PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS

Output/Input and Open Studios are BACK!

Join us at Paradise Works for a vibrant Saturday filled with Exhibitions + Open Studios + Street Food + DJs.

Open: Saturday 16 November, 3-10pm. No need to book (except for the tour)
Artists: Various Paradise Works Artists
Where: Ground Floor Gallery, c/o Paradise Works studios, Irwell House, East Philip St, Salford, M3 7LE. 1st and 2nd Floor ( accessible via stairs only).

What’s Happening:

Open Studios & Tours:
Kick off the day with a free studio tour of our artist-led space! Get an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look with insights and informal talks from selected studio artists. Meet the talented artists who make Paradise Works so unique. Book your spot on the tour here.

Output/Input Exhibition:
Step into our new ground-floor gallery for Output/Input – a playful, thought-provoking exhibition that dives into themes of communication and misinterpretation. With sculptures, drawings, and time-based works by artists Jack Brown, Anna Clough, Gwen Evans, Kieran Leach, M I K E S I A N, Tanith Mab, Maisie Pritchard, and Fleur Yearsley.

After Party & Eats:
Stay for our annual evening party! Savor delicious street food, drinks from the PW bar, and dance the night away with a DJ set by sebastieN. Come for the art, stay for the party.

Thinking About Sonic Objects by Kayt Hughes

Open: Opening night 31 October. Exhibition open 1-3 November 2024. Please contact info@paradise-works.com in advance to arrange a time.
Artists: Kayt Hughes
Where: Ground Floor Gallery, c/o Paradise Works studios, Irwell House, East Philip St, Salford, M3 7LE

Thinking About Sonic Objects is a solo exhibition of sound and sculptural works in progress by Kayt Hughes. The exhibition captures a key moment in Kayt's practice, where several works have been made during a transformative period of research and development.

Using ceramics and sound, Kayt explores her experience of synaesthesia, where sounds are experienced as shape, colour, texture and forms. Her current focus looks at the processes of transmutation and the connections between non-verbal communications and object-making: particularly around neurodivergent sensory techniques like stimming.

The ceramic works have been made using handbuilding and slip casting techniques, each holding the gestures and traces of their making processes. Glazes and underglazes are used to capture subtle tone and texture of each piece. This series of sculptures is presented alongside two related audio works, created from hydrophone, contact microphone, and directional microphone recordings. These recordings capture the various stages of working with clay, from its liquid state as slip to its final form as fired ceramic.

Thinking About Sonic Objects draws upon Kayt’s practices as both an artist and producer. Her work navigates the politics of understanding to explore how communication happens outside of language, and the importance of finding alternative routes to create and share knowledge.

The exhibition is on display at Paradise Works (Salford, Manchester) from 1 - 3 November, 11am-5pm with an opening event on Thursday 31 October from 6-9pm. 

This period of development and the exhibition has been supported using public funding by Arts Council England. 

Unbearable Lightness of Being with Frame Contemporary Art

Open: From 20 September. Please contact info@paradise-works.com a week in advance to arrange a time.
Artists: Jez Dolan, Freya Wysocki, Chris Alton & Emily Simpson, Jere Vainio, Timo Vaittinen, SASHAPASHA
Where: Ground Floor Gallery, c/o Paradise Works studios, Irwell House, East Philip St, Salford, M3 7LE

The exhibition project “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is a collaboration between Helsinki- based and Manchester-based textile artists. It begins with the similarity in the textile industry between the two cities. Named “Cottonopolis”, Manchester is a city shaped by cotton and textile. From the 19th century until now, the cotton industry is still the trademark of the city. Over the past few decades, Finland has also become a thriving hub for sustainable textile innovations. In our daily lives, we all have intimate relationships with textiles. We wear clothes and decorate our homes with fabrics, which could also evoke personal and collective memories.

Going beyond daily use, textiles are also widely used by contemporary artists. Thus, this project explores how contemporary artists, who reside in Helsinki and Manchester, employ textiles in their practice. Their works are not only a reflection of the contrasting lightness and strength that is inherent in textiles, but also a contemplation of political, societal, or ecological issues.

The exhibition will be held this September for six weeks in Paradise Works, an artist-led studio community of 38 contemporary visual artists, a project space and gallery in Manchester. Jere Vainio, Timo Vaittinen, and artist duo SASHAPASHA (Sasha Rotts and Pavel Rotts) from Helsinki will be exhibited with Freya Wysocki, Jez Dolan, and artist duo (Chris Alton and Emily Simpson) from Manchester.
Through the collaboration of Helsinki-based and Manchester textile artists, we hope to deepen the dialogue between artists from different cultures as well as with the local communities.

This exhibition is funded by Arts Council England and FRAME Finland.

Preserving Hole By Division of Labour

Open: By appointment Thursdays and Fridays from the 5th September 2024. Please contact info@paradise-works.com a week in advance to arrange a time.
Artists: Aled Simons, Bláithín Mac Donnell, Tom Cardew
Where: First Floor Gallery, c/o Paradise Works studios, Irwell House, East Philip St, Salford, M3 7LE

Preserving Hole is an exhibition of audio, sculpture and textiles.

