If land justice is being challenged by co-ops and community land trusts, by community benefit societies and community led land banking, why aren’t artists using these same methodologies to tackle studio precarity?

In May, artists in The Royal Standard (TRS) were evicted. Landlords came, changed the lock. Exhibitions were locked in rooms that no one could enter. Artists had to send back deposits from customers who booked on to courses. Accounts from studio holders and those running TRS build a picture of a new level of precarity for artists in Liverpool and beyond. The Echo have reported on it twice and so have The Post.

I’m not here to write another article about what happened. I wasn’t a studio holder at TRS, and the story of the group’s eviction should be told by them. I’m also not here to discuss the demise of Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle. I wasn’t living in the city at the time this area was a cultural hotbed. I only really know it as a place of over priced apartments, of bars in shipping containers, and where adverts sell ‘investment opportunities’ to private landlords .

I want to talk about something else: organising.

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The Wild Pansy Press (WPP) is an independent publishing press and collective art practice established in 1995, which has built up a considerable catalogue of books and projects, often linking a publication to an exhibition in ways which extend and confound the usual notions of a catalogue. WPP actively develops and supports collaborations, as in behind land: poems and paintings (2015), which brought together artist Judith Tucker and poet Harriet Tarlo to explore images, landscape and eco-poetry. WPP’s name comes from the title of Levi Strauss’ 1962 book La pensée sauvage, meaning ‘savage’ or untamed thoughts, but which can also be literally translated as ‘wild pansy’. In that double-play, I read the implication that savage thoughts might lead to radical thinking, to wild and freeing approaches to making.

I first came across the press a decade ago when I joined University of Leeds’ School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, where press editors Chris and Simon would become my tutors and subsequently long-term friends and colleagues. Today, Simon and I run The Writers’ Room (TWR), an offshoot of WPP in London, both a residency programme and a site for those working at the intersection of fine art and literature. We host residents who are developing art writing, auto-fiction, sound art, broadcasting and spoken word projects. The space is a working studio that we invite guests to reimagine and repurpose. So far, it has been used for publication launches, performances, screenings, symposia and quiet writing. It is, I hope, a place to reposition reading and writing as situated and embodied engagements.

Having continued our relationship with Leeds, the School of Fine Art suggested we celebrate the press in its anniversary year and bring TWR too. Chris secured the space and brought with him the extensive WPP archive; Simon and I curated a series of contributions by artists and writers who had done residencies with us in London, each with links to cities across the North, including George Storm Fletcher, Joanna Jowett, Elaine Fisher, Emily Fielding and Lily Petch. Words Worth Watching was a week-long exhibition and events series, with workshops led by Emily and Joanna, the latter joining Chris Taylor for a talk on the final day. Live readings animated the opening night, with current fine art students presenting work alongside the exhibitors.

I am writing this while sitting in the exhibition space. Shelves skirt the edges, running in a continuous horizontal line around the room. Books line the shelves, inviting the reader to circulate, navigating a multiplicity of perspectives and knowledges. Where one person’s knowledge and practice ends, someone else’s continues, cover to cover, edge to edge. The shelves float on the wall like the margins on a sheet of paper. We want these books to be picked up and interacted with. Two monitors share the films of Lily and Joanna, punctuating the continuous line of the shelves which also acts as a timeline. In the middle is our workbench and the floorspace for performance, discussion and sociable reading. This setup puts the centre and the margin in a dialectical co-becoming, while emphasising the margins of the room as ‘zones of unpredictability’.1 Centre and margin coexist relationally. This idea is at the core of WPP and TWR, as well as many of those who have interacted with, or been elevated by, WPP over time.

In the centre of the room there are clusters of seating for those who want to read or watch the films on display. An off-set table doubles up as a workshop bench and reading desk.

It is at this table that I spoke to various contemporaries from Yorkshire’s artist book ecology. Discussing the press and its previous projects, Simon shared how TWR and Words Worth Watching was largely inspired by WPP’s ‘Portable Reading Room’, which was designed and built in 2011 to act as a mobile project space, gallery and bookshop:

‘It was a flat-pack, easy-assembly, enclosed structure incorporating seating, a layout area where books could be displayed and examined, and, on the exterior surfaces, an area for displaying artwork, a notice board and signage. As well as being a site for activities, the Portable Reading Room was a social sculpture in its own right, centred on the activity of reading and the book as an expressive medium. Readers were encouraged to interact with one another in an unfamiliar but welcoming space and, in a sense, put themselves ‘into’ the imprint. It could be incorporated into an exhibition, set up in public spaces such as museums - namely in 2012, when it was in residence at Leeds Art Gallery - universities, theatre foyers and festivals. It complemented a broad range of events such as exhibitions, art fairs, conferences, school and college curricula.

The Portable Reading Room visited a range of venues to publicise and disseminate our imprint. In return, it offered a space for artists working with WPP and for local groups to devise and run their own activities based around ideas of reading, writing, publication and the integration of these into visual art. These collaborative activities offered a platform to a network of practitioners enabling audiences to become active participants. The portability of the project meant it could be shown in venues of any size, from a village hall to a city gallery, for periods of a day to one month. One of the main aims of this project was to break down boundaries between what are separately seen as “Literature”, “Writing” and “Art” and, by doing so, extend participants’ and their audiences’ understanding of what these forms offer.’

Picking up these notions of active participation and portability, I next spent time with friend and fellow writer Tom Branfoot. Tom is a prolific poet and founder of the independent press More Song, which hosts readings across cities in the North, including Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield and Manchester.

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One of the pleasures of working as a Regional Editor at Corridor8 is being reminded, month after month, that there is no such thing as ‘the regions’ in the singular. Across the North, and the Midlands, countless local art ecologies play out simultaneously, each with their own artists and artist-led ecosystems, organisations, audiences and histories. Writing about contemporary art is often framed as merely a response to exhibitions or events, but it also does something much more fundamental. It creates connections between places. It allows conversations happening in Liverpool to resonate in Leicester, Nottingham to speak to Newcastle, or Blackpool to find readers in Birmingham. It builds a critical record of what is happening outside the gravitational pull of London, while resisting the idea that regional practice somehow exists in relation to a centre elsewhere, rather than on its own terms. Off-centre, you could say.

This idea feels particularly pertinent as cultural activities increasingly depend on collaboration and conversation across places and across borders. Although not divided by any obvious borders, the Midlands as a whole is a hugely sprawling middle-mass that doesn’t always easily inter-connect. We’re therefore delighted to be partnering with CVAN West Midlands and CVAN East Midlands on their upcoming project Ode to the Midlands, an ambitious cross-regional commissioning programme pairing six artists based here with organisations across the Midlands to develop new digital commissions. And of course in true ‘off-centre’ fashion, pairing artists based in the East with organisations in the West (and vice-versa). Bringing together Aisling Ward with British Ceramics Biennial (Stoke-on-Trent), Andy Harper with Meadow Arts (Herefordshire), Kim Thompson with Herefordshire Museums & Galleries, Antonio Roberts with Film and Video Umbrella (Nottingham), Marley Starskey Butler with Arts Collective (Northampton), and Natasha Taheem with Hub (Sleaford), Corridor8 will be commissioning six extended critical reviews from Midlands-based writers, creating space for thoughtful pan-regional engagement with each project as it develops. We’re excited not only to publish this new writing (working with five organisations for the first time in the process), but to continue expanding the range and depth of conversations happening away from the ‘centre’, and across the ‘middle’.

