“Drawing with coal: Liverpool to Silesia,” is an exhibition that beautifully captures the artistic exchange between two historically and culturally rich regions – Liverpool and Silesia.
This exhibition features the works of two talented Liverpool-born artists Jordan L Rodgers (known as Węglowy Artysta) and Paul Romano, forging a path of artistic tradition and celebrating cross-cultural dialogue. Join us on this journey of discovery and cultural exchange.
Featuring recent graduates and emerging makers working across a range of disciplines and media, Emerging Makers highlights the ‘makers to watch’ of 2023.
All work is for sale in the gallery and they now have a selection which is also available to purchase online.
The Carl Rosa Opera Company would be 150 years old this month. The exhibition in the Picton Room (of Liverpool Central Library and Archive) celebrates that with highlights from the archive.
The ‘Rosa’ was Britain’s longest running and most successful touring opera company, always performing opera in English. Its aim was to promote opera at affordable prices to the largest and broadest audience possible.
The Rosa owned the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool between 1884–1896, and performed in Liverpool regularly from 1873 until the 1950’s. It also performed in 58 other towns & cities…
The Rosa was closed down by The Arts Council in 1960. This exhibition marks that first performance at the Theatre Royal in Manchester of MARITANA by William Wallace, conducted by Carl Rosa.
The Mirage – An Evening of Art and Music at Bridewell Studios and Gallery.
This is a ONE NIGHT ONLY Exhibition – Thursday 21st September 6pm-10pm // In the large gallery space at The Bridewell Studios and Gallery – Gareth Kemp will be showing a large-scale triptych measuring 250cm x 540cm made in 2018 and never shown before.
It will form the back drop for performances by two amazing bands – Me and Deboe & Puzzle // In the second gallery space, Nick Sykes will be exhibiting recent paintings // Free event with pay bar // View the Art from 6pm – Live music from 730pm.
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From 20 October 2023 – 28 January 2024, FACT presents two major solo shows by artists Jenkin van Zyl and Uma Breakdown.
The artists’ works look to defy the nature of conventional heroic narratives. Through processes of retelling and reenactment they open up possibilities for centering the overlooked, the queer, and the monstrous. Their works offer glimpses into the transitory joy of building new communities, while also reflecting on the cyclical nature of time. The opening of both exhibitions marks the celebrations of FACT’s 20th anniversary.
Jenkin van Zyl unveils his most expansive and ambitious exhibition to date. Spanning FACT’s ground floor galleries, the installation extends van Zyl’s latest film work Surrender (2023), with new sculptural elements. Visitors can explore van Zyl’s large-scale immersive environments, including an energy-drink lined trophy room, and experience the film from a ballroom setting found within the domed stomach of a giant inflatable metallic rat.
Inside the ballroom, Surrender plays on an endless loop as visitors follow the experience of GRACE. After checking into the P.E.E.P love hotel, GRACE, along with other paired couples, begins to compete in a series of tournaments that play with the limitations and expansiveness of the body. Fuelled by an endless stream of energy drinks, it’s unclear whether GRACE’s drive to participate emerges from an insatiable yearning or from a desire for escapism, community, oblivion or victory.
Van Zyl’s hallucinatory film conflates this ‘rat race’ with the ‘rat king’, a lethal and rare natural phenomenon where the tails of rats become fused together. The work questions notions of individuality and collectivity, exploring how community-building can foster belonging, allyship, and resistance, despite neoliberal frameworks often inducing competition for survival. Dense with references to queer club culture, cinema, and the dance marathons of the 1930’s Great Depression, Surrender draws viewers into an unstable world where suffering and defiance become spectacles for entertainment.
Uma Breakdown‘s solo exhibition comprises of a multimedia installation at FACT and a playable video game online. Earth A.D. 2 (2023) transforms the gallery into a video game ‘save room’ whilst online artwork Low Estate (2023) invites players to navigate as the last survivor of a world-changing event.
Inside the gallery, visitors encounter collections of sculptures carefully piled with objects that resemble maps, and projected fragments of video games that drift across the space. Breakdown’s multimedia installation plays with the motifs and history of Gothic narratives. Through its explorations of intense emotions and extreme experiences from fear, horror, and violence, to passion, love, and tenderness, this genre offers new understandings of care and intimacy.
