Event type: Exhibition

Step onto the pitch at Tate Liverpool + RIBA North for a free day-long festival exploring the culture, creativity and spaces of football.

Inspired by Home Ground: The Architecture of Football, you’re invited to share stories, try out new skills and experience the game from a new perspective. Show your support by contributing to a collective supporters banner, build a stadium using recycled materials, try drawing like an architect and share your match day memories in a comic drawing workshop. Join a curator tour of the display, grab a match day pie while they’re hot and stay for an afternoon of sports storytelling talks with author and illustrator Anna Trench and local sports journalists including The Anfield Wrap.

Programme

Comics Drawing with Comics Youth

10.30-12.20

Join Sara and Seb from creative collective Comics Youth for a drop-in comic-making session. Illustrate your favourite match day memories or sketch a short sports-themed comic strip. No experience needed, just bring your imagination!

Comics Youth is a youth-led community organisation based in Merseyside, empowering young people to find their voice through drawing and storytelling. All welcome. Ages guidance 8-16 years old.

Sketch-a-stadium

11.00-12.00 (age guidance 5-10 year olds), 12.30-13.30 (age guidance 11-14 year olds) and 14.00-15.00 (age guidance 15-18 year olds)

Join Ivy or Edie, our resident architectural drawing experts from the Learning team at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to explore stadium design through drawing. Get inspiration from our Home Ground display to create your own pencil stadium design. Think about shapes, materials and spaces and explore scale, plans sections and elevations.

Sustainable stadium build

11.00-15.00

Build two table-top stadiums with recycled newspaper and materials. Help us tackle designs that will evolve from your ideas and construct our stadiums as a team throughout the day. Pop back later to see how they’re developing, check the structures are sturdy and let us know which one you think is the winning design. All welcome. Children must be accompanied by an adult.

City of Supporters: Collective banner project with Emma Norbury

10.30-15.00

Join LFC banner maker Emma Norbury to contribute to a collective football banner, celebrating Liverpool as a city of supporters. Paint a section of text, colour the city backdrop and add your own banner of support for whoever and whatever you support. All welcome. Children must be accompanied by an adult.

Emma Norbury is a local artist and designer who has been dressing the Kop with giant hand-painted banners since 2009.

Home Ground curator tours with Pete Collard

10.30-11.15, 12.00-12.45, 14.00-14.45

Join RIBA curator Pete Collard for a tour of Home Ground: The Architecture of Football. Hear stories behind the works and discover the process of putting on an exhibition. Tours are free but booking is essential. Book your ticket here.

Homebaked bakery pies

12.00-14.00

Grab a match day pie for sale from Homebaked Bakery. Whether you’re buying one hot to eat on the spot or taking it home to bake later, these pies are match day staples. Since 2012, Homebaked Bakery has been providing pies to football supporters and Liverpool locals alike, and has become a hub for the community to connect, socialise and learn.

Florrie: A Football Love Story with Anna Trench

15.00-15.45

Join author and illustrator Anna Trench as she shares the inspiration behind her debut graphic novel, Florrie. Through the story of a female footballer, Anna’s book explores friendship, falling in love, and the little-known history of the women’s game, including the impact of the FA’s 1921 ban on women’s football. Anna will discuss the motivations and stories behind the book and share her perspectives on the game as a player, a fan and a creative storyteller. All welcome.

Anna Trench is an author, illustrator and teacher based in London. Her book Florrie has been shortlisted for the First Graphic Novel Award and the LDComics Award.

The Art of Football Story

16.15-17.00

Join sports journalist Neil Atkinson from The Anfield Wrap and award-winning radio and podcast producer Lizzi Doyle to explore how football stories are shaped on the pitch, in the stands and behind the mic. In this interactive Q&A session led by Curator Pete Collard, hear what drives their work, some challenges of sports journalism and how to make a story resonate with fans.

Jump feet first into our Learning Space this summer and create multi-coloured replicas of your favourite marine life, including fish, crabs and coral. Play with print stamping blocks and collage to recreate intricate marine patterns and textures. Using our easy-to-follow templates, make a 3-D model of your sea creature and deep dive into our pick ‘n’ mix recycled craft box to add finishing touches to personalise your marine animal.

Take inspiration from artworks in Tate’s collection, including John Skeaping’s Fish, Federico Herrero’s Crab, Salvador Dali’s Lobster Telephone, Masami Teraoka’s Catfish Envy and Eileen Agar’s Marine Object.

These activities are suitable for children aged 4-12 years old. Children must be supervised by parents/carers.

Our Learning Space is open every day for visiting families- a space to relax and create with art games, colouring-in, books, toys and more!

Share your experience with us on social media using @tateliverpool and #TLfamilies.

Accessibility

Tate Liverpool is temporarily located at RIBA North, Mann Island, a short distance (425m) along Liverpool’s iconic waterfront. There is step free access to the main entrance. There is a lift to the first floor gallery, or alternatively you can take the stairs.