Our latest review from the Midlands picks up on these ideas. Pamela Vivas' thoughtful response to Matrika: She Who Makes Worlds at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, reflects on the exhibition's exploration of identity, memory and belonging, reminding us that places, like cultures, are continually made through exchange, dialogue and shared histories. Reflecting on Saroj Patel's exhibition, Vivas writes:

…hearing Patel speak about her work helped me relate my own Latin American culture to the artist's own, recognise common points from very different parts of the world and also to understand the collective origin of some pieces.

It's precisely these kinds of connections, or ‘common points’, that a regional arts writing ecosystem helps to pollinate: linking ‘local’ experiences with wider cultural conversations from further afield, and reminding us that no place, or idea of a place, exists in isolation.

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Round up of our reviews, features and interviews:

Curious what else has been happening across the North and Midlands? Here’s a roundup of the other exhibitions and artists we’ve encountered over the last few weeks:

Parham Ghalamdar’s solo exhibition Aerotheology at Leeds Arts University’s Blenheim Walk Gallery is carefully unpicked by Staffordshire-based writer and art history graduate Simal Rafique.

Kelly Loughlin reviews Absense at Liverpool’s Stable Gallery, a photography exhibition produced in partnership with Open Eye Gallery and curated by our very own Associate Editor Laura Harris.

Chris Alton visits Art Gene in Barrow-in-Furness to review the group exhibition Rough Terrain, featuring ten artists working in, on, and about Cumbria.

James Stevenson reviews Jason Wilsher-Mills’ Jason and the Adventure of 254 - a cartoonish world of oversized feet, toy soldiers and illness played out across Attenborough Arts Centre’s larger spaces.

Our Regional Editor for Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Cumbria, Jazmine Linklater interviews Manchester-based artist Jessie Tam, talking about the artists’ Hong Kong heritage and recent exhibition, It Has to Be Apart It Has to Be Alone at C&G Artpartment in Sheffield.

Kirsty Jukes travels to Blackpool to reflect on over a decade worth of paintings by acclaimed Manchester-based artist Louise Giovanelli and her exhibition From Here to Here to Here at Grundy Art Gallery.

With love and solidarity from Kevin and the Corridor8 team.

Sometimes, as I adapt to my new, freelance life beyond the art institutions in which I spent the first ten years of my career, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume and range of creative practice in the UK. There is so much happening, in so many different spaces, in so many different ways. How does it cohere, and what connects us, if anything? And do I have a place within it all? I increasingly find myself outside of the centre; sometimes wilfully, but often not.

As editor for the East Midlands at Corridor8 this sometimes feels like a useful position to hold. Our region is geographically broad, taking in city, coast, and rural isolation. Often, coverage of art in the East Midlands focuses on the main urban centres. Nottingham in particular, but also Leicester, Derby, Lincoln. Yet, dig a bit deeper and you will find threads of art and creativity woven across the whole region.

In the historic market town of Newark, Coreset is a relatively new and evolving creative community with a varied programme of exhibitions, community-led workshops and events that come from an ethos of fostering ‘a more interesting, equitable and sustainable world’.

A little further up the A1 is The Harley Gallery, set amongst the green and pleasant land of The Welbeck Estate in North Nottinghamshire. Founded by the Duchess of Portland in 1978 to ‘encourage creativity in all of us’, their current programme includes an exhibition of new and previously unseen ceramic works by Serena Korda.

Level Centre, nestled in the Peak District town of Matlock is a contemporary art centre that prioritises working with disabled creatives in visual and performing arts. Their programme of exhibitions is driven by a desire to ‘celebrate the art that difference makes’, as well as offering vital opportunities for artists to develop and test new ideas.

Just a few miles down the road (or an adventurous hike across the hills and past the Nine Ladies stone circle) is Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth, who champion rural contemporary art through their changing programme of exhibitions, micro-residencies and workshops that respond to the distinctive geography and folklore of their unique location.

Fermynwoods Contemporary Art down in Northamptonshire is a commissioning powerhouse, presenting new works by contemporary artists in places across Northamptonshire and online, with a focus on reaching non-traditional arts audiences, rural and disadvantaged communities. Corridor8 has covered many of their projects already, including Tobias Zehntner: Halo at All Saints Church in Earls Barton, Maya Chowdhry and Alison Clare: What’s Eating Our Reality at The Core, Corby Cube and an online presentation of David John Scarborough’s digital installation Earth-Stepper.

The Generator is a new home for ‘creativity, connection and community’, a community-led venue that provides much needed space for creatives and collectives in Loughborough. Their inaugural exhibition last month ‘Our Very Fabric’ explored forms of making that responded to the history of the building as a former art school and the long history of textile making in the region.

Last but certainly not least, The Hub in Sleaford, home to the National Centre for Craft and Design, hosts a programme of changing exhibitions that foregrounds artists and makers working at the intersection of contemporary art and craft. Their current exhibition ‘Raisa Kabir: I only dance, I wish we could sing’ was reviewed for Corridor8 by Ruth Charnock. Kabir is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver whose work explores the material histories and textile networks that connect Asia and Europe, with a generous helping of defiant joy and queer sensibility holding it all together.

In our latest Substack long-read, Jenny Steele mulls on the slow development of her own obsession with weaving, which began in the midst of the pandemic. Initially a response to a challenging series of life events, Steele reflects that it also signalled a pivotal shift in her practice that she describes as having become ‘frustratingly formulaic’. For Steele, developing a supportive network of other artists who weave has been an important part of this practice. Of Raisa Kabir’s work, Steele writes:

What I appreciate about Raisa’s work is how she uses the performance of weaving to identify hidden aspects of the weaving process. As she described in an email to me, she wishes ‘to activate the latent political and violent histories that are ascribed into the histories of cultivating that material – the extraction of the land, the labour of the people who grew, processed, or spun and wove with that material, dye, fibre’.

Steele’s piece, along with many other explorative, personal and experimental texts, is available in full to paying subscribers. Please consider a paid subscription and help us to continue to pay writers for their work here, outside of the supported content model we run on the main site.

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Round up of our reviews, features and interviews:

What else has been happening across the North and Midlands? Here’s a roundup of the exhibitions and artists we’ve encountered over the last few weeks:

Jessica El Mal introduces us to an installation comprising 200 clay wind instruments from Pakistan in Invisible Flock: Microtonal at Lancaster Arts.