Alongside the installation, Breakdown introduces online adventure game, Low Estate (2023). In this game, players must go in search of the Dreadnought, a cyborg from the Warhammer game universe capable of sustaining a pilot housed within. The aim is to locate the entombed oracle and update their database, ensuring that their wisdom is preserved with new knowledge to inform and educate future generations.
Breakdown links these concepts to the important idea of mutual support within the trans* community. They term this concept “radical solidarity,” an act of caring for others without needing to know who they are. While elements of our histories can fade away, the exhibition emphasises that collective respect and care ensure that generational knowledge and histories will endure. Co-produced by FACT (Liverpool, UK), Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge, UK) and QUAD (Derby, UK), Breakdown’s body of work will continue to evolve as its tour continues into 2024.
Both exhibitions will be accompanied by a programme of free events including tours, workshops, film screenings selected by the artists, and a night of live durational performances by the cast and crew of van Zyl’s Surrender. Breakdown is joined by Joseph Buckley, Dr Karen Di Franco and Dr Alice Rekab for an online talk to discuss the concept of ‘relics’, while van Zyl has created a new short film that expands on this psychotropic world which will be available to watch in a limousine at the opening party on Saturday 21 October 2023.
Kirushan’s process begins with the questions “who am I?” and “am I changing my identity or are my surroundings changing it?”.
His work is a search for identity within changing physical, psychological and ideological landscapes. He also focuses on compassion, and how important this quality has been to him since his arrival in the UK.
“Nightmares” will run in Gallery 6 from 16th September – 14th October. Free entry – check our Visit Us page for full visiting information.
Events:
Friday 15th September: Artist’s performance. To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, Kirushan will be staging a performance in the gallery from 6:30pm. Free entry, all welcome.
About the artist:
Artist Kirushan Sivagnanam returns to the Williamson after his 2022 performance. He was born in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. He studied art and design at the University of Jaffna and has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions in Sri Lanka, India, and London.
Illustrator, printmaker and workshop artist Laura-Kate Draws has been working with members of Buzz Hub St Helens CDP to explore environmental activism and sustainability through sensory drawing and printmaking workshops.
See what the Buzz Hub members have created, through guided observational drawing and painting, inspired by the nature and green spaces surrounding St Helens.
Laura-Kate has been commissioned by Heart of Glass as part of Prototype Projects 2023.
Part of A Sense of Green.
We aim to create safe, welcoming and accessible spaces for all.
Wednesday 20th September, 10am – 4.30pm, Buzz Hub, Nuttall House, Clifton Street, St Helens, WA10 1EX, Drop-in
If you’d like to discuss your access needs, please get in touch by contacting Heart of Glass via info@heartofglass.org.uk or call Anna on 07529224271.
Access information for Buzz Hub:
Accessible toilets
Flat access
Access information for Derbyshire Hill Family Centre
Accessible toilets (Changing Places and family room available)
Flat access
Lift to all levels
Accessible by bus (31)
45 minute walk from St Helens Central station
Since 2021, Tony Mallon has been working as a photographer-in-residence with local Prescot residents, to reimagine the high street and create a contemporary portrait of the area.
Tony initially ran a series of photography and memory fairs inviting people connected to Prescot to share their own personal photographs and local social history about the area. He then went on to establish a Prescot Photography Club. Every Saturday, the new photography club has been exploring what makes up the high street using street photography and portraiture. The group have not only been co-producing all of the work but have been their own curators, editing and sequencing the images and stories. An exhibition of work will also be displayed later this autumn, from 28 September 2023, at Open Eye Gallery, who have co-commissioned the project.
This exhibition is part of the Picturing High Streets, a three-year project led by Photoworks which includes six photographer-in-residence programmes at six high street locations across England, as well as artist mentoring, a digital nationwide mass participation project and a national touring outdoor exhibition.
Over the past few years Knowsley Council has put a lot of hard work and investment into developing Prescot. Prescot was selected as one of the 68 high streets to benefit from the High Streets Heritage Action Zone project in 2020. The high streets cultural programme is the widest-reaching, community-led arts and heritage programme in the public realm that has ever been organised, led by Historic England in partnership with Arts Council England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
The £3.1 million heritage-led regeneration programme see’s major investment from Knowsley Council and Historic England into a number of key projects in Prescot town centre. In addition, Prescot have benefited from a series of cultural events as part of the HSHAZ Cultural Programme Local Grants, as delivered by the Prescot Cultural Consortium, led by The Shakespeare North Playhouse.
