SPARK #42: GIVING AND GETTING

For our December session, we will gather in Manchester Museum’s top floor classroom, reflect on the year to end and the year to come, and make cards for Stan’s Secret Santa. We’ll make and talk and ponder and plan, in a session hosted by SPARK co-ordinator Jane Lawson. Please bring ideas for sessions you’d like to see or host in 2026.

The Stan in question is none other than Manchester Museum’s Tyrannosaurus Rex Stanta Claws, who is collecting gifts and food to donate to Manchester-based charities Barnabus, Mustard Tree and Wood Street Mission. We’ll make single sided A5 cards so that no envelopes are required and the images are a gift in themselves.

Jane will bring A5 watercolour paper and card and some drawing kit – but please bring any materials you’d like to use! Ideally low enviromental impact materials, or materials that have been sitting around unused.

You’re also welcome to bring donations of art materials (as long as new/unopened) and artworks. Items that the charities are particularly requesting are:

Food
Selection boxes
Festive treats
Christmas biscuits
Stocking fillers
Other non-perishable items (including tinned and packaged food, cereal, UHT milk, sugar, tea bags)

Clothes
Thermal gloves
Hoodies/jumpers/coats
Jeans/joggers
Shoes/trainers/boots
New socks
New women’s bras and briefs
Novelty Christmas socks
Santa hats

Gifts
New toys, gifts or books, unwrapped and suitable for children aged 0-14 years old.

Wrapping paper

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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.

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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 about to exhibit in Plant Dreaming at Leeds Art Gallery (14 November 2025-19 April 2026).

Jane is Artist Environmental Lead at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 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.

https://www.janelawson.co.uk/ / https://www.instagram.com/msjanelawson/

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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 #42 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.

https://www.instagram.com/sparkartistsnetwork/

Image: 2023 Christmas card, Jane Lawson