A meteorite, a spoil tip, a mountain or an island. A fatberg. A co-authored story entangling fact, fiction and anecdotal prose. Three voices become one narrator, Celtic myth, folklore and superstition are merged, layered and retold. A hole or a bog, subterranean preservation - like a time capsule in a biscuit tin with a dodgy lid, buried 40 years ago but the water got in. What happens when fact becomes anecdote?

‘There had been heavy rain, a week of torrential downpours, incessant waterfall, fields of crops washed away overnight. Usually after heavy rain they clear the drains of organic waste, leaves, trees, silt and mud. But this time, this time they found a coffin.’

This exhibition is the culmination of a conversational collaboration between Welsh artists Tom Cardew, Aled Simons and Irish artist Bláithín Mac Donnell. Emerging from research sharing and an exploration of practice intersections; individual interests are fused in tangential storytelling, narrative building and myth making. Unearthing spurious information and hearsay to present loose-narrative audio and sculptural installation, drawing on collective Celtic nation backgrounds and reflections on the existential urge to remain, to persevere and to preserve. This project follows the development of a new collaborative practice made possible by the Four Nations Fund.

Access: only accessible by staircase.

PREVIOUS

Recollection, A Second Act Show

Open: By appointment Thursdays and Fridays from the 1st August 2024. Please contact info@paradise-works.com a week in advance to arrange a time.
Artists: Florian Höulker and Sophie L. Knight
Where: First Floor Gallery, c/o Paradise Works studios, Irwell House, East Philip St, Salford, M3 7LE

For the finale of duo shows at The Second Act, Florian Höulker presents ‘A Night on the Cobbles,’ a series of works based on the narrative of growing up in the terraced streets of a post-industrial landscape. The series takes the viewer on a journey through a sequence of stages, often involving actions that lead to heightened emotions, inhibitions, and euphoria, which then turn to pain, fear, and internalised voices of shame.

Although playful and nostalgic, the works communicate a forgotten adolescence, serving to understand the origins of habits that we carry into adult life, shaping our character. Recalling memory through objects, Florian highlights the crossover between repetition and addiction, they pair the addictive behaviour of drinking with the repetitive action of making. Keeping idle hands busy and busy hands off the bottle, nonetheless it is only phasing out one addictive trait for another.

Whilst Sophie's paintings deal with a broad spectrum of subjects, nestled within the recollection of her previous experiences, using objects as focal points to compose and share a narrative, they are drawn to inverted colour. She stages animals and objects that mostly float in their surroundings, ungrounded, blurring the line between the concept of an object and the reality of it. The artworks selected for this exhibition present a juxtaposition between green and red, using opposing tones as a method to harmonise, interrogate, and describe, whilst subliminally found within her everyday life. Works such as ‘Fiona’s Stairs’ pay homage to the living space of Sophie’s late aunt, a space celebrated from floor to ceiling in her favourite colour, red. Commemorating and containing her memories of Fiona, green holds the red at bay through the inverse of her home.

Florian Höulker is a multidisciplinary artist who emits a strong working-class narrative through their art. They aim to use traditional skills to identify themselves with craft and identity; often recycling objects reclaimed from the landscape, to reconstruct narratives from the post-industrial environment.

This includes themes of memory, nostalgia, fractures, decline, loss and abandonment. Whether it’s a personal, socially observed or lived experience, they seek to construct a visual language through the conversation of materials, through order, forms and repetition.

Sophie Lourdes Knight is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in painting, sculpture and photography. Her practice revolves around the dualities and contradictions of all things, seeds of doubt and unknowing, absurdity and seriousness. Her work attempts to level the playing field, raising the mundane to the exemplary, the lavish down to the devalued, a commentary of the inherent biases and assumptions we give to objects and the values we place on them. They transcend their physical limitations and rise to become akin to religious idols or spiritual totems.

Dreaming Upon a White Stone

Open: By appointment Thursdays and Fridays from the 7th June 2024. Please contact info@paradise-works.com a week in advance to arrange a time.
Artists: Céline Berger
Where: Division of Labour gallery, c/o Paradise Works studios, Irwell House, East Philip St, Salford, M3 7LE

Céline Berger was brought up in a commune established in 1972 as a ‘Christian protest against the consumer society’. Within this community, members shared a life centred around prayer and rural work, including collective ownership of property and income. Growing up in this unique environment provided her with an intimate perspective on an alternative to capitalism.

Despite the preached ideals, she keenly felt the pressures, constraints, and contradictions within the group’s dynamics. The commune ultimately collapsed in 1983 when she was just 10 years old. In her current series of works, “Communal Thread”, Berger intertwines archive photographs from the commune with the macramé technique she learned during her childhood.

These images, printed on felt and meticulously sliced into thin strips, undergo a laborious process of reconstitution through repeated knotting. While the photographs captured moments of joy, such as large gatherings, communal dances, and children playing, the strips, held together by knots, present a blurred image. Recognizable only from a distance, the scenes progressively disintegrate into fragments as one approaches.

The video work, “Cutting Edges” delves into today’s visions of work flourishing in start-ups and co-working spaces. Based on images and interviews collected during a three-month residency in the Ruhr area, the German Rust Belt, the work explores the start-up ecosystem in the region. It delves into the specific vocabulary and subtexts surrounding these new economic hotspots, where bits and pieces of utopian discourses aim to shape a reality governed by very different rules.

