Event type: Exhibition

Launch: Local Nature Recovery Strategy – School Nature Map Exhibition

Monday 1 September / 4pm–6pm / Open Eye Gallery / RSVP
Join us for the launch of an extraordinary collaborative project that brings together young voices from across Liverpool City Region to reimagine our natural world.

There will be light refreshments from 4pm, and at 5pm Councillor Liz Grey, Chair of the Environment, Climate Emergency and Transport Committee, will introduce the project, alongside artist Joe Venning who delivered the school workshops.

Local Nature Recovery Strategy: Mapping Our Natural Environment and Revitalising Nature Across Liverpool City Region

The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, appointed by DEFRA, has developed a comprehensive Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) for the area. This ambitious spatial strategy is designed to identify opportunities to restore and enhance our region’s natural environments, supporting biodiversity and creating healthier ecosystems for future generations.

To make this strategy accessible and engaging for younger audiences, they commissioned local art organisation dot-art and artist Joe Venning to work with six schools – one from each borough of the Liverpool City Region:

Liverpool: St Julie’s Catholic High School
Wirral: Weatherhead High School
Sefton: Peterhouse Schools
Knowsley: Prescot School
St Helens: The Sutton Academy
Halton: Ormiston Bolingbroke

Together, they created beautiful nature maps highlighting the diverse and rich species found in each area. These artistic interpretations of our natural heritage are being exhibited here for the first time, connecting young people with the importance of protecting and enhancing our local environment.

The exhibition will be on display from Tuesday 26th August – Sunday 14th September outside the Open Eye Gallery at 19 Mann Island and is free to visit.

In the Window: Meet the Maker – Corinne Price

The Bluecoat Display Centre and Liverpool Irish Festival are delighted to announce our 2025 maker: Corinne Price; continuing our annual In The Window partnership. This event provides visitors with the chance to speak with the artist directly, about their work, general practice, ambitions and achievements. Centred on Corinne’s ceramics, which layer pigment into the clay itself, visitors will benefit from a guided question and answer session, being able to ask additional questions. Refreshments will be provided on arrival.

Friends of the Bluecoat Display Centre will receive a 10% discount on all purchases during the event.

Booking is needed. Please call +44(0) 151 709 4014, to book a place, or stop by the gallery to reserve a space with a member of staff. This event has a recommended donation price of £10 per ticket, providing a speaker fee for Corinne. See our exhibition listing for more details about Corinne.

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Black Maternal Health Exhibition

Part of the Diasporic strand of Radical Retrospectives

From 26 September 2025, Collective Encounters will present an exhibition of previously unseen creative material produced in our Black Maternal Health project at the Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre.

This powerful installation revisits and reflects on themes of migration through the lens of Black maternal health. Created in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University, the work draws a striking connection between historical research into enslaved midwives in the 19th century and the stark, ongoing disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity rates between Black women and women of other racial and ethnic groups today.

The exhibition also features our ‘Hey Mama’ leaflet, designed by Black women, for Black women on maternity wards, offering peer-informed guidance and support. Visitors will have the opportunity to sign up to join our Black Maternal Health Group, which meets to discuss, plan and lead future initiatives and interventions.

Honouring our Ancestors: family friendly drop in event

On Monday 27 October, 11am – 2pm, we will be hosting a family friendly drop in event alongside the installation, led by local Black mothers. This will include an exclusive opportunity to see the original Shrine to Granny Marie, on loan from the International Slavery Museum.

Interactive creative activities will invite everyone to celebrate the achievements of their ancestors and to reflect on the legacies, strengths and qualities passed down to future generations.

There is no need to book for this event, just turn up any time between 11am and 2pm. If you have any access requirements or want to ask any questions in advance, please email admin@collective-encounters.org.uk 

Review at the Rathbone: Private view

A private view to open a new show: Review at the Rathbone. Visitors can speak to the artists and meet the makers.

In 2024 Liverpool Irish Festival recruited several artists to work with citizen groups across Merseyside to create art works responding to Liverpool Irish Famine Trail sites. The resulting work can be seen in our app, but this exhibit provides an opportunity to see the original art works close-up, with some works on show for the very first time.

The Rathbone family – William IV (b.1757-d.1809), William VI (b.1819-d.1902) and Eleanor (b.1872-d.1946) especially – were key figures in the abolition of slavery, nursing and Ireland’s land league, harking back to their Irish connections. Being in an eponymously named gallery feels fitting.

Read more in the exhibition listing.

Image credit: Tadhg Devlin (detail only).

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Launch: Emergence @ Victoria Park Butterfly House And Garden

Thursday 4 September / 4.30pm–6.30pm / Victoria Park Butterfly House
Join us for the celebration of our new exhibition, Emergence!

Emergence is the outcome of a socially engaged project between volunteers at Victoria Park Butterfly House and visual artist Anna Wijnhoven. 

Through a series of photographs and collaborative work, Emergence celebrates the often unseen efforts of those who sustain this unique urban sanctuary. The project highlights the value of volunteering, the power of community, and the role small green spaces play in supporting urban sustainability.

Entirely volunteer-run, the butterfly house and gardens are a community-led space where people come together to care for both nature and one another. 

Emergence is part of Photo Here, a programme of socially engaged photographic residencies and exhibitions commissioned by Liverpool City Region Combined Authority as part of this year’s Cultural Events Programme. Developed by Open Eye Gallery in collaboration with each of six local authorities: Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens and Wirral.

