Out Here

Ashleigh Beattie will be covering several surfaces of the gallery with clay dug from her garden where she lives in Manchester. Originally from Zimbabwe, the work references Beattie’s experiences of displacement and belonging, as well as making a connection between the land where she now lives and the land that was used to produce tobacco, cotton and maize under Britain’s colonial rule. The work’s title Cracked Earth (2026) recognises the lasting negative ecological and economic impacts of the introduction of these crops to Zimbabwe. 

Emelia Hewitt’s work combines various photography techniques with textiles and illustration. She is interested in the history of photography from its documentation of everyday life in the 19th and 20th century to early photography’s intersection with the sciences, investigating and categorising the natural world. Recent works have seen Hewitt experimenting with cameraless photograms such as cyanotypes, anthotypes and chlorophyll printing as well as making more sustainable development fluids with natural ingredients and fewer chemicals. Like Beattie’s work, these works merge their subject matter with their materials.

Keziah Thomas-Mellor’s work translates experiences of walking and climbing through the UK landscape into drawings and sculptures made in the studio, and live performances in gallery spaces. Her meditative drawings with repeated marks relate her experiences of moving through landscapes to more general experiences of time, loss, impermanence and the body. For Thomas-Mellor there is something hopeful and insightful in the mixture of symbolism associated with the spiral that she also finds in nature’s own tensions between growth and cyclicality, impermanence and boundless flow, power and vulnerability, continuity and transformation.

Adam Rawlinson is an abstract painter, predominantly working with rich layers of oil paint on canvas. His practice is underpinned by research into lichens, taking interest in their often unnoticed and underappreciated significance within our ecology. Whilst walking through forests and wild landscapes, he records his experiences and observations with oil pastels on paper. His studio painting is informed by these sketches as well as photographic imagery, from close up details to aerial and satellite imagery. Encountering Rawlinson’s large-scale paintings, and his combining of micro and macro view points, we have the opportunity to consider individual and collective experiences of what it means to be alive and in the world.

Steve Sutton works with naturally occurring found materials such as fallen trees, beach pebbles, and animal remains, as well as appropriated materials discarded by other people. His work is influenced by a longstanding physical relationship with the land. Years spent working with wood and other materials to maintain a farm have earned him many skills and experiences that inform his art practice. He responds carefully to the characteristics and possibilities of his materials, bringing them together with a mixture of labour intensive techniques and delicate but purposeful placement.