More News About Flowers

Open: By appointment Thursdays and Fridays from the 7th June 2024. Please contact info@paradise-works.com a week in advance to arrange a time.
Artists: Andee Collard, Gwen Evens, Hilary Jack, Sian Macfarlane, Ruth Murray, Hannah Wooll
Where: First Floor

More News About Flowers features the work of Andee Collard, Gwen Evans, Hilary Jack, Sian Macfarlane, Ruth Murray, and Hannah Wooll.

The exhibition title comes from conversations with Andee Collard about ‘News About Flowers,’ a comment essay by Walter Benjamin. More News About Flowers unpacks theories discussed by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media’ (1936) ideas like Mimesis, the Aura and Distance, and the Uncanny are explored through the artists’ depiction of flowers as being; symbolic, nostalgic, languorous and being about; site and place, feminist struggle, alienation and nature.

News About Flowers examines the new and unimaginably modern macrophotographs of flora and fauna from Karl Blossfeldt’s seminal work Urformen der Kunst (1928). Blossfeldt was a novice to photography and like Collard, Blossfeldt crafted his own ‘machines’, he built his own camera and lenses, allowing him to magnify his subjects many times their natural size, resulting in a strikingly avant-garde, alien-like aesthetic. Some ninety years ago Benjamin wrote about art reproduced by mechanics, chemicals and light and asks, where will the future lead?

Benjamin turns to Lazio Moholy-Nagy for the last word; “Everything is so new here that even the search leads to creative results. Technology is, of course, the pathbreaker here.”

PREVIOUS

Muck and the Mire

Open: By appointment Thursdays and Fridays from the 5th - 26th April. Please contact info@paradise-works.com a week in advance to arrange a time.
Artists: Nicole Sheppard and Anna Clough
Where: First Floor

‘Muck and the Mire’ is a two person sculptural and time based exhibition with Nicole Sheppard and Anna Clough. The work exhibited is a playful exploration of the prompt “The Material Process of Being Alive”, in which both artists explore pressing environmental issues. The artists consider their own entanglement in the environment, exploring materiality found in edgeland spaces.

Edglands spaces are liminal or transitional places created between urban and rural areas. They often become wild wastelands. Within them are littered objects of industry and agriculture, entwined by brambles and briars. Acting as sudden interceptions into existing ecosystems and a visual reminder of human input on the land. These spaces question the duality of subject and object, exposing our day to day material assumptions.

Through collecting, assembling and journeying with these notions, Clough and Sheppard investigate the storied history of matter and land. In doing so they explore movement through the entanglement of objects. Exhibiting a material language that is reactivated by natural forces, human labor or machine.

The opening night will include a poetry reading from poet Lucy Prescot, inspired by Salfords Edgeland spaces. 

Access: only accessible by staircase.

Join us for an artist talk as part of this exhibition, where Anna Clough and Nicole Sheppard will offer insight into individual works and overarching themes of the exhibition. Sign up via eventbrite here.

Artist Talk

Friday 26th, April 6-7pm

Highlighting edgeland spaces, entanglement and materiality, this talk will be joined by Alex Critchley from Lancashire Wildlife Trust. Throughout the talk Alex will discuss the trust's restoration work at the remaining fragments of the Chat Moss peatlands: Little Woolden Moss located near Irlam. The event will close with a Q&A discussion between speakers and audience. Please note this is a ticketed event and to dress warm.

Where: 1st floor Gallery, Paradise Works, E Philip St, Salford M3 7LE

To coincide with this exhibition, the ‘Lively Objects #2’ will be held at Paradise Works . Sign up via the eventbrite link here.

Lively Objects #2

Saturday 27th, April 11am - 2:30pm 

Based at Paradise Works, this session is a continuation from ‘Lively Objects #1’, which explored the agency of water along the River Irwell and engaging in possibilities of the river as a ‘hyper object’. As well as exploring industrial and agricultural history through the peat restoration site at Little Woolden Moss and a short tour of Anna Clough’s and Nicole Sheppard’s exhibition, ‘Muck & the Mire’.

In this session we will further these discussions, developing our creative ideas through engagement with the river Irwell as a physical river and time-capsule containing heritage. We will continue to playfully explore local and global relationships to bodies of water using artistic interventions. Followed by an informal discussion with Alex Critchley of Lancashire Wildlife trust, diving into the history of peat extraction and its restoration. We will explore the site specific history of Little Woolden Moss; as a railway and peat extraction site. Throughout the afternoon we will engage in a collaborative mapping exercise, using found objects as a method of mark making. This process will follow our physical journeys around the river Irwell and in the Bridgewater Community Gardens. 

Please note this is a free ticketed event, dress warm. You do not have to have attended the first workshop to participate. There will be a shared lunch, please bring your own forks and a contribution. There is a kitchenette and toilet at the facility.

Where: Ground Floor Gallery, Paradise Works, East Philip St, Salford M3 7LE

a borrowing of bones 

Preview: Friday 8 March, 6 – 9pm 
Open: Saturdays and Thursdays between the 9th - 28th March, by appointment only. Please email info@paradise-works.com a week in advance to arrange a time.
Artists: Jack Brown, Isabella Clark, Joss Heierli, Oona Wilkinson 
Where: First Floor

Slugtown are delighted to present a borrowing of bones, an off-site group exhibition of four artists from  across the UK and The Netherlands: Jack Brown, Isabella Clark, Joss Heierli and Oona Wilkinson at  Paradise Works, Manchester. 