 

Celebrating Irish Craft

Having partnered with the Liverpool Irish Festival, over years, to celebrate and share the work of Irish makers Bluecoat Display Centre hosts a retrospective of those artisans, including more that are seen through their annual portfolio of creatives. With silver, ceramics, glass, paintings, textiles and more besides, there is something to suit every budding creative, interest and price point. Whether you’re just looking for the sheer fun of it or searching for a unique gift, this is an exceptional display of contemporary talent in one of the longest serving display centres in the country. 

A private view will be held at the Centre from 4.30pm-7.30pm on Thur 18 Sept 2025.

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In the Window: Corinne Price

As part of Liverpool Irish Festival 2025, the artist Corinne Price will display their incredible ceramics at Bluecoat Display Centre. A Northern Ireland based ceramicist, Corinne grew up under the ​open skies of the Dee Estuary in Northwest England. 

Using pigmented porcelain, Corinne creates colourful and sculptural vessels that trace the time and movement involved in their making. Integrating pigment into the clay body, rather than applying it afterwards as a decorative surface, allows Corinne to effectively build in colour. Inspired by the expression of movement in water and air, sunrises and sunsets and the flow of energy in and around bodies and objects, ripples of colours become suggestive of rock strata, waves flames, or wisps of smoke. Drawn to the versatility and sometimes unpredictability of clay, embracing imperfection, Corinne’s work endeavours to infuse spaces with joy and optimism through the presence of colourful forms. ❤️??

Review at the Rathbone

In 2024 Liverpool Irish Festival recruited several artists to work with citizen groups across Merseyside to create art works responding to Liverpool Irish Famine Trail sites. The resulting work can be seen in our app (accessible via liverpoolirishfaminetrail.com), but this exhibit provides an opportunity to see the original art works close-up, with some works on show for the very first time. 

Comprising films, embroidery, banners, cyanotypes, mixed media canvasses and rediscovered stories, the artworks help to connect people today with the legacy of The Great Hunger, considering its impact here on Merseyside. 

Just around the corner from the Liverpool Irish Famine Trail’s plaque on Price Street, the gallery sits in Birkenhead where many of the Irish Famine poor arrived for refuge, just south of where tragedy struck The Sea Nymph and The Rambler in the Mersey in 1846.

The Rathbone family – William IV (b.1757-d.1809), William VI (b.1819-d.1902) and Eleanor (b.1872-d.1946) especially – were key figures in the abolition of slavery, nursing and Ireland’s land league, reflecting their Irish connections. Being in an eponymously named gallery, therefore, feels fitting.

The work was funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and is presented here in partnership with the Rathbone Ceramic Studio and Gallery. The Festival would like to thank Tadhg Devlin, Lydia O’Hara and Nicola McGovern for their efforts – over and above the call of their original commissions – and the many individuals that contributed to the art works on show, especially Jean Maskell and Richard Orritt who worked hard to get the exhibition on show. 

Visitors to the exhibit might also be interested in the Festival’s new book, which documents some of this work — Reveal — available from our online shop: www.liverpoolirishfestival.com/shop

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RIBA presents Home ground: the architecture of football

Go behind the scenes of the beautiful game and explore how football stadiums have shaped cities, local neighbourhoods, and communities for over 125 years. 

Home ground celebrates the stadium as a cultural landmark and a place of weekly pilgrimage, where thousands gather in hope, pride, and passion. From early terraces to today’s bold arenas, stadiums reflect the identity of the places they belong to.  

Inspired by Everton Football Club’s new Hill Dickinson Stadium, the exhibition features more than 50 stadiums from around the world. Through architectural models, photographs, film, and archive material, you will see how stadium design has evolved, and why it matters.  

Alongside material from club and city archives across Europe, highlights in the exhibition also features works of leading contemporary architecture practices. These include Herzog and de Meuron who designed the Allianz Arena in Munich which is the first stadium in the world with a fully colour changing LED exterior as well as Meis/BDP; gmp von Gerkan, Marg and Partners Architects; Populous; and more.  

See how architects have shaped the stadium, solving complex challenges to create shared experiences, and designing spaces that unite fans. 

Whether you are a lifelong supporter or a curious visitor, our Home ground exhibition at RIBA North and Tate Liverpool invites you to see football stadiums as more than sports venues, as unique expressions of place, identity, and design. 

RIBA presents Hill Station: architecture and the altitudes of Empire

 

See how the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone, was shaped by health, architecture, and empire. 

 

Hill Station: architecture and the altitudes of Empire explores the architectural history of colonial-era health segregation in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and its entanglements with the expansion of the British Empire and the emergence of tropical medicine.

 

RIBA’s new exhibition at RIBA North + Tate Liverpool explores the architectural history of colonial-era health segregation in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and its entanglements with the expansion of the British Empire and the emergence of tropical medicine.

 

In 1899, the newly established Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine sent an expedition to Freetown to investigate malaria prevention. Among its recommendations was the construction of an exclusive enclave of “houses for Europeans” on a plateau overlooking the city.

 

Combining architectural model work and film, this new installation by Killian O’Dochartaigh and Edward Lawrenson — part of a wider research project Salone Drift — explores architecture, colonialism, and health segregation, and the complex links between the two port cities, Liverpool and Freetown.

 

Hill Station: architecture and the altitudes of Empire is supported by: 

 

Project by Killian O’Dochartaigh and Edward Lawrenson 

Curatorial support and exhibition coordination by RIBA 

Film directed by Edward Lawrenson, produced by Edward Lawrenson and Killian O’Dochartaigh, featuring Ibrahim Abdullah. Sound design by Philippe Ciompi

Image by Luciano Piazza and Edward Lawrenson

Model designed by Killian O’Dochartaigh

Fabrication by Killian O’Dochartaigh and Richard Collins