Disc Unknown: Artist and Curator Tour
Event
Disc Unknown: Artist and Curator Tour
27 August 2026
12-1:30pm
Castlefield Gallery
Exhibiting artist Joe O’Rourke and Castlefield Gallery’s Head of Programmes, Matthew Pendergast, will lead an Artist & Curator tour of Disc Unknown on Thursday 27 August, 12–1.30pm. Together, they will discuss the ideas, processes and themes behind the exhibition.
Disc Unknown is a solo exhibition of mixed-media paintings by Joe O’Rourke. Throughout the exhibition, O’Rourke draws on materials and images that surround us every day. These include billboard adverts, magazine pages, DVD cases, a 1970s factory worker’s timesheet, and a child’s science homework.
By bringing these found images, texts and objects together, the works connect different times and places. At the same time, they combine apparent opposites, such as the handmade and the mass-produced, or the intimate and the everyday. Likewise, they blur the boundaries between the unique and the generic.
For O’Rourke, these materials are the starting point for making. As a result, they carry multiple meanings. On one hand, they preserve traces of the recent past. On the other, they point towards hidden systems, including corporate influence, uncertain promises and anxieties about the future.
Read more about the exhibition Disc Unknown.
Joe O’Rourke
Joe O’Rourke (b.1995) is a Manchester-based artist and teacher. O’Rourke is interested in the emotional responsiveness of painting and its expanded possibilities. He’s drawn to painting because it offers both an internal psychological space and an external encounter – pulling the viewer inward while also referring them back to the world. Working across multiple scales and media, found materials and text often function as points of entry and departure into both the making and viewing of the work.
He’s interested in the ideas that materials carry; how they can root the work in a time and place and hold tensions between the handmade and mass-produced, the intimate and the public. Living in Manchester has shaped his sensitivity to the felt experience of urban environments, using materials and motifs that reference urbanisation, labour, and thresholds between internal and external, private and public space. In the studio, his ideas emerge from intuition through slow looking– allowing objects, images, text and materials to collect meaning.
O’Rourke graduated in 2017 from Edinburgh College of Art, and in 2018, he was a prize-winner in the John Moores Painting Prize. In 2019, he began the national collaborative painting project ‘Painters Posting Paintings’. He has taught at Edinburgh College of Art, Manchester School of Art, and the University of Greater Manchester.
Images
- Installation View of Disc Unknown, Solo Exhibition by Joe O’Rourke, at Castlefield Gallery, 2026, Courtesy of Jules Lister
- Joe O’Rourke, Image courtesy of Jake Harrison
Watch: Disc Unknown
