SPARK #46: Images For These Times
With local elections taking place in May, what information and ideas do we want to put out into the world? What images can we make to counter narratives of grievance and division, and help create the world we want?
Jane Lawson hosts this practical session where we’ll make images to share in the runup to the elections. Jane will bring a selection of visual research to draw on, including feminist agitprop and the Cuban posters that inspired her designs for the compost toilets at Kingsnorth Camp for Climate Action.
Please bring yourselves, ideas, longings and any art materials you’d like to use. We’ll provide paper, pens, pencils, collage material, scissors and random art materials.
More about Jane Lawson
Jane Lawson 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. Recent projects include Being Fungal (UK Fungus day event for Heart of Glass, 2023); Detox to Delish (part of A Modest Show, 2022); a poster for Jade Montserrat’s publication Tender Order (for Precarious Straits, 2021). She is currently exhibiting in Plant Dreaming at Leeds Art Gallery (14 November 2025-19 April 2026) and about to exhibit in Your Salford 100: Contemporary Narratives at Salford Museum and Art Gallery (27 March-27 September 2026).
Jane is Artist Environmental Lead at Castlefield Gallery 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.
Access Info
The session will take place in the top floor classroom at Manchester Museum. This space is wheelchair accessible.
Please see https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/visit-us/access/ for further access info.
More about 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 #46 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, as well as promotional support.
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- Jane Lawson – design for compost toilet, 2008
