Castlefield Gallery X Pipeline Solo Exhibition Selected

Posted on 10 February 2026

Castlefield Gallery and Pipeline are pleased to announce that Joe O’Rourke has been selected for the Castlefield Gallery x Pipeline Open Call.

Applications were open to members of Castlefield Gallery Associates, and we received a record number of submissions. O’Rourke’s proposal presents an ongoing series of DVD-case paintings alongside large-scale mixed-media works, re-staged across both venues. Moving between intimate and immersive encounters, the project explores how painting can operate as image, object, structure, and environment.

O’Rourke will first exhibit at Pipeline, from 4 June – 25 July 2026, coinciding with London Gallery Weekend. Following this, the work will be presented in a different context at Castlefield Gallery, from 30 July – 30 August 2026. Across both venues, painting becomes a site of encounter moving between the private and the public.

This dual presentation offers a significant professional development opportunity, enabling the artist to explore how meaning transforms across commercial and public gallery contexts while remaining conceptually unified. We look forward to programming more opportunities for Castlefield Gallery Associates members.

This is an exciting opportunity to restage my work across two distinct settings, testing how painting can circulate between scales, spaces, and audiences, shifting between intimacy and immersion, image and environment.

Joe O'Rourke

More About Joe O'Rourke

“I’m interested in the emotional responsiveness of painting and its expanded possibilities. I’m drawn to painting because it offers both an internal psychological space and an external encounter– pulling the viewer inward while also pushing them back into the world, and functioning as a site of encounter rather than resolution. Working across multiple scales and media, I often use found materials and everyday objects as points of entry into both the making and viewing of the work. Within the language of painting, these materials can operate simultaneously as image, surface and object. I’m interested in how materials can root the work in
time and place and hold tensions between the handmade and mass-produced, the intimate and the public. Living in Manchester has shaped my sensitivity to the felt experience of urban environments, and I use materials and motifs that echo urbanisation, labour, and thresholds between public and private space. In the studio, ideas emerge from intuition through slow looking– allowing objects, images and marks to collect meaning.

I’m also an educator, and have taught at Manchester School of Art, Edinburgh College of Art and The University of Greater Manchester. Beyond formal teaching, I’ve initiated learning opportunities through crits, workshops, and collaborative projects that connected artists across the UK, including Painters Posting Paintings (2018–present) and Bankley Exchanges (2023). I’m motivated to develop a practice that engages diverse audiences across broad social and spatial
contexts– and would be open to discussing potential workshops with local communities at Castlefield as part of this opportunity.”