Drawn from the poem October Fullness by Pablo Neruda, a borrowing of bones considers notions of  absence, memory, and the transience of existence and time. Within the exhibition, the artists reflect upon  the material traces we each leave behind, that both reveal and conceal personal histories. The  susceptibility of these remnants to retain marks and gestures provide opportunities for us to bestow our  own narratives and values onto them, whilst they remain curiously elusive. 

Jack Brown’s work investigates the overlooked, things that should be given more than a passing glance,  moments that would benefit from magnification. The works he makes are often found, realised or placed in  the public realm. Brown’s floral foam works operate as delicate keepers of lost and forgotten time, with  left-behind materials pressed into the pliant green surface, immortalising the various anonymous  keepsakes. Whilst the foams themselves are a delicate and fragile material sensitive to any impression,  and on the cusp of falling apart. In his ongoing series The grease marks left by a passengers hair on a bus  window, the usually unseen residual smudges, flecks, and streaks that remain on surfaces in public  spaces are forensically explored. Each produced from a diminutive transfer print, these fleeting traces of  human activity are reminiscent of mid-century gestural abstraction. 

Isabella Clark’s work is informed by gatherings, shared stories, and the ephemera collected through the  passing of time. Her pinboard works hint towards the human desire to collect and display, as part of an  identity showcase. Scribbled notes, keys, cards, trinkets and drawings find their ways onto gingham  pinboards, to remain temporarily on this passing place, before being discarded and moved on from. 

Through the language of abstract painting, Joss Heierli’s practice focuses on the ontology of mark making  and suspicion towards the ‘artist’s hand’. His series of work (A) circle with an A in the middle, the A  standing for authenticity, are made by painting gesturally with oil sticks on raw canvas on the floor. Marks  would come through the back whilst also picking up marks from the studio floor, leaving no hierarchy  between incidental marks and the made marks. Heierli would flip the canvas back and forth and work on  sections until the composition became correct. His own gestures are obscured and blurred, reflecting on the fetishism of skill, labour and chance in painting, made through the tropes of painting, rather than  illustrating them. 

Oona Wilkinson’s work explores the anonymous inherited furniture of rented accommodation, gesture and  the increasing difficulty of placing ourselves in space and time. Weaving together multiple references to  the conditions of shared space and how it informs our relationships to the filtering and re-remembering of  personal archives. Through sculpture, photography and installation her work draws on the methodologies  of industrial design and non linguistic forces. Utilising different modes of knowledge production to examine  the emotional detritus of the conditions that underpin our experiences. 

-- 

Jack Brown (b.1979) lives and works in Greater Manchester. He works with (and in the spaces between)  sculpture, painting, response to site, print, public action, drawing, photography and video. He has  exhibited widely nationally and internationally including: Pallet show 12, Manchester Contemporary,  Manchester, 2023; Juxtapose Art Fair, Aarhus, 2023; Soaps, Suihkulahde Gelerie, Helsinki, 2023;  Gertrude Presents, The Truman Brewery, London, 2022; A Modest Show, The Hamptons Air Fair, New  York, 2022; Breathing in and Drawing out, Rogue Artists Studios, Manchester, 2022; and Recreational  Grounds – Off Site, Thames Side Studio Gallery, London, 2021. Brown’s work is held in the collections of  University of Salford, Soho House and numerous private collections. 

Isabella Clark (b.1999) lives and works in London, having graduated from Newcastle University in 2023.  Clark works across media, including sculpture, installation, print and film. Recent exhibitions include:  Newcastle Degree Show, Newcastle and Liverpool, 2023; Interim, XL Gallery, Newcastle, UK, 2022;  Lethal Tender, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, UK, 2022; Good Morning, LOT, Newcastle, UK, 2021; and To  Isabella and Ben, online exhibition, 2020. Clark is the recipient of the Forshaw Interview Prize and  participated in the 2023 Varc micro residency.  

Joss Heierli (b.1988) lives and works in Amsterdam. He received his BA in Fine Art from the University of  Westminster, London in 2012 and his MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art,  London in 2017. He co-founded clearview.ltd project space in London, alongside numerous curatorial  projects. He has exhibited widely nationally and internationally including: Good Signal, Duarte Sequeira,  Braga, Portugal, 2023; Linktree, V.O Curations, London, 2022; Os Mutantes, S·A·D, Madrid, 2019;  drawings, 650mah, Hove, 2018; Franchise, trial shift, Purcell street, London, 2015; and Ornament,  Bombast, London, 2014. 

Oona Wilkinson (b.1995) lives and works in London. She received a BFA in Sculpture and Environmental  Art from Glasgow School of Art in 2017 and was resident of Conditions Studio Programme in 2022.  Wilkinson has exhibited in exhibitions nationally and internationally including: Rumour Glue, Recent  Activity, Birmingham, 2023; Killing Time and Other Crimes, Conditions, Croydon, 2023; Works That Never  Came To Life, Art Hub Studios, London, 2023; The Patriot, O’Flaherty’s, New York, 2022 and Reality  Check, Las Palmas, Lisbon, 2019.

