SPARK #44: Beacons
SPARK Event
SPARK #44: Beacons
07 February 2026
11am - 1pm
Manchester Art Gallery, ground floor studio
Please join us in Manchester Art Gallery’s ground floor studio, to mark the beginning of spring!
We’ll share food and make zines with offerings for the year to come. SPARK #44 will be hosted by artists Jane Lawson and Jackie Haynes. In the UK we’re used to celebrating the start of the year on 1st January, but this isn’t universal; for example, Chinese and Iranian New Years are both in February. In the Celtic calendar, 1st February – halfway between the Winter Solstice and the spring equinox – marks the festival of Imbolc – the start of spring, traditionally dedicated to Saint Brigid. It is a time of year to reflect on what is wanting to emerge and what do we need to tend to?
St Brigid embodies the attributes of fertility, healing, and fire and her presence symbolizes the return of light and life after the dark winter months. Imbolc traditions include lighting candles and bonfires to symbolise the return of the sun, making Brigid’s crosses from rushes or straw to hang in homes for protection and blessings, and performing rituals to ensure a fruitful year ahead. What might a fruitful year look like for SPARK, its members, and the wider world? How can we best create the conditions to support fruitfulness? What communities and practices can act as our beacons? These questions become every more pressing as climate impacts worsen and authoritarians build power globally.
We invite SPARK members to bring food to share, and ideas to offer. We’ll make simple 6 or 12 page cut-and-fold zines of our beacons for fruitfulness in 2026. These beacons could include; regenerative ways of making art, poems, resources, practical skills for low impact living, imagery, inspirations, climate solutions, throughtopias, slogans, tips for adapting to climate impacts – whatever beacons you want to offer. We’ll start the session with a short brainstorm of what we think the year ahead will hold, and use this to give a framework for the year to come.
We’ll provide A4 paper, a steel ruler, a cutting board and a scalpel. Do bring A3 paper if you want to work larger. Please bring anything you’d like to draw with, and something edible to share.
Jane Lawson
Jane works with diagrams in order to understand the structures and processes that shape the world we live in, and with fungi to try and loosen the grip of capitalist realism on our collective imagination. She is influenced by the US Radical Mycology movement which posits that close contact with the resilient and interconnected lifeworlds of fungi can help us learn how to come into better relations to other beings and the world around us.
In 2023 she completed the MA in Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths, where she focussed on bringing people close to fungi through as many senses as possible. She is currently exhibiting in Plant Dreaming at Leeds Art Gallery (14 November 2025-19 April 2026). Jane is Artist Environmental Lead at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, where she leads on the gallery’s environmental reporting and action plans, provide enviro data for our funders and stakeholders, feeds into various aspects of the gallery’s activities, and co-ordinates SPARK.
https://www.janelawson.co.uk/ / https://www.instagram.com/msjanelawson/
Jackie Haynes
Jackie established House of Haynes Fancy Dress Hire in Manchester’s Northern Quarter in 1995. For seventeen years, she developed a business of making and hiring costumes to the public, alongside bespoke commission work such as making costumes for performers, and a wholesale range. In 2012 she changed direction, creating an art practice from her existing costume-making skills. She completed MA Textiles at MMU. Her interests led to an art practice-based PhD at University of Cumbria, where she studied the German Dada artist, Kurt Schwitters. Jackie’s recent artwork features in ‘Things of the Least’ at Manchester Art Gallery, and ‘The Long Haul’ at the Williamson Gallery in Birkenhead for Liverpool Independents Biennial. ‘The Long Haul’ is by the collaborative duo, Artist A & Artist B, namely, Jackie and Heather Mullender-Ross. Jackie is currently developing her costume collection as a mobile, hands-on archive and resource for community groups.
Access Info
This venue is wheelchair accessible.
More detailed access info available at https://manchesterartgallery.org/accessibility-2/
SPARK
The SPARK network was set up by Castlefield Gallery in 2022 to facilitate a Greater Manchester/North West-based network of artists wanting to intervene in the climate crisis. The gallery initiated SPARK in response to the high demand for places on the 2021/22 SUSTAIN programme focussed on low carbon artmaking. SPARK #44 follows SPARK sessions at Manchester Art Gallery, Rogue, The Birley (Preston), Eccles Friends Meeting House, Manchester Museum, AIR Gallery, Paradise Works, Editional Studio, Cadishead and Little Woolden Moss, Gallery Oldham, the John Rylands Library, Dunham Massey, Lindow Moss, Castlefield Viaduct, Gallery Oldham, The Atkinson, Castlefield Gallery, Northern Roots, Salford Museum and Art Gallery; and a group exhibition and events programme at Rogue Studios.
Castlefield Gallery continues to provide admin and co-ordination support via its Artist Environmental Lead, Jane Lawson.
JOIN SPARK
IMAGES
- The lighthouse on the Zad at full moon; image credit Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