Caroline Bagenal reviewed Felicity Hammond: Reactor at Signal Film & Media, Barrow-in-Furness.

Bob Dickinson considers the role of emotion and intuition within artistic practice in Felt not Thought… Works on Paper at Cross Lane Projects in Kendal.

Denise Courcoux reviewed a trio of Women in Print Exhibitions at Allan Bank, a National Trust property in Grasmere.

Liliana Muñoz Flannery went to the Whitworth to see Michaela Yearwood-Dan: The Practice of Liberation.

Jazmine Linklater reviewed Curtain Up at the Lowry, an exhibition that asks visitors to step—quite literally—into the spotlight.

Mollie Balshaw spoke to Yasaman Mollasalehi about the evolution of her painting after coming to the UK from Iran in Sad Music You Can Dance To: On Yasaman Mollasalehi.

Natalie Bradbury reflected on exhibition-making that foregrounds the experience of early years audiences in Things of the Least: lively exhibition-making with children under-3 at Manchester Art Gallery.

Chantal Oakes encountered Amy Townsend-Lowcock’s performance ‘Enter, Tragic Mulatta’ at Manchester Art Gallery.

Ruth Charnock reviewed Raisa Kabir: I only dance, I wish we could sing at Hub, Sleaford.

News

Our Yorkshire editor Benjamin Barra is organising an exhibition as part of LAX programming collective. If you’re passing through Lincoln later this month, look out for ‘Wicked Money Await’ at General Practice, 25 Clasketgate, Lincoln, LN2 1JJ.

With love and solidarity from Rachel and the Corridor8 team.

My weaving obsession began slowly, in the beginning months of the pandemic.

I bought an editioned lithograph by Marion Dorn of one of her ten commissioned illustrations from the re-translated William Beckford Gothic novel, Vathek (1929). This illustration has a pale green and black line drawing in ink and crayon of a woven fence, with rushes in the foreground, that may have provided the material the fence is made of. The simple yet idyllic scene, printed onto cream, details two people relaxing by a river amongst natural materials. The life cycle of the weaving seemed to completely picture a life I wanted to have.

I started collecting postcards of basketry from museums and galleries such as the Ruthin Craft Centre, pinning them up in my studio. I marvelled at the magic of how smaller parts could come together to make a whole. I enjoyed looking and felt satisfaction from the clever construction and repetitive interlocking forms.

Weaving is widely recorded as one of the oldest crafts across all cultures and continents. For over 12,000 years we have instinctually woven plants and fibres together by warp and weft to make clothing and utilitarian objects. In the North of England, we live within a dominant history of industrial weaving, with each town and city having its own proud and often complicated textile story to tell.

Five years ago, throughout a series of challenging personal life changes, I found myself drawn intuitively to weaving. I had worked for several years in print and drawing, responding to in-depth research into interwar architecture, coastal environments and historical textiles. My somewhat private pivot to weaving, from looking outwards to research as a starting point, was a big but welcome shift within an artistic approach that was feeling frustratingly formulaic. I would research and make drawings from stories I found, then make them into sited works using print. To some extent I was disconnected from it personally, apart from picking out motifs.

Looking at weaving gradually turned to making. I was keen to learn. I began with an online passementerie course, which is a technique for making wound and woven trimmings. Over a two-year period, I undertook short courses in basketry, rush weaving and loom weaving. I continued to teach myself from YouTube and books.

Since I have started weaving, I cannot seem to stop. I have heard weavers jokingly call this ‘Weaver Fever’. An addiction to the satisfying connection of warp and weft. The undeniable passion and connection I feel surprises and delights me, but I am curious about why it took me so long to connect with it.

Although the materials and outcomes can differ greatly, I have found there is a regular sequence to the weaving process:

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It is the job of Paradise

to comfort those who’ve been left behind

from ‘The Job of Paradise’ by Roger Robinson

In paradise every

the desert wind is rising

third thought

in hell there are no thoughts

is of earth

from ‘Wait’ by Adrienne Rich

To soothe my wobbly heart, I have taken to saying out loud, several times a day, ‘We live in heaven.’ It makes my partner laugh. Or else it worries them. Sometimes I mean it – a fox slipping through fruit bushes at the allotment; the sun’s heat rebounding from the tarmac outside Aldi – sometimes it sounds ironic – a magpie eating raw chicken from the pavement; angry car horns at a fast food drive-thru. Always it is true. Always it reminds me that paradise is ours to make and unmake.

It is a useful trick of perspective that helps me see the world again. This is also the power of art and poetry. In our latest Substack long-read, ‘Circularisations’, Tom Dillon looks at a decades-old graphic device for delivering narrative and weighs its potential as a strategy for refreshing the world for jaded eyes. The ‘circularisations’ of the piece’s title were the invention of Michael Butterworth – publisher, editor, writer, and an important figure from Corridor8’s own pre-history, having founded the original Corridor in 1971 – and were a method of condensing a story down to its barest essentials. Superfluous words were removed, key verbs and nouns shunted together and crumpled down into radial word-images, like spokes of a wheel. The effect was often jarring, always surprising, and produced odd portmanteaus like ‘silencesound’, ‘moltenvault’ or ‘skelereal’.

As Tom writes, ‘The world today is beset by catastrophe; climate breakdown, genocide, and endless war. When images of disaster are the everyday, we can become inured to them.’ They wonder whether Butterworth’s method of reframing a narrative in a way that allows it to be absorbed at a glance, of retooling language so that it resonates at a different frequency, might cut out ‘social niceties’ and literary conventions and force the reader to reckon with that which standard narrative techniques might gloss over. We live in heaven, but sometimes our responsibilities to that idea go missing in all the extraneous noise.

Tom’s piece, along with many other explorative, personal and experimental texts, is available to paying subscribers. Please consider a paid subscription and help us to continue to pay writers for their work here, outside of the supported content model we run on the main site.

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For more on the intersection of Michael Butterworth, Corridor8, and the avant-garde publishing scene of the sixties and seventies, read Helen Nussbaum’s ‘An inward looking outer space’ from 2019 on our main site.

Round up of our reviews, features and interviews:

What else are we putting into the world? Here is a brief rundown of some of the art activity we’ve covered over the last few weeks, from explorations of artist development programmes and print residencies to reviews of exhibitions and digital commissions:

Jay Drinkall reviewed Gathering Landscapes & When the Day is Done: Two Sheffield Exhibitions at Weston Park Museum and Graves Gallery, Sheffield (image from When the Day is Done: New Paintings by Ryan Mosley above).

Lizzie Lloyd reviewed Kelsey Cruz-Martin: A Shell Stood for Zero at g39, Cardiff – a rare foray into Wales.

Suzanne Golden reviewed Becky Beasley: A Gentle Man (Part II) (1975-2029) at QUAD, Derby.