Access: only accessible by staircase.

In the Membrane

Preview: Saturday 18/11/23 6-8pm
Open: Saturdays from the 18/11/23 - 9/12/23.
Artists: Fleur Yearsley, Gabriel Kidd, and Isaac Jordan
Where: First Floor

Welcome to ‘In the Membrane’ an exhibition curated by Jessica Bennett that delves into the realms of the uncanny, where lingering presences come to life and layers reveal hidden truths. This exhibition showcases the works of three artists: Fleur Yearsley, Gabriel Kidd, and Isaac Jordan each offering a unique perspective of the world we live in and its connections to identity, loaded objects, and the subtle presence and absence that linger in our surroundings. Through the lenses of Yearsley, Kidd, and Jordan, we are reminded that the uncanny is not to be feared, but embraced. 

It is in the layers, the vibrations, and the unique identities that we find the true essence of our shared humanity. As you navigate the meticulously crafted works; you are invited to contemplate the threads that bind us all together. 

All three artists are recipients of The Haworth Trust Scholarship Programme at Paradise Works 2022/23. This Exhibition is kindly funded and supported by The Haworth Trust. 

This exhibition coincides with our Winter Open Studios 2023. Further Information

Fleur Yearsley:

Fleur Yearsley (b.1990 Manchester, UK) graduated with an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art as a recipient of the Gwen John Scholarship in 2017. Her work, To The Moon and Back, was featured in the John Moores Painting Prize 2020 at the Walker Art Gallery. Yearsley is this year’s Freak & Unique selected artist for Hundred House Coffee, demonstrating support of the arts through industry. The commission encompasses a residency and a solo show scheduled for the upcoming year.

Play is the life force running through the paintings, with suspended narratives suggesting that they might have sprung to life all at once. The work reflects the artist's experiences as a millennial living in cities characterised by constant flux. Central themes frequently centre on introspective moments or the uncanny, poised on the brink of happening, evoking anticipation and apprehension. References to pop culture seek to find commonalities with the viewer, offering a sense of shared experience and fostering empathy by reassuring us that certain sensations are also felt by others.

Gabriel Kidd: 

Gabriel Kidd (b. Manchester, 1999) completed their BA in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art in 2021. On graduating, a year’s studio scholarship was awarded by Paradise Works. In 2022 they were selected for the New Contemporaries 2022 cohort and retained a studio at Paradise Works with the Haworth Trust New Graduate Award. They are now studying their MFA in Sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art with the Milein Cosman Scholarship for Drawing. 

‘I’m attracted to natural processes as stages/terrains/cradles for queered storytelling. 

Queerness as an undercurrent. Worldbuilding as a gathering/articulation of objects: broken things, fragile ephemera, bone, wood and rock bound to dyed fibres by desperate threads.’

Isaac Jordan: 

Isaac Jordan, a Manchester-based artist, holds a BA in Fine Art from the University of the West of England, Bristol. His creative process involves the development of focused series, with each piece being born during a single sitting. Drawing inspiration from a diverse range of sources, including YouTube videos and stills from 1970s science-fiction films, Jordan's work centres on the depiction of still images.

His paintings are then arranged in minimal installations, resulting in a cinematic experience in which the finalised work exists animated in the viewer's imagination. Notable accolades include the Spike Island Graduate Fellowship (2020/21) and the Haworth Trust New Graduate Award at Paradise Works (2022). Additionally, Jordan's work has been shortlisted for the BEEP Painting Prize in 2020, where his work was exhibited in Swansea.

Hyper-Deflation 

Preview: Fri 29th Sept 2023 6-8pm
Open: 30/09/23 -  01/11/23 by appointment only. Contact 
Artists: Dean Kenning, Rosie McGinn
Where: Ground floor Division of Labour Gallery

Division of Labour are proud to present Hyper-Deflation, featuring seminal works by Dean Kenning and Rosie McGinn.

In this two-person exhibition both artists explore the deflationary: economic, political, emotional and literal. Kenning exhibits his blackboard diagrams Signs & Signals (2021) and Diagramming Politics (2017) alongside kinetic sculptures from his Untitled Rubber Plant series. McGinn exhibits her inflatable kinetic sculpture Howse (2018).

Kenning’s chalkboard diagrams take on an autodidactic, systems based approach to the bio-semiotic and the socio-economic, combining allegorical and analogical modes of figuration. They are exploratory models of social, psychical and physical reality where the working-out process is still apparent. In the artwork Diagramming Politics (2017)  Kenning  constructs a relational map of alternative state models out of the so-called 'shocks' of Trump, Brexit, Corbyn, etc. Also on display are kinetic sculptures from his Rubber Plant series that wobble with nervous, perverse energy. These pseudo-autonomous art objects, presented on a plinth  deflate contemplative art world seriousness by conveying an idiotic and convulsive aesthetic. 

McGinn's  inflatable sculpture Howse is a giant, handmade, leopard-printed bingo woman. As the air flows through the nylon structure the woman rises, her arms flinging out to each side, mimicking the frenzied moment of winning a full house. The image is of McGinn’s grandmother, who is now banned from her local bingo. Terrifying in scale and presence, while maintaining slapstick humour, Full Howse captures this moment of euphoria. The deflating of the body punctures the joy and the fleeting moment of escapism is gone. 

