Soft Bodies

20 March 2020 — 1 November 2020

This will be our first exhibition when the gallery reopens.

The exhibition takes its title from soft-body dynamics, a field of computer-generated graphics which create simulations of soft materials such as muscle, fat, hair, vegetation and fabric. Involving both figurative and abstract works the exhibition will reference the body in relation to technology, politics, gender, race and sexuality, and will gesture towards bodily experiences that are beyond language.

You can see all the works, including links to video pieces, in the exhibition guide, and find out more in Sara Jaspan’s article for Creative Tourist and  Castlefield Gallery curator Matthew Pendergast’s reflections on the exhibition.

You can also download the pdf version of George Gibson’s book ‘Other Kin’.

Featuring the work of artists; Emma Cousin, Stine Deja, George Gibson, Aliyah Hussain and Anna Bunting-Branch (Potential Wor(l)ds), Robin Megannity, Sadé Mica, Jake Moore and Semi Precious, Sam Rushton, Megan Snowe, Xiuching Tsay.

If you have any queries please
send us an email

Curated and produced by Castlefield Gallery.

With special thanks to Commissioning Patrons Jo and Allan Melzack.

Castlefield Gallery Exhibition Supporters

Image: Jake Moore and Semi Precious ‘Other Life’ (2019) film still.

Other Transmissions at The Whitworth

14 February 2020 — 14 June 2020

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak The Whitworth is closed until further notice. For updates please visit their website.

Other Transmissions: Conversations with Outsider Art, at the Whitworth in Manchester, marks the latest incarnation of the long-running partnership between Castlefield Gallery and Venture Arts. For this exhibition six artists; Joe Beedles, James Desser, Amy Ellison, Frances Heap, Andrew Johnstone and John Powell-Jones, have created original artwork in response to the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection (MKOAC), housed at the Whitworth. The exhibition, and the research which has produced it, represent just some of the outcomes from a two-year artist residency project led by Venture Arts in collaboration with the Whitworth and Castlefield Gallery.

The MKOAC is the largest collection of ‘Outsider Art’ in a public gallery in the UK and features work by artists who are self-taught and have been historically marginalised from the art world. The artists have explored how the term ‘Outsider Art’ may become ‘isolating’ or ‘liberating,’ or perhaps both. The spectrum of works include sound, film, digital artwork, drawings and sculpture, as well as costumes for performances.

Each of the artists has selected a number of artworks from the MKOAC, for the exhibition including works by Madge Gill, Albert Louden and Michel Nedjar.

Other Transmissions is a partnership project with Venture Arts, a Manchester based visual arts organisation that works to build the work and careers of learning-disabled artists.  The exhibition originated from a project that took place in 2018-19 called Conversation Series II, which was a partnership project between Venture Arts, the Whitworth and Castlefield Gallery. Castlefield Gallery has supported the residency as a critical friend and provided the artists with mentoring to encourage reflection at key stages throughout the project. Elements of the project have been shown at a Tate Exchange in Liverpool, at Artlink in Hull and at Salford University, culminating in the full and final show being shown at the Whitworth.

Conversation Series II was the second part of a four-part programme, conceived by Venture Arts, and a wider network of national organisations including Castlefield Gallery.

#convoseries2 #othertransmissions

Elements of the work will also go on display at Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool (7-21 March 2020).

Conversation Series II- OTHER TRANSMISSIONS 

Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool

7–21 March

Running concurrently with the Whitworth exhibition for two weeks in March 2020, Grundy Art Gallery will host an exhibition that brings together artists, with and without disability, from Blackpool and Manchester who have worked together to investigate how artists are labelled, who makes art and who it is for. The exhibition will also include works on loan from The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection.

Image: Joe Beedles  ‘Oeillade strobe; temporal lobe’ (film still).

The Annotated Reader | The Naming of Things – Podcast 21st May 2020

21 May 2020 — 21 May 2021

The Naming of Things: a group exhibition curated by Castlefield Gallery Associate Bryony Dawson

The Annotated Reader: A publication-as-exhibition and exhibition-as-publication conceived by Ryan Gander and Jonathan P. Watts

Originally planned to be exhibited at the gallery in May 2020, due to Covid 19 they have been rescheduled for 2021. 

To mark the occasion of what would have been their public preview our curator Matthew Pendergast invited Bryony and Ryan to share some questions and thoughts with each other for a podcast available HERE.
You can also listen to it on Spotify. 

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The Naming of Things features the work of: Sriwhana Spong, Lydia Davies, Jeanne Constantin, Sarah Tripp, James McAleer and Bryony Dawson, Charlie Godet Thomas and Jessica Higgins. 

Language has always been in a state of flux, but the acceleration of change led by new media platforms and formats dramatically changes the way that language is written, read and understood. The artists chosen for this exhibition embrace this unreliability by using and mis-using language as a way to imagine architectural spaces and alternative viewpoints. With works involving text, audio, sculpture and film they explore the semiotic relationships between images, sounds and words. 

The Naming of Things was selected from proposals submitted by Castlefield Gallery Associates by guest selector Ryan Gander and Castlefield Gallery Curator Matthew Pendergast. 

The Annotated Reader 

Imagine you’ve missed the last train. Is there one piece of writing that you would want with you for company in the small hours? Perhaps this text transformed your thinking. It might be a mantra continually returned to. Perhaps it is a text you felt should be read by younger generations or that you wish you’d encountered as a student.

Artist Ryan Gander and critic and writer Jonathan P. Watts put this question to a range of creatives, artists, academics, writers, musicians, and designers, inviting them to suggest such a piece of writing and then annotate it. The annotations add a further layer to the texts, demonstrating and suggesting ways of reading, displaying thought, complicating the relationship between image and text, reading and looking. 

With almost 300 contributors including Marina Abramović, Art & Language, Paul Clinton, Tom Godfrey, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Alistair Hudson and Hans Ulrich Obrist it forms an educational resource that can be used as a teaching aid for future generations. The Annotated Reader is a curriculum, an index and an ethics