Farah Dailami spoke to this year’s cohort of artists – Matilya Njau, Thahmina Begum and Rhian Cooke (image from Rhian’s work ‘Wow Now’ above) – for her piece ‘Shaped Around Us’, exploring Yorkshire Contemporary’s artist development programme Practice: Leeds.

Sally Button wrote Stillness in Motion: Lisa Milroy’s Women in Print Residency, the latest piece exploring the artist residency series at Artlab Contemporary Print Studios, University of Lancashire, Preston.

Wingshan reviewed the digital artwork David John Scarborough: Earth-Stepper commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Northamptonshire.

Orla Foster reviewed George Shaw: Small Returns at Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield.

With love and solidarity from Ben and the Corridor8 team.

Michael Butterworth is best known now as a publisher and editor first of the literary magazine Corridor, which would later become Corridor8, and the co-founder of the avant-garde publisher Savoy Press. Butterworth’s literary career is perhaps less well known, although it is difficult to fully disentangle the two sides of writer and editor in his particular case. The experimental techniques of literary compression that Butterworth developed early in his career would later serve him well as an editor.

Butterworth published the majority of his early fiction in the magazine New Worlds in the late 1960s. The magazine had historically published science fiction, but in 1964 was taken over by fantasy author Michael Moorcock who set about transforming it into an avant-garde literary publication. The magazine in this period was the birthplace of the New Wave in science fiction; a movement that emphasised taboo topics such as sex and mind-altering substances but also encouraged the use of experimental techniques. It was at the forefront of the literary avant-garde in Britain, admired by Angela Carter and Eduardo Paolozzi.

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Colonizers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

seconds before becoming daisies.

I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

It’s so beautiful, the moon.

They’re so beautiful, the flowers.

from ‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying’ by Noor Hindi (Poetry, 2020)

We’ve made it back around to the cruellest month again, when in recent years the cognitive dissonance that grows between budding flowers and ongoing genocides and unfolding disasters around the globe feels most discombobulating. In our last newsletter, our North East editor Lesley shared a quote from Brecht’s ‘Motto’—a quote I’ve encoutnered semi-regularly lately. So I wanted to repeat that gesture with another snippet of poetry that has returned to me as the spring flowers emerge and pass, yellow giving way to purple, pinks to cream, as greens arrive on branches and the worldwide permacrisis sprouts ever more heads.

The way we carry poetry around like this—its space internal to us—makes me think of the other arts spaces we create, inhabit and fight for more locally. It makes me think of arts spaces as places of resistence, little pockets of autonomy. The countless studio spaces we’ve used and lost, the galleries that turned out to be so much more temporary than we’d hoped for, the institutions we still cling to even as their management becomes ever more punitive and their infrastructures crumble. But we can still celebrate our many small wins. Where I live: a new neighbourhood music venue at Kamera Ballroom in Chorlton; a stay on Bankley Studios & Gallery’s eviction notice, providing hope they might yet stay in their home of thirty-five years—though they still need your support; Blackwall Art Collective persistently running performance art takeovers at Manchester Art Gallery, forcing the building back into its intended support and showcasing of brilliant local art, in spite of the institution’s own disappeared contemporary programming.

Our latest essay here on Substack is deeply indebted to place and space. In ‘An Art Education in the Midlands’, artist-educator Polly Brant remembers her own time at Birmingham School of Art and delves into the wider history of art schools in the Midlands, reminding us of the importance of arts education in its many forms. As she writes: ‘In the present, art education has sadly become a fleeting radical moment through a workshop or fixed-term project as art organisations actively work to fill the gaps created by education cuts, lack of opportunity and a consistent devaluing of the arts.’ But just as Noor Hindi grapples with her ironic appreciation of flowers in poetry, Polly urges us not to relinquish the beautiful possibilities of arts education: ‘I am dreaming of a future where art education isn’t radical because it is present in everyday life. It should be accessible; it should hold more value in society; it should be a part of the infrastructure.’

For more on this theme, check out yesterday’s published ‘John Beck and Matthew Cornford: The Art Schools of Yorkshire’ by our Yorkshire editor Benjamin Barra.

Polly’s essay, along with many other explorative, personal and experimental texts, is available to paying subscribers. These subscriptions enable us to pay writers here, outside of the supported content model we run on the main site. I’m so proud of what we’re managing to achieve across these digital spaces, but we will need more subscribers in the long run to keep going. Please subscribe, like, comment and share to keep the discussion moving.

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Round up of our reviews, features and interviews:

John Beck and Matthew Cornford: The Art Schools of Yorkshire at Leeds Arts University, Leeds by our Yorkshire editor Benjamin Barra

Saodat Ismailova: As We Fade at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead by Jade Foster

Harriet Bowman: Slow Puncture at Cross Lane Projects, Kendal by Grace Edwards

Tony Heaton: Serial Dissenter at Lancaster Arts, Lancaster by Kyle Nathan Brown

Against Control: Anti-Heroic Authorship in New Exhibitions from Ellis and Kidd at HOME, Manchester by Mollie Balshaw

Charlotte Verity: The Season Following at Harewood House Trust, Leeds by Chloe Elliott

Jayne Simpson: LION at Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool by Natalie Russett

For Solidarity x Document H.E.T. Alternative Publishing and Community Undercurrents at The NewBridge Project, Newcastle upon Tyne by Craig Stewart Johnson

News

Potato Press’s forthcoming edition of JAWS 12.2 ‘A Potato Codex: An illuminated book of experimental and collaborative writing’ currently has a call for papers which is still open until the end of the month.

Potato Press have been invited to guest edit JAWS - journal for art writing. Potato Press is an experimental art press based at Northumbria University and run by our North East editor Lesley Guy along with Kate Liston and Tom O’Sullivan. Submit your work by 27th April.

To turn another of Lesley’s good ideas into a tradition, here’s a near perfect articulation of some of that confusion we’ve been feeling, from SANAM. Enjoy!

With love and solidarity from Jazz and the Corridor8 team.

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"In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing / About the dark times" Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’(1938)

While the world goes to hell in a handcart I sometimes wonder why we keep making, writing about and enjoying art. I think about the suffering of those at the sharp end of conflict and the multitudes of injustices I see on my screen everyday and wonder if what we do makes any kind of difference.

Without art though, what then? To imagine a world without it, now that would be a dark place. Brecht’s verse, written while in exile from Nazi Germany, reminds me that art is inevitable even if it can’t make the dark times go away. Through the making of and critical engagement with culture we find space to imagine and create change. Art lets us remember that we need beauty, humour, protest and rebellion to thrive and that transformation is possible.

In our latest essay The Nature of Gothic: Cultivation, Curation, and the Working-Class Voice, writer and filmmaker Peter Shukie takes us on a journey through the works on show at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery, reflecting upon their histories and social implications and providing a brilliant critique of bourgeoise values within the display of heritage. He concludes, ‘Culture should make us think, not settle into silence. The cracks remain, and it is through them that light — and the possibility of change — still enters’. Brecht also says, in ‘The threepenny Lawsuit’ (c1932) that ‘Contradictions are our hope!’ Thank you Peter, thank you Bertolt.