THE ALUMNI STRIKES BACK

Preview: 21st September 6-9pm

Exhibition continues: Thursday-Sunday 12-5pm until 15th October 

Where: First Floor Gallery

Paradise Works are delighted to present THE ALUMNI STRIKES BACK, a group exhibition by Short Supply showcasing artists from the Class of 2019-2022.

4 years ago in a galaxy far far away, before a plague, cost of living crisis and literal alien invasion, Short Supply started a little project to platform graduate artists called MADE IT, which debuted on the spaceship Paradise Works in 2019.

Since then, Short Supply kept platforming graduate artists and providing them with a crucial springboard opportunity through exhibitions and further opportunities across the region and nationally. Our alumni have gone on to achieve impressive things; residencies, solo shows, commissions, exhibiting internationally, bands, albums, podcasts, going viral, roles as producers and curators, collaborating with huge national organisations, working on hollywood films, starting a cooperative, winning awards, getting featured on TV and radio, being part of museum collections and continuing their study in some of the best art schools in the world - but knowing they started right here. 

They say you’re only as good as the company you keep, and we’re in excellent company. When we started this show, we were frustrated with the lack of an emerging artists community we felt in the North West, but we were also frustrated with the lack of documentation for just what graduates in this region achieve. The proof is in the pudding, and we’re proud to show off a small handful of our alumni at Paradise Works this autumn.


MADE IT The Alumni Strikes Back is a selected showcase of artists from the Class of 2019-2022: 

PRINCESS ARINOLA ADEGBITE, LUE CAMPBELL-SMITH, CANDICE DEHNAVI, EMMA DOLAN, OLIVER EAST, JASMINE GARDNER, MADELEINE ISMAEL, KOHENOOR KAMAL, GABRIEL KIDD, ANABEL-GARCIA KURLAND, ALICJA MROZOWSKA, SHIVANI PATEL, VIVIAN ROSS-SMITH, BABS SMITH, SANDEEP UBHI.

Facebook Event

Access: only accessible by staircase.

Hoarfrost On Our Lips

Artists: Yelena Popova, Catriona Robertson, Madi Acharya-Baskerville, John-Paul Brown with poems by Esther Koch

Preview: 6-8pm Saturday 8th July

Open: 12-4pm Saturdays until the 12th of August

You will be phlebotomised of your utility,

Shorn from within of fleecy tradition until

Assimilation has left hoarfrost on your lips

And ceramic cladding has you cleaved from the earth

Esther Koch, 2023

Paradise Works is pleased to present Hoarfrost On Our Lips, a group exhibition exploring itself through the medium of poetry, curated by Will Marshall.

Salford based poet Esther Koch responds to the artworks of Yelena Popova, Catriona Robertson, Madi Acharya-Baskerville and John-Paul Brown through series of newly commissioned poems. Displayed within the exhibition, these texts will act as a means to interpret the show, and explore and build upon the complex and subtle range of ideas the artists deal with in their work, including: environmentalism and sustainability, materiality and the Anthropocene, visual language and symbolism, migration and movement, the ocean and the land, physicality and architecture, and personal relationships to the earth.

This exhibition is supported by Arts Council England.

Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow

Open: By appointment until the 15 JULY 2023. Contact nat@divisionoflabour.co.uk.

Where: Division of Labour gallery, ground floor.

Taking its title from the Millennium Dome promotional slogan, Imagine What We Can Do
Tomorrow is a solo exhibition by digital artist Duncan Poulton which relives and reimagines
the dawn of the 21 st Century. The show includes new works in digital collage that have been
developed around a major found footage video work titled Y2K, made in collaboration with
artist Nick Smith. The pieces are shown amidst an immersive installation which will see the
gallery covered in aluminium foil, rendering the room a no-signal, Wifi-free zone, also known
as a Faraday Cage.

Made in Poulton’s intuitive approach which marries the logic of online algorithms with his
flawed human subconscious, this new body of digital collage works pull material from
personal family photo archives, as well as scans of found charity shop books and lost
images downloaded from the deep internet. Each collage is anchored by an image created
in 1999 or 2000 – be it a photo of the artists’ 7 th birthday cake or his mother’s tap dancing
troupe, scanned self-help books or video game screenshots – presenting remixed and
redacted personal and collective memories. In his work, Poulton attempts to distil the
sensation of the overwhelming world of images and information that make up our chaotic
physical-digital existence today. These digitally printed collages bear witness to the mental
and physical toll taken on a generation that has grown up online – the anxiety, insomnia,
apathy and confusion that our post-Millennium tech-led culture has caused.
The year 2000 saw the beginning of social media (Friends Reunited in the UK) and reality
TV’s rise to prominence (Big Brother, Survivors), as well as marking the end of the naïve
hopeful energy that characterised the 90’s, just before 9/11’s paradigm shift. This shift is
embodied in the Millennium Dome which was devised as a statement of ambition and
progress, but became a monument to political and financial failure after its closing in 2001,
and is a recurring motif in Poulton and Smith’s collaborative film Y2K. Drawing on the artists’
respective archives, Y2K combines home video recordings, news clips, TV adverts and early
internet ephemera into a video essay in two halves: pre- and post-Millennium, complete with
its own New Year’s Eve countdown composed from timestamped house party camcorder
footage. The film playfully explores the artists’ shared interest in the Millennium as a
significant cultural landmark and turning point – one that marked simultaneously the
beginning, and the end, of ‘the future’.

