashion and visual language of the north, highlighting young people’s identities and style as culturally significant. We are delighted to facilitate conversations around belonging, identity, community and self representation through this work.

Casey Orr, photographer, said: “The project acts as a witness to young lives. Taking these photographs continues to excite me as it evolves and refers to the times in which we live, as well as a shared past that is reinvented and flows through new generations. Fashion and bodily self-expression are important and powerful tools for us all, to state who we are beyond consumerism and capitalism; beyond selfies and social media platforms”.

Saturday Town started in 2013 as Saturday Girl, when Casey Orr started photographing young women in Leeds on Saturday afternoons and exploring what it meant in terms of culture, tribe identities and values and how these things burst forth in the unspoken language of fashion and bodily self-expression.

After that Casey took the studio on the road throughout the UK, visiting over 20 cities and photographing over 800 people. Casey said, “Liverpool women just blew me away with their style. The Liverpool aesthetic of wearing curlers in your hair whilst out shopping on a Saturday afternoon is just so playful and expressive, saying to the world: “I’m going out tonight!”

Saturday Girl turned into Saturday Town, as the project has developed into a space for all gender expressions. The portraits aren’t styled beyond personal decisions made in front of bedroom mirrors. These images are a document of culture, read through fashion.

Saturday afternoons are spaces of freedom – from school, family and institutions. Saturdays are often a time when groups of young friends gather together in city centres and high streets to shop and hang out, to look and be seen.

They invite you to the exhibition where every day is Saturday.

Earth’s Murmurs exhibition at th...

Two artists, working with very different media, explore their emotional connection to the landscape

Bridget Greenwood
Valerie Wartelle

Thursday 11th April – Saturday 11th May
Opening times: Thurs – Sat, 10am – 4pm

Bridget Greenwood is a contemporary abstract artist based in Cheshire, whose paintings explore her fascination with the landscape. Colour has always been Bridget’s starting point and is central to her work. She sketches outside to record the moment, but her paintings are completed in the studio where they go through many stages before she feels that she has kept the essence whilst reducing and paring back the landscape to shapes and marks.

Working with fibres and textiles, Valerie Wartelle’s practice is rooted in the traditional craft of wet felting and the manipulation of textiles as an expressive art form. Taking the rural environment as her inspiration, she draws on its colour, texture and form to create evocative semi-abstract landscapes rich in climate. The compositions are built in layers, hinting at what may lie beneath, and use translucency and light to create absorbing moods. These are highly textured felt pieces in which cloth is embedded and threads unravelled, as a painter with her brush.

The gallery will be hosting a preview evening on Thursday 11th April between 6pm and 8pm. All welcome

You’ll find the LAKE gallery in the heart of West Kirby, a couple of minutes from the train station.

David Clapham: The River Runs Through

Two decades since he last lived and worked in Merseyside, artist David Clapham is returning to Birkenhead with a new exhibition, The River Runs Through, at Williamson Art Gallery.

Harrogate-born Clapham lived in Birkenhead Park for twelve years in the 1980’s and 90’s, including six years in Birkenhead Cricket Club. He made a significant contribution to the arts on Merseyside, as a Fine Art lecturer at John Moores University for over 20 years, and as a freelance filmmaker working for a variety of broadcast media including Granada TV. It was Clapham who invited Yoko Ono to Liverpool to perform her famous ‘Music of the Mind happening’ at Bluecoat Chambers in 1967. In 1976 he went on to co-found and manage the Bridewell Artists Studio complex, still thriving today on Prescott St in Liverpool.

The River Runs Through includes some of Clapham’s most recent works, alongside selected pieces from over two decades of development. The recurrent images of water and rivers are unifying themes from different periods in his life and different places that he has lived and worked, including London and Portugal. The exhibition features work in a range of media, including ephemeral large hanging installations which play with transparency.

Although they are landscapes based on real locations, Clapham is interested in the feelings beyond what we see. He says that “I’m looking at nature through the lens of history and recollection that sets in motion a series of memories, such as of a moment in time, or a particular quality of light, that affects how we live and feel in a place. That series of associations represents true reality.”

The River Runs Through will run at Williamson Art Gallery 6th April – 15th June.

The Convenience Store

As a Community/ Contemporary arts organisation, Convenience will animate Birkenhead Town locations across the 2024 Borough of Culture Year for Wirral, including reanimating a high street shop, alongside locations such as Birkenhead Priory, Birkenhead Library and others with free to access arts exhibitions workshops and experiences all made and designed by local people.

This project will create a number of new artworks and culture opportunities across Birkenhead and beyond during 2024 and 2025.

Convenience will be bringing their Convenience Store to Birkenhead’s old M&S building this Spring, highlighting some of Merseyside’s best creatives. The Convenience Store is an additional way to support Northern artists to sell work and have sustainable income.

Exhibitions and Stores opening times:
Wednesday: 10am – 4pm
Thursday: 10am – 4pm
Friday: 10am – 4pm
Saturday: 10am – 4pm
CLOSED: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – please contact to arrange special visitation.

You can see all the works on the site: conveniencegallery.store. All work will only be available until 20 April.