I feel lucky to be working in the arts - no matter how dysfunctional the art world is - and I feel hopeful that the work we publish on our website and here on Substack contributes towards the critical debate and the reimagining of better worlds that we all need right now.

If you want to read more and be part of the discussion please subscribe. Your contribution will help us commission more essays like this.

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Round up of our reviews, features and interviews:

Hardeep Pandhal: Saag and Fish Fingers at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham by our West Midlands editor Kevin Hunt.

Firehawks at Open Eye Gallery by our Merseyside and Cheshire editor Natalie Hughes.

Ethereal Matter at BasementArtsProject, Leeds by Kerry Harker.

Desire Lines at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art by Kate Sweeney.

Pathways: Exploring Bloc Projects’ Artist Development Programme by Jessica Piette.

Delaine Le Bas: Un-Fair-Ground at the Whitworth by our Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Cumbria editor Jazmine Linklater.

Attenborough Arts Centre: A Decade of Exhibitions by Anna Li.

News

Our Merseyside editor Natalie Hughes will be leading an Artist Office drop-in for At The Library on Tuesday 10th March (on every second Tuesday of the month) in the Community room, Crosby Library, 10am - 3pm.

Natalie will speak about Corridor8, telling you how to get involved and pitch ideas before she hosting a short writing workshop.

For the fourth (and final - for now?) edition 𝑺𝒑𝒆𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 have invited Ashley Holmes to join them, in partnership with Berwick Film & Media Arts Fest. There are limited free tickets available for our regular audience or entry is included with BFMAF passes. Maltings Cinema at Berwick Barracks, Sunday 22 March, Doors 13:45.

𝗔𝘀𝗵𝗹𝗲𝘆 𝗛𝗼𝗹𝗺𝗲𝘀 will present an iteration of his ongoing series, 𝘋𝘶𝘣 𝘌𝘱𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺, here centred around Luton Carnival in the 2000s, picking up and building on threads drawn out in Jennifer Reid and Ellie Armon Azoulay’s earlier listening sessions and Giles Bailey’s communally performed reinterpretations.

Our very own and very talented poet Jazmine Linklater has a number of UK events lined up for her new publication 𝘚𝘯𝘢𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥 this month. ⁣On the 19th of March she will be reading at 1b Books in Newcastle and I’ll be there! Check out the link below to see the other dates and to get more information.

Potato’s forthcoming edition of JAWS 12.2 ‘A Potato Codex: An illuminated book of experimental and collaborative writing’ currently has a call for papers and the deadline has been extended!!

Potato Press have been invited to guest edit JAWS - journal for art writing. Potato Press is an experimental art press based at Northumbria University and run by our North East editor Lesley Guy along with Kate Liston and Tom O’Sullivan. Submit your work by 27th April.

For those of you wondering what the singing-about-the-dark-times might sound like…(thank you Rosalía, thank you Björk).

With love and solidarity from Lesley and the Corridor8 team.

For several decades, I then worked as an academic in a working-class college — a space formally designated as higher education but structurally peripheral. Most of my students were the first in their families to attend university. The problem was never that they needed to be reshaped to ‘fit in’; it was that higher education rarely recognised the value of what they already brought with them. My work in education and teacher training was shaped by that shift. We had to alter how we taught, what we counted as knowledge, and how people were allowed to speak. Projects, art, writing and poetry were not enrichment activities but ways of thinking and expressing that already existed in the room. That position sharpened in 2020 during lockdown, when the first Working-Class Academics Conference we organised — originally planned as a physical gathering — was forced online. What felt at first like a compromise became its defining strength. Geography fell away. Participants joined from the US, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Experienced speakers worked alongside first-timers. Film, poetry and discussion sat alongside academic papers. What emerged was less a conference than a collective experiment in voice, and it made clear how unstable the language of class really is. ‘Class’ circulates as identity, label, method and marketing. Institutions are comfortable invoking working-class experience as an idea, far less comfortable relinquishing power or allowing people to speak for themselves. The paternalism has not disappeared; it has simply become more polished.

That context matters, because it explains why two events, encountered within days of each other, fused into a single argument in my mind. I was invited to attend a Ruskin College event at the Labour Party Conference because of earlier writing on class and academia, and because I had previously followed — and written about — Ruskin College during a period of intense controversy.

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Thinking about the past in order to understand our present is a mode very much in keeping with our latest Subsack offering from Kate Lisson From the Moving view Point Of A Major Road , which reflects on the legacy of The Angel of The North. A beautiful piece that shares her dad’s photos of the sculpture’s 1998 installation to connect personal experience with public art’s broader civic effects.

We’ve been running our Substack for just over two years now and, thanks to you, our subscribers, we’ve been able to support over twenty writers from across the North and Midlands. From Roy Claire Potter debating the best ways to nurture arts writing practices on Fine Art degree courses - a topic which sparked Pil and Galia Kollectiv to write their own response - to a beautifully rendered meander through the archive of the Natural History Society of Northumbria by Peter Mitchel, our Substack allows us to commission exciting independent writing across a range of topics.

We’re currently offering an annual subscription for just £30. So if you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed yet, now’s the time!

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£30 annual subscription offer!

Access our catalogue and support independent art writing in the North and Midlands for a special one-off annual price of £30. This not only pays our writers here, but also goes towards independent commissions on the site, like this one, so we can cover more artist-led and grassroots activity.

Round up of our reviews, features and interviews:

The Manchester Contemporary; A Diary by Will Marshall.

Unquiet Landscapes, Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield by Hanna Dhaimish

OUR TURN: The Art of Becoming, Various Locations, Bradford by Martin Scott.

Coventry Biennial , The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry by Cathy Wade.

Sport Art and Politics, a reflection on the politics of access in and between institutions, Newcastle by Kel Pereira.

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Potato’s forthcoming edition of JAWS 12.2 ‘A Potato Codex: An illuminated book of experimental and collaborative writing’ currently has a call for papers!!

Potato Press have been invited to guest edit JAWS - journal for art writing. Potato Press is an experimental art press based at Northumbria University and run by our Northeast editor Lesley Guy along with Kate Lisson and Tom O’Sullivan. Submit your ideas by 30 March 2026.

Keep on keeping things mulling, safe and cosy. With love and solidarity from Nat and the Corridor8 team x.

The next one from the archival folder shows the same wooden maquette shot at a closer frame. Only the wings’ bases are in place at this point and the cross-section of one reveals its airplane wing-like form. Gormley is tending to something at the base in this image, his left hand on the Angel’s feet, the other holding onto the right leg around its hamstring. Next is a close-up showing torso and legs up to the knees. Then, a huge, full-scale section in black painted wood in the yard outside. Gormley watches on, small by comparison.