As a seminal moment of global collective anxiety, New Year’s Eve 1999 is particularly timely
to look back on in 2023, amidst the furore of fear and speculation around exponentially
accelerating Artificial Intelligence. This exhibition pinpoints the Millennium as a key moment
in considering “How did we get here?” and invites audiences to consider an alternative past
in which the Y2K problem (or Millennium Bug) did cause cataclysm. If this were to have
happened, would have still sleepwalked into our hyperconnected, techno-reliant present?
Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow coincides with Manchester International Festival 2023,
and will have an accompanying events programme to be announced.

image credits: Duncan Poulton & Nick Smith, Y2K (2023), video still. Courtesy of the artists

Tied to Everything Else

Preview: 6-9pm, Fri 28 April 2023

Open: Saturdays 12-4pm from 29 April - 27 May 2023

Where: First Floor Gallery

 Paradise Works are pleased to present a solo exhibition by Chris Alton, curated by Will Marshall.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911

Tied to Everything Else brings together an array of artworks produced by Chris Alton over the last 7 years, which address the climate crisis in some way. This body of works includes; textile banners, videos, a typeface, drawings, posters, and a publication.

Whilst this exhibition's overarching concern is the climate crisis, Chris's works also address other phenomena to which the climate crisis is tied, including; Britain's colonial history, neoliberal capitalism, tax avoidance, nuclear infrastructure, deluge myths, extreme weather, extinction, and migration, amongst others. Exploration of such connections and interdependencies are common throughout his practice; and this exhibition draws out these overlaps.

Many of these concerns stem from Chris's Quaker upbringing, which brought him into contact with people working towards a more just world at an early age. Since the age of 13 he has contributed to anti-nuclear and anti-arms campaigns, and he began participating in climate protests at the age of 16. However, Chris is reluctant to describe his artworks as a form of activism. Whilst their content is often overtly political, he is wary of overstating their immediate efficacy; particularly when faced with a cause as urgent and all encompassing as the climate crisis.

He has come to think of art (making, exhibiting, and encountering) as a space where this transformative work can take place. Art provides space for curiosity, learning, and critical thinking. Chris hopes that such spaces* might precipitate slow changes by providing nourishment and offering ideas, which subtly shift our perception of and relationship to the living planet. We need spaces to articulate alternative futures and to sow seeds that will feed us in the world to come.

 *These spaces are not exclusively artworks or galleries; art does not hold a nourishment-monopoly. Chris has found such nourishment in novels, documentaries, walks, growing tomatoes, and attending Quaker meeting.

Bio

Chris Alton is an artist & curator, based in Manchester, UK. His practice spans a range of media and approaches, including; socially engaged projects, site specific artworks, video essays, textile banners, and publications. In 2012 he founded English Disco Lovers (EDL), an anti-fascist, pro-disco group. Other projects include; Adam Speaks (With New Mouths) (2017), a neoclassical treehouse commissioned by the National Trust; What Mortals Henceforth Shall Our Power Adore (2020), a video essay that frames the trident as a symbol of colonial intent; and Grief Must be Love with Nowhere to Go (2021-present) an ongoing exploration of grief and language in collaboration with Emily Simpson. Each project addresses an array of interconnected social, political, economic and environmental concerns. He is also an active member of the Quaker community and a skateboarder.

 Chris was a participant in Syllabus III, an alternative, peer-led, learning programme (2017-18). Exhibitions & commissions include; The slabs whistle; a song under my wheels, KARST & Take A Part (2022); Throughout the Fragment of Infinity That We Have Come to Know, The NewBridge Project, Gateshead (2020); Link & Shift, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2019); Survey, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Bluecoat, Liverpool; g39, Cardiff; & Jerwood Space, London (2018-19); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery; & Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool Biennial (2018-19); Adam Speaks, The National Trust, Croome, Worcestershire (2017); and Outdancing Formations, Edith-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg (2015).

Facebook event

This event is supported by Paradise Works and Arts Council England

Access: only accessible by staircase.

LIQUID MIRRORS

Open: by appointment from 16/02/23 - 16/3/23

Where: Division of Labour ground floor gallery at Paradise Works

Paradise Works are delighted to present Liquid Mirrors, a group exhibition with Natalia Escudero, Jorge Isla, Cecilia de Val curated by Daniel Silvo.

Liquid Mirrors revolves around the absence of information due to the collapse and excess of images and text in our contemporary society. In their works, these three artists take the destruction of information to the extreme, either as a fade to black, blackout or as a flood of light to white. The liquid, fragmented and floating work of Cecilia de Val reveal a cracking architecture and show us the hidden fissures under the name of progress. Jorge Isla’s work is aligned to this rupture of the contemporary image, offering us dozens of ruined and dark smartphone screens, like a polished and cracked obsidian stone that gives us back our broken anti-image. Contrary to this Natalia Escudero, hides her information inside old books rescued from her grandfather's house, giving a new shape to texts whose meaning is hidden among pieces of marble and deceptively playful objects.