There Seemed a Strangeness…

An exhibition of contemporary landscape painting by Paul Mellor and John Elcock at Editions Gallery.

Paul Mellor’s paintings explore history, loss, and mortality as he seeks to question the idea of both private and collective memories, their illusion and ambiguity. Taking his personal memories – of places (real or imagined) – as a starting point. He uses source materials from the internet, film stills, postcards and his old photographs to affect a distance from the subject so the final painting is viewed atmospherically rather than descriptively.

John Elcock is a visual artist based in Liverpool with a multidisciplinary practice centred on painting and conceptual sculpture. He is a founder member of the Material Matters collective.

From Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales to the Wirral, the artists have gathered a series of enigmatic yet strangely beautiful paintings that shed new light both on the familiar and the unknown. The works are accompanied by a selection of found objects, photographs and other ephemera, specially chosen by the artists to provide a glimpse of respective journeys towards their practical realisation in the studio.

Open weekdays. (Closed Saturday & Sunday)
Editions Gallery, 16 Cook Street, Liverpool.

The Sefton Open 2024

The Sefton Open is an annual exhibition celebrating the creativity and artistic talent across the borough.

The exhibition takes over The Atkinson’s art gallery in an eclectic salon-style hang and features a wide variety of works from individual artists and local groups. Each year the exhibition attracts thousands of visitors to The Atkinson.

The Atkinson’s longstanding partner, Southport Palette Club, select the work from individual artists for the Sefton Open. The club was formed in 1921 to champion the work of local artists and this will be their 98th annual exhibition.

Julia Midgley: Bicentenary Sketchbook ...

Liverpool John Moores University will look back on its milestone Bicentenary year at an exhibition of work by artist Julia Midgley created during her residency throughout 2023. 

As Artist in Residence, Julia visited the LJMU campus regularly during the year to capture everything from open days to public lectures, to student projects and graduation celebrations, using her distinctive documentary and reportage style to create a poignant record of a historic year.  

Julia created around 140 individual drawings with watercolour from her time on campus, some of which have been curated for the special exhibition which will also feature large-scale reproductions of the original works, Julia’s sketchbooks and her art materials.   

In bringing the exhibition to fruition, Julia has worked in collaboration with the Bluecoat’s Director of Cultural Legacies Bryan Biggs, one of LJMU’s Bicentenary Honorary Fellows, and final year History of Art and Museum Studies student Madeleine Pedley, brought onto the project through an innovative internship opportunity through the university’s on-campus recruitment agency Unitemps.  

Award-winning artist Julia was a Reader in Documentary Drawing within LJMU’s School of Art and Design and a member of staff for 26 years before retiring in 2013. Julia is also a practising printmaker and is a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Art’s Summer Exhibition (12 occasions). She has been the recipient of national awards for drawing, painting and printmaking, and is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers and the Royal Watercolour Society. 

Open daily, 8.30am – 4.30pm, except weekends and Bank Holidays.

Bread and Roses

“For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!”

Bread and Roses was a poem written in 1912 by James Oppenheim, about women and children striking for better wages and working conditions.

The metaphor of Bread and Roses is that we all need bread to feed our bodies, but we also need to be nourished by life’s roses: art, music, literature, education, and nature.

As the cost-of-living crisis continues, dot-art wanted to curate a group exhibition that showcases the best of affordable art. This show is dedicated to featuring original works under £200 and limited editions under £100. Owning art does not have to break the bank and quality artworks do not have to have eye watering prices.

This exhibition features a wide array of imagery and styles from over 20 dot-art Artist Members. On display you will find still life, cyanotypes, abstract paintings, lithographs, and charcoal portraits. A show for everyone, ranging from the traditional to the conceptual.

Artists such as Caroline Race have responded to the history of the poem and its historical moment. “I have produced a series of affordable paper lithographs on kozo tissue with 22 carat gold leaf embossed onto Fabriano print paper. A series of objects representing the strength of women and their fight for fairness and equality during the suffragette movement of the early 1900’s. I am using warm red tones to represent the blood spilt during their fight, the gold leaf representing their struggle for equal pay and fairer working conditions.”

Susan Cantrill Williams reflects on her personal connection to this exhibition’s theme. “My bread was provided by my Grandmother Hanna Pritchard, an active member of the labour party who marched for women’s rights in Birmingham and ran her own business in a rough part of Aston. She enabled education for my mother and art education for myself, allowing us to experience the roses.”

At dot-art, they are always affordable and have payment plans for works over £250 because they know the value of treasuring special pieces of art by local artists, so do their very best to create the best buying conditions for art lovers.

As the poem says: “Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses”.

All artworks are for sale.

Join us for the Private View of the exhibition on Thursday 4th April from 5pm-7pm.

All welcome, but please register here: dot-art-breadandroses.eventbrite.co.uk

The dot-art Gallery can be found at 14 Queen Avenue, Castle Street, Liverpool, L2 4TX (just 5 minutes’ walk from Liverpool One).

Opening times: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am-6pm

The exhibition runs 5th April – 1 June 2024.