I was twelve years old in 1998 when the Angel arrived about two miles from my house. A panoramic hilltop site located on the urban fringe was chosen by Gateshead Council for its poetic resonances of ancient and recent histories. The reclaimed hill at Low Eighton already marked miners’ work beneath the surface in the dark at the threshold of where they came into the light. Formerly this was the pithead baths for Teams Colliery, an operation which ceased in the late 1960s having worked the area for coal since the 1720s. The Angel materialized in a collaborative venture showcasing industrial strength as resistant COR-TEN steel built around an unseen skeleton was anchored in place to solid bedrock. Containing copper, this material would mature to have a rich rust-like texture and colour.

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As 2025 comes to a close, so too does our first year covering activity across the East and West Midlands, making this a fitting moment to reflect on Corridor8’s expansion southwards from the North of England. Over the past ten months we’ve published fifteen features and reviews spanning Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Walsall, working hard to build relationships across this vast, yet interconnected and deeply proud regional ecology of arts organisations and writers.

A particular highlight has been celebrating Digbeth-based Grand Union’s fifteenth Birthday through a trilogy of commissioned texts exploring their relationship to people and place at a moment of rapid change in the area. In August, Stoke-on-Trent-based Anna Francis considered how artist-led organisations entangle with place, whilst in November, Derbyshire-based Sean Roy Parker examined what Social Practice can be within non-extractive, person-centred programming. In the new year Demi Nandhra will reflect on Grand Union’s increasingly radical exhibition programming from a critically anti-ableist perspective.

It has been a joy and a privilege to support critical writing emanating from and within the West Midlands this year. Looking ahead to 2026, exciting new collaborations are already taking shape and we cannot wait to share what’s coming next :)

£30 annual subscription offer!

Access our catalogue of exclusive long reads and support independent art writing in the North and Midlands for a special one-off annual price of £30. This not only pays our writers here, but also goes towards independent commissions on the site, like this one, so we can cover more artist-led and grassroots activity.

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Barkle and Tranklements is flying off the shelves!

Our beautiful compendium of new ‘Art Writing from the Midlands’ is still available to buy online and/or in real life across the country at MAC, Birmingham; Two Queens, Leicester; Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and The NewBridge Project, Newcastle upon Tyne - More stockists to come next year!

Round up of our reviews, features and interviews:

Stephen Emmerson: How to Read a Book at Portico Library, Manchester was reviewed by Richard Barrett, finding playful questions instead of stuffiness; ‘The Portico, today, deliberately opts to show books on its shelves exhibiting evidence of wear and tear, believing it’s important to show how collections were used then, and how the Portico, as contemporary custodians, treat the collection today to pass on to future generations.’

James Harper interviewed artist Angela Davies and responded to (To the) Heart of the Matter at Plas Glyn Y Weddw in North Wales.

The inaugural edition of The Tweed River Festival, taking place across three days in Peebles, was reviewed by Maria Howard in this expansive piece, Watery Commons: The Tweed River Festival 2025.

Our Place in the Arts: Creativity, community and quiet resilience in Stockton-on-Tees is a joyous reflection on arts and place by Harriet Mee, commissioned as part of The Collective Studio, an artist development programme at The NewBridge Project.

Obsessions, Possessions: Coventry Biennial is reviewed by Daniel Sean Kelly, finding that “our cultural obsessions and possessions are a battleground for sure – and in seeking to rebuild our cultural narratives, all must be up for grabs.”

In a special voluntary piece Ciara Leeming lays out the plight of Bankley Studios in Manchester, who are facing the threat of eviction in an all-too familiar story that highlights the precarity of even long-established artist-led organisations.

‘By presenting evidence in a clear-eyed, quasi-legal way, calling on experts from many fields, the CICC’s work helps the viewer to see the true intergenerational nature of climate crime.’ - Tessa Norton, on Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal, Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes: The British East India Company on Trial at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University, Leeds.

Continuing a narrative of displacement, the natural world and a commitment to justice and solidarity, Amrit Doll reviews Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom at Nottingham Contemporary.

Forming a poignant triptych with the previous to two pieces, Silvia Hassouna reviews Lintukoto and The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing at The Newbridge Project, as part of The Collective Studio.

In a powerful reflection on Corinne: The Severed Wing Amie Kirby asserts: ‘If there is one thing I wish would come from this piece, it’s that I want every able-bodied person in my life to watch it and really listen to what is being said. As Corinne pleads in the post-show video’s conclusion, ‘don’t ever forget us’.’

Amongst many recent pieces that face up to harsh realities whilst offering hope Simon Sylvester reviews Landscape & Protest: Signal Artist Lab at Cooke’s Studios, Barrow-in-Furness: ‘Against a backdrop of nuclear fire and haemorrhaging carbon, this is not premonition but promise: if we are to survive at all, the land must become something different. If we can reinvent our past, maybe we can reimagine our future.’

Love, solidarity and happy holidays from Kevin, Lauren, Lesley and the Corridor8 team!

One of the most exciting things for me about covering the Midlands as well as the North of England is when our Regional Editors publish writing about spaces I’ve been curious about for ages, but haven’t had the chance to visit. This has been happening a lot lately, and below with the article round up you too can take a virtual tour from the Black Country to Northumberland which would, let’s face it, cost an incomprehensible amount via public transport.

Thinking further about access, presence and travel, in this month’s essay for paying subscribers, ‘A Poetics of Navigation’, Anna Li discusses several recent exhibitions across the East Midlands, Tees Valley, London and online that foreground aspects of disabled experience:

It operates within what I would describe as a posthuman topology, wherein bodies are not simply present or absent, but reconstituted through digital traces, affective reverberations, and mediated presence. I’ve also felt this reframing take hold in other mainstream cultural institutions.

Upgrade to a paid subscription to read this and the other essays and explorations that take on knotty and prickly issues in the arts and beyond, as well as supporting our continued work and independent commissions.

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On the 25-26 October you might have met Yorkshire Editor Ben Barra at Bound Art Book Fair at The Whitworth in Manchester. It was a treat to catch up with our fellow publishers and thanks to everyone who bought a book from us!

This year we have been a partner on The Newbridge Project’s Collective Studio, with critical and artwriting mentorship for the cohort from North East Editor Lesley Guy, and a series of excellent texts published on the site - two of which are live now. If you’re quick you can also catch Lesley on Slacks Radio at 3pm, Saturday 15 November.

We ventured south for Digbeth First Friday in Birmingham on 7 November with a box of Barkle and Tranklements for a launch and situated reading by Joanne Masding at Modern Clay. It was a joy to meet many of the contributors in person, and to get a sense of the city we’re now covering.

Snagged on a Red Thread by Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Cumbria Editor Jazmine Linklater was published by Monitor Books on 29 October; a long poem of protest, power and complicity. If you’ve read any of Jazmine’s writing for us you’ll know that you need to get a copy immediately.