This exhibition has been possible thanks to the support of Aragón Exterior, which has organized a competition to select these young Aragonese artists and bring their work to the United Kingdom.

Access: Ground floor

Contact: nat@divisionoflabour.co.uk to arrange an appointment or for further inquiries.

PAL

Open: 05/11/22 - 20/01/2023 by appointment.

Where: Division of Labour ground floor gallery at Paradise Works

Paradise Works are delighted to present PAL, a solo exhibition with Angelina May Davis by Division of Labour.

Angelina May Davis’s paintings are fabrications, plundering imagery from childhood TV and art history. She is interested in thinking about the past and what shapes us, using the transformative act of painting to reflect on history and culture as well as her own sense of belonging. She has recently been restoring the English elm as depicted in remembered films, archival footage and English landscape painting as metaphor for loss and longing, recalling an insincere past. Her paintings are claustrophobic worlds in which there is ambiguity, artifice and the possibility of things just out of view.

Access: Ground floor

Contact: nat@divisionoflabour.co.uk / info@paradise-works.com to arrange an appointment or for further inquiries.

CINEMA PARADISO: HOME ARTIST FILM WEEKENDER 2022

Open: 1st December Doors at 18.00 for 18.30 start, 21.00 finish.

Where: First floor gallery

HOME’s annual Artist Film Weekender returns for a celebration of the wild and wonderful world of artist film with a packed weekend of screenings, talks, and workshops.

To kick off the weekend Paradise Works will host the opening night with Cinema Paradiso, an evening of experimental film, expanded cinema and live performance. Dress warm!

HOME Artist Film Weekender will continue on Saturday and Sunday at HOME, Manchester, with a programme inspired by the idea of worldbuilding – highlighting artists that envision alternate futures, build speculative worlds, and expand our imagination of the possible. This cinematic journey will imagine utopic gender-fluid futures and human-plant hybrid communities with Maryna Makarenko; exploring the interweaved worlds of spirits and science in the collaborative films of Chu-Li Shewring & Adam Gutch; speculating on gender, reproduction and technology in the sci-fi inspired work of Pedro Neves Marques; and travelling beyond the stagnant fiction of a singular capitalist future to the queer, comical, and cosmic wonderlands presented in Destination: Other Worlds.

Curated by Jamie Allan and Alice Wilde and programmed by studio member Chris Paul Daniels.

Facebook event // Further Information

Access: only accessibly by staircase.

Looking at People Looking at Art in the Gallery from the Studio

Preview: 21st July 6-8pm

Open: 22/07/22- 21/08/22 by appointment only, contact kieran.leach@btinternet.com.

Where: Division of Labour ground floor gallery, Paradise Works

Paradise Works is delighted to present ‘Looking at People Looking at Art in the Gallery from the Studio’, a solo exhibition curated by Division of Labour, as part of A Modest Show.

Part IV in Division of Labour’s Looking…. series

Artist Kieran Leach’s sensibility is based primarily around making and the history of making. Some critics have noted a conceptual and empirical approach to Leach’s sculptures that could be read as humorous insular activities, in-jokes, self-referenced nods to art making and history. Or new perhaps these works re-address a split that Conceptual Art created in the divergence of skill in craft-based labour and newly recognised artistic skills with immaterial production.

By staging this show in both the artist’s studio and the new project or gallery space Leach and Division of Labour each open up discussion of the shared transnational location of art making and art display, how communities share and develop knowledge.

The artists could be seen as self-controlled worker making art in isolation and at the same time working collectively in clusters or ‘innovation systems’ they, we, transfer knowledge through “flexible production structured around short-term relationships between artists (that is for example; private views, talks, studio groups and parties) and external partners” (galleries, collectors, group shows, talks, parties, critics and curators)

1 Roberts, J. 2007 The intangibilities of form Skill and deskilling in art after the readymade, New York Verso

2 Bain, A. 2005 Constructing an Artistic Identity Work, employment and society 19 1 25-46

3 Leadbeater, C. and Oakley, K. 1999 The independents: Britain’s new cultural entrepreneurs

Facebook Event

Making of the Sausage

Preview: 21st July, 6-8pm

Open: Saturdays 12-4pm 22/07/22- 21/08/22

Where: Division of Labour ground floor gallery, Paradise Works

Paradise Works is pleased to present ‘Making of the Sausage’, a solo exhibition with Andee Collard curated by Division of Labour, as part of A Modest Show.

Using self-built CNC machines, Andee Collard creates mechanised, analogue drawings and paintings. Collard’s interest in technology results in a range of diverse approaches and styles across his practice. Each piece represents a new way of working and allows him to further develop the software and hardware used to make his artwork.

In this exhibition, Andee explores the history of ‘Making of the Sausage’, allowing the public to view, through livestream, the process of creating his work whilst he explores the links between art and cookery.

Contact curator@amodestshow.org.

Facebook Event

EXHIBITION ARCHIVE

Our exhibition space acts as a platform for an ongoing programme of critically engaged exhibitions, film screenings, projects and events. Our programme is curated in-house and by invited guest curators.

Due to Covid-19 we are not accepting proposals at this time, please join our mailing list to be kept up to date with our digital programme and activity. Read more about the impact of Covid-19 on our artistic community here.