Image: Barber in Prescot. Stephen Jackson, 2023.
From artist Lou Chapelle: in a city of flowers!
‘In a City of Flowers’ is a holographic and interactive video installation that invites viewers to gently place their hand within small wooden shelters to hold a butterfly in their palm. The work consists of 12 of these houses, each hosting a different British breed: some thriving, some vulnerable or extinct, some migrating.
These houses resemble those for birds or insects found in the garden whose aim is to offer shelter and care for local species. In the installation, these houses are removed from this context to question what home is for these creatures. Most of our British butterflies are in decline due to pollution, change in climate, and light pollution affecting their local habitat.
Each house in the installation hosts a holographic video of a butterfly reflected in the centre like a ghostly and ungraspable apparition, only visible through a narrow peep hole. Through a larger hole, people can place their hands within to cup the butterflies, a tangible yet absent image, giving them a sense of intimacy and fragility and reminding us of our care and responsibility for the natural world.
Some of the butterfly species presented are extinct in the UK, such as Large Copper, Black Veined White; some are still thriving such as the Cabbage Butterfly; some are migrating species that come and go with the fluctuations of the Earth’s climate such as the Painted Lady. Each one is closely linked to the plant species in their habitat which provide food and shelter with some only feeding on particular plants.
This work is a reminder of how important it is that we keep our urban and rural spaces packed with local plants and wildflowers.
The work will tour to various public locations from Autumn 2023, and with it the aim to make people more aware of our beautiful and fragile wildlife.
Collaboratively produced with the Rule of Threes team. Consultations about butterflies took place with Widnes Greenhouse and Butterfly House and the national charity Butterfly Conservation.
You can find out more about Lou and her previous work on her website: http://www.louchapelle.com/
The exhibition will launch with a preview on 22nd September and will then be open to the public Monday – Friday 10am – 4:30pm and Saturday 10am – 1:30pm.
For further details of the associated events, visit their Eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-a-city-of-flowers-round-table-discussion-tickets-714499997727?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl
Event is completely free and available for drop-in. The exhibition’s Round Table Discussion on Friday 22nd September must be booked in advance on our Eventbrite page, but the tickets are also free.
Birkenhead’s Williamson Art Gallery & Museum is proud to host the launch of the New Light Prize exhibition 23/24.
Established in 2010, the New Light charity celebrates and promotes Northern art, supporting both well-known and emerging artists by offering some of the region’s best awards and opportunities with the biennial New Light Prize Exhibition. It provides Northern artists with an unparalleled platform to showcase their work and reach new audiences.
The 2023 New Light Prize Exhibition Tour which covers five galleries, visiting four counties and London, begins at the Williamson, with judging taking place just prior to the exhibition’s opening. A panel of industry experts comprising of Olivia Heron, Curator at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, Nan Perell, New York Collector and supporter of emerging British artists, Matthew Hall, Director of London gallery Panter & Hall, renowned figurative artist Mark Demsteader, and Director of New Light, Rebekah Tadd, will shortlist artworks for the £10,000 Valeria Sykes Award, judging Royal Academicians alongside emerging artists.
Williamson Curator Niall Hodson says that “we are delighted to host and launch the New Light Prize Exhibition 2023/24. We want to be able to support the creative economy and the viability of artistic careers in the North West and beyond. It will provide economic benefit for the artists and opportunities to embrace new talent”.
Two free public events will take place during the exhibition’s run as part of Art For All, New Light’s education and outreach programme. On Saturday 14th October 2-3pm Art Historian Sara Riccardi will lead a free tour & talk of the exhibition. Then on the evening of Friday 3rd November join former New Light prize winning artist Josie Jenkins to use paint and print to create your own beautiful interiors inspired artwork.
Following the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum the New Light Prize Exhibition will then tour to London’s Bankside Gallery, The Gallery at Rheged in Penrith, The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle and finish at The Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate on 31st December 2024.