23 November sees the first Special Collections with guest Jennifer Reid, a new event series and podcast organised by Lauren Velvick (that’s me, I’m writing this) and Kathryn Elkin that seeks to rethink how we understand the archival, from within the historic walls of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Round of of reviews, interviews and explorations:

FOREST at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery is review by Wingshan.

Acting in the Middle: A Glossary of Encounter at Sovereign Design House, Huddersfield is reviewed by Joanna Jowett.

The Inside and Outside of Belonging at The University of Leeds is reviewed by Joanna Jowett in our coverage of various MA degree shows from around the North and Midlands.

13 Beautiful Horses at Leicester Gallery, De Montford University is also an exhibition of MA student work, reviewed by Paige Costinescu.

Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton: From Skin to Land, from Walls to Worlds at GLOAM, Sheffield is reviewed by Simal Rafique, in one of our independent commissions funded by paid subscriptions here, that enable us to cover artist-led spaces.

Bloom: a Story of Metamorphosis, a contemporary dance piece performed at Hallé St Peter’s, Manchester for Japan Week

FAFSWAG: FALE SĀ / SACRED HOUSE at HOME, Manchester as part of MIF is reviewed by Jessica El Mal.

Nothing Gold Can Stay: Assembly 2025 at New Art Gallery Walsall is reviewed by Leah Hickey with deep care towards the town; ‘I see the long stretch of the canal sugar-coated with frogspawn, moss and mildew, and feel each artist’s work embedded in the overgrown landscape.’

In an independent commission from the North East, A Pink Seahorse, Kate Sweeney interviews Ziza, artist in residence with D6’s Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues; ‘But it was challenging to go into the contemporary Western way of holding oneself, you know, keeping your hips square. I wanted to make work about being flamboyant.’

British Textile Biennial 2025: The Future Was Always There across Lancashire is reviewed by Sally Button.

William English & Sandra Cross: To Farse All Things as Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham is reviewed by Wayne Burrows.

Exchange Place Studios: Inside Sheffield’s art laboratory is an exploration by Orla Foster of the artists studio complex managed by Yorkshire Artspace.

In all possible worlds: Middlesbrough Art Week, 2025, is reviewed by Kin; ‘Last year, Middlesbrough made national headlines for all the wrong reasons (anti-immigration riots). The successes of MAW unfortunately won’t attract the same level of public attention, but they really should…’

As part of The Collective Studio partnership with The Newbridge Project, Anna Mud reviews an outdoor exhibition in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Beth J Ross: Her Extraordinary Colours.

Anna Clough: Inter/Extra Terrestrial, the outcome of a residency at Full of Noises, Barrow-in-Furness is reviewed by Iona Glen.

Juliet Klottrup: An Archive at Windermere Jetty Museum, Cumbria is reviewed by Kyle Nathan Brown.

In a second commission from The Collective Studio, Mridula Sharma reviews Esther Salamon: Woodland Bird Woman at Newcastle Contemporary Art.

Simon Starling: Boat Works at Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Windermere Jetty Museum is reviewed by Caroline Bagenal.

Yuki Kihara: Darwin in Paradise Camp at The Whitworth, Manchester is reviewed by Grey Marlowe.

Up Town Again at Two Queens, Leicester is reviewed by Alexander Mobbs-Iles.

Sean Roy Parker continues our trilogy of commissioned texts exploring Grand Union’s relationship to people and place in Recomplicating Place with Social Practice.

With Make Time for Love, Jessie Jones visits Wavertree-Picton for Picton Play; ‘That magic and mystery, that local knowledge and connection, is not a creative force to be extracted by a visiting artist’

Stay warm and dry, with love and solidarity from Lauren and the Corridor8 team x

As a disabled artist and curator myself, I have long moved through a cultural landscape structured around my exclusion. My artistic formation has been shaped not only by creativity but by structural absence: the absence of representation, access, and belonging. The presence of disability within the contemporary art world has rarely felt integrated into critical discourse or institutional memory.

Yet recently it seems as though something has shifted.

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In our latest independent commission, Kate Paul reviews ‘Ghost Driver’, the debut novel by poet Nell Osborne about ‘a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her’. Thanks to all the subscribers and donors who continue to support us - we literally couldn’t do it without you! As always, in these permanently strange and upsetting times it’s important not only to persist but to nourish the networks and communities that sustain us.

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In other news, Barkle and Tranklements continues to wend its way into bookshops across the land. You can find our collection of Midlands-related meanderings in:

MAC, Birmingham

Two Queens, Leicester

Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh new!

The NewBridge Project, Newcastle upon Tyne new!

And we’re also looking forward to greeting you in person at the Bound Art Book Fair, 25-26 October at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Come and say hello!

Subscribers this month were also treated to our Associate Editor, Laura Harris’ exploration of ‘the slow accretion of experience and artworks that mark biennial time’, and entanglements with broader rhythms of the city in ‘The Lithic Biennial’. If you’d like to immerse yourself in a reading of the biennial that is counter to the breathless mad dash around the city that we’re perhaps more familiar with, I’d wholeheartedly recommend hitting that subscribe button below…

Subscribe to read:

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Round up of our reviews, features and interviews:

Nell Osborne: Ghost Driver, Kate Paul reviews the first novel by Nell Osborne, published by MOIST

A Gathering: Newcastle University Post-Graduate Degree Show, Newcastle University by Uma Breakdown

Pippa Eason: Four-fold Reverie, PINK, Manchester by Jazmine Linklater

The Way In Is Not The Whole Way Through, texture, Manchester by Laura Biddle

Dale Holmes: Beenderman & Gytrash, South Square Gallery, Thornton by Hanna Dhaimish

Elizabeth Price - ‘HERE WE ARE’, The Black-E, Liverpool Biennial 2025 by Rory Cook

Slow Play, Shared Futures: an interview with Jazmin Morris about Sandbox, modal gallery, SODA, Manchester by Lesley Taker

The Offbeat Sari, Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham by Roo Dhissou

Resounding Diasporic Sonic Worlds, The NewBridge Project, Newcastle upon Tyne by Christie Yung-hei Chan

We Grown-Ups Can Also Be Afraid: Creativity in Times of Crisis, Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester by Jennifer Brough

A Grand Union: Artist-Led Entanglements With Place, Grand Union, Birmingham by Anna Francis

Pippa Hale: Pet Project, The Bowes Museum, County Durham by Lesley Guy

Pepperpot The Mole & Final Boss: Bruce Asbestos’s Pop Cultural Follies, Ilam Park & Wentworth Woodhouse by Wayne Burrows

Who Wants Flowers When They Are Dead? Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead by Denise Courcoux

Going Back Brockens: Monuments and Rhetoric After the Miners’ Strike, The Warehouse, Bishop Auckland by Kate Liston

How to Build a Village (for Artists), St Helens by Sinéad Nunes

Confluences, Cross Lane Projects, Kendal by Vaishna Surjid

Uncanny Carnival, The NewBridge Project, Newcastle upon Tyne by Lesley Guy

Love and solidarity from Rachel and the Corridor8 team!

I should be sleeping when I click on a link that a former writing tutor of mine shares on Instagram, a text from a literary event called MANIFESTO! in New York; ‘a rowdy audience (…), downtown Manhattan, elbow-to-elbow, knee-to-knee.’ She took part in it alongside her partner, also a writer and critic, and three others. I read their short texts with the lights off, evading sleep, each ‘a vision for the future (and possible reformation) of criticism.’

One of the presenting writers, Alex Kitnick, opens his text with:

‘When I think about the social function of art, I think about the subway. I think about people clustering, gathering, shuffling, and moving, and then I think about all the cars linked together—eight, nine, ten, eleven at a time. I remember, too, that another train will arrive minutes later, and that the F is only one of many lines crisscrossing the city, twenty-four hours a day. When I think about all this, art—and the audience for art, which includes the audience for criticism—seems fairly small. I think about Poetry in Motion.’

Kitnick’s subway analogy occupies me for days. It is grasping towards an understanding of how the individual operates in relation to the collective, and reminds me of a sentence in Peter Cornell's 2024 book Ways of Paradise: ‘Particulars are understood via the whole and the whole via particulars.’ This consideration of the social function of art – as a web of small parts or interlocking rooms, weaving amongst each other – feels more relatable to my own experience of it than any notion of the art-world as a singular, vast, self-contained system.

Then I consider that, on a micro scale, the particulars could also be the artists and their ways of art-making. On the subway car, I sit without moving yet in perpetual quivering motion, and I find the same interiority that I find in art-making, leading to the same flow-state. A state where the inner mind moves further and deeper into its own sublime landscapes. What is that interior: memory? speculation? soul? instinct?

I abruptly left London one cold December day after two tumultuous years. The previous summer, I spent most days with two close writing friends: we laid on the grass in the park after seminars, having just opened like shells, poured out through our words, spinning tales and reading each other with critical intent. It was casual, sitting there, knowing one another more deeply than most others ever will. But when the summer ended, the city grew sad as I grew tired. I left London and started over again in the place I was born, returning as if both it and myself were entirely new versions.

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Compared with flash-in-the-pan art fairs, or steadily plodding institutional exhibition timescales, biennials move slowly. They become way-markers in the memories of city residents, definitive landmarks around which to organise the tumult of passing time in the rearview mirror. This is not how they are usually written about: the reviewer tends to be a scuttling and rushing thing, with deadlines to hit and opinions to form. They miss the ways that art works settle into place, how the cityscape absorbs or resists them, and how they turn into memories, conversations, and arguments between friends. How can someone passing through a city in art-consumption mode know what it means that this set of works, at this moment of time, is here?

I write as a sociologist of art, which means that I have a particular disciplinary inclination to look at art in its social contexts. Sociologists of art have often been accused of overlooking the artwork itself in favour of the material, economic, or cultural conditions of its making, distribution, or reception. To make up for this deficit, many of my colleagues started to, in their words, bring the artwork back in to their analysis. This has often resulted in very materially driven analyses: how a particularly chalky work impacted audience interaction; or how a particularly heavy work impacted on the workers who installed it. My preference is instead to think of the art object as fundamentally emplaced, and to look for the ways that they draw from and impacts their surroundings.

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A fair bit has happened since our last monthly newsletter. We've officially launched our new book Barkle and Tranklements online (see below for some news about bricks-and-mortar stockists across the Midlands) and published a whole lot more fab writing on contemporary art activity across the Midlands and North of England. In addition, this week, in conjunction with South Square and OUR TURN Festival in Bradford, we've launched a bursary to find a new or emerging writer to cover some of the exciting artist-led activity that will be springing up across the city from September. (Do please pass on details to anyone you think might be eligible and interested!)

So, read on to find out more about all of the above, whilst I once again idly weigh up the pros and cons of becoming a teacher so that I can spend a month on the Costa de Almeria every year like my (wonderful and deserving) sister...

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Open Call: Writer Bursary Opportunity – OUR TURN × Corridor8

Corridor8 is partnering with OUR TURN to offer a paid writing bursary for an emerging or early-career writer based in the Bradford region. The successful applicant will be invited to attend exhibitions and events and receive a £350 commission to create a written piece to be published with Corridor8. Editorial support, travel costs and networking opportunities included.

Deadline: Tuesday 2 September, 12 noon.

Learn more and apply: southsquarecentre.co.uk/writer-bursary

We welcome applications from writers of all backgrounds, especially those underrepresented in arts writing.

New Midlands stockists for Barkle and Tranklements

As you may have heard, we have a new book out! You can find out more information and order it online here, but if you want to save on postage and support a local business into the bargain, you can also find Barkle and Tranklements at the following wonderful locations:

Two Queens, Leicester [Two Queens, 2 Queen Street, Leicester, LE1 1QW]

Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham [Five Leaves Bookshop, 14a Long Row, Nottingham, NG1 2DH]

MAC, Birmingham [Midlands Arts Centre, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, B12 9QH]

With more locations to be announced very soon…

Front page round-up

Nat Hughes went to see Amartey Golding’s new work Chainmail 4: Silent Knight (2025) at FACT, Liverpool, ‘the product of a two-year collaboration in which Golding worked with incarcerated men and prison guards based at HMP Altcourse.’

Chantal Oakes reviewed Snapes Open Call and Response, at Snapes Printworks, Preston, which ran for just over a week at the end of June / beginning of July and ‘investigated urban regeneration in a small northern city and asked what the place of independent artists is.’

Anthony Ellis reviewed The Workers and The Binding Tide, both part of 'Sankey: Lives Through the Lens', a two-year curatorial project by Signal Film and Media, an arts charity based in Barrow-in-Furness, focussing on the Sankey Photography Archive, on display across various sites until 31 Aug.

Kerry Harker returned to our pages to review Mia Mai Symonds: A Life of its Own, the last show at its current location for BLANK_, Leeds, on until 22 Aug.

Writer Kirsty Jukes found 'a visually dazzling experience that evokes many childhood memories' at Chila Burman: I Love You Southport, on at The Atkinson until 15 Nov.

'Paper Goes Swimming' by Susannah Thompson is the latest instalment of our series exploring the Women in Print Residencies at Artlab Contemporary Print Studios, Preston. This piece focusses on the 'fantastical, beguiling' work of Alicia Paz.

‘Love Cries’ by Emily Roux is a special exploration of the Cardiff leg of the Feeding Chair UK Tour. 'Born out of collaborative arts-based project Feed... the Chair declares a welcome and a nurturing space for mothers, caregivers and babies', and can be found at Chapel Arts Centre until September.

Nