SPARK #43 Getting Lost
For our first session of 2026, Castlefield Gallery Curator Matthew Pendergast will host a tour of our current exhibition It Requires Getting Lost, followed by a discussion around the show’s key themes – our relationship with nature, and what happens if we allow ourselves to get lost?
It Requires Getting Lost features work by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Noémie Goudal, Gregory Herbert, Pierre Huyghe, Malik Jama, Leon Kossoff, Jocelyn McGregor and Wolfgang Tillmans.
The exhibition is the result of a unique partnership between the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA), Venture Arts and Castlefield Gallery in which three artists working in the North of England – Gregory Herbert, Malik Jama and Jocelyn McGregor – have been invited to work in dialogue with one another and in response to major works from one of the UK’s most significant private collections, the David and Indrė Roberts Collection (managed by RIA).
The artists’ research has focussed on places and spaces where humanity and nature come into contact in unexpected ways, including Anderson boat lift, a wishing well in Alderley Edge and Yordas Cave in Ingleton. Guiding the artists’ research and overall exhibition are shared interests in the complex entanglement of human and non-human worlds, and testing the boundaries between the natural and artificial, making and material, intention and accident.
The works in It Requires Getting Lost span film, photography, painting, sound, projection mapping, and sculpture. A diverse group of works, together they point to what can be discovered in embracing the unknown. If we can resist the desire to have all the answers, and instead accept not knowing, what might we learn? If we ‘get lost’, might we discover, see, and hear anew, including what nature has to share with us?
Access Info
Castlefield Gallery is wheelchair accessible.
Assistance dogs are welcome.
More detailed access info available at https://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/visit/
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 #43 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.