• Toilets are located on the first floor
• The nearest Changing Places toilet is located at the Museum of Liverpool
• Ear defenders are available to borrow. Please ask a Visitor Engagement Assistant

Additional seating is also available. Please ask a member of staff if you require assistance.To help plan your visit to Tate Liverpool + RIBA North, have a look at our visual story. It includes photographs and information of what you can expect from a visit to the gallery.

For more information before your visit:

Email visiting.liverpool@tate.org.uk

Who were the ‘British Chinese’ artists that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s? What is their legacy today?

Explore these questions in a special film screening and talk. Curator and artist Kwong Lee will discuss his role at the Chinese Arts Centre and the important presence of British Chinese artists in Manchester and Liverpool. Filmmaker Rosa Fong will present her offbeat short films ‘Chinese for Beginners’ shown on Channel Four in 2002. This will be followed by an audience Q&A.

While looking back on the forgotten presence of these artists, this event will also look forward to a new era of East and South East Asian identity and artmaking.

Biographies

Kwong Lee

Kwong Lee is an artist, curator and contemporary arts producer. He was previously Director of Castlefield Gallery (2005-2016), producer at Factory International/Manchester International Festival, and is currently Director at Deptford X.

Rosa Fong

Rosa Fong is an award-winning filmmaker. Her films have garnered accolades from the British Film Institute, Arts Council of England and UK Film Council. She has directed programmes for BBC and Channel 4 television. Deconstructing Zoe, a feature length documentary was selected for the Hong Kong LGBTQ+ Film Festival.

Owen Owen Clayton Square store opened in November 1925. A Centenary Display celebrating this much loved and much missed department store is on the 3rd floor of Liverpool Central
Library, William Brown Street, Liverpool. The display will be there until end December 2025.

An exhibition by Jessica Slack at INNSiDE hotel by Melia.
dot-art and Jessica Slack invite you to join in her mission: To spread joy and positivity across the globe through her art. Her aspiration is to transform everyday lives, inviting people to immerse themselves in the mindful benefits of getting lost in abstract paintings.

Rooted in Joy celebrates the beauty of contrast within nature, bringing together two distinct yet deeply connected abstract expressionist collections by Slack: Rooted and Radical Joy.

Rooted honours the earthy, muted, grounding tones that echo autumnal landscapes, quiet woodlands and the steady rhythm of change. These works capture stillness, belonging and resilience, inviting viewers to feel the calm of being anchored.  By contrast, Radical Joy bursts with the vitality of spring and summer with vivid sunrises, radiant sunsets and bold flowers in bloom. These works revel in unapologetic colour and radiance, celebrating joy as both playful and powerful.

Together, the collections reflect the cycles of nature: How stillness gives way to renewal and how quiet roots make way for radiant blossoms. It is a commentary on the power of presence, balance and the ever-changing beauty of the natural world.

Jessica is recognised as an emerging British artist, with honours such as the Signature Art Prize and Bethlehem Card Commission. Her artwork has found its way into the pages of The World of Interiors magazine, and she has had the privilege of creating commissioned pieces that now grace the streets of Liverpool city centre.

*Please note due to the exhibition space located on the Meeting Rooms Floor, the exhibition may sometimes be closed off to the public during events.

To ensure you can access the exhibition please do call the dot-art team on 0345 017 6660 or email gallery@dot-art.com when planning your visit.

Shop the full collection of artworks online.

Exhibition continues until January 2026

Featuring dot-art artists Amanda Oliphant, Felice Beilin and Rachel McArdle
In Abstract Alchemy, three dot-art artists use processes akin to alchemy to transform recordings, memories and lived experiences of nature in to abstracted depictions of landscapes in constant flux.

As Amanda Oliphant moves through the landscape, she responds to distinctive patterns and rhythms. In her studio, she translates these experiences into visual stories, distilling the sensations of wind, and rugged terrain on to her surfaces. She captures not just the landscape itself, but the quiet mystery it holds. To evoke both the physical and emotional presence of place, she draws on written reflections, diverse materials, textured mark-making, and intuitive gestures. Amanda explores the hidden elements beneath the visible, where marks become fragments of sound, movement, and memory.

The aim of Felice Beilin’s work is to create mood and atmosphere within the landscape. Colour and gestural mark-making are key to conveying images that go beyond mere representation. Her work focuses on light and space to evoke a strong sense of place, drawing the natural world into the viewer’s awareness and encouraging reflection on their environment and the impact they have upon it.

Rachel McArdle is drawn to the patterns and colours found in nature, reflections in water, atmospheric skies, and shifting light and shadow. Her paintings seek to capture the often ethereal or surreal atmosphere and drama and change of the natural landscape. She distils vast scenes into intimate fragments, attempting to pin down a fleeting moment or feeling, so that each work becomes almost a memory or an imagined place. Her practice shifts between representing a physical space and evoking the atmosphere of a moment through heightened colour and abstraction.

All artworks are for sale.

Exhibition continues Friday 5th September – Saturday 11th October

VISIT: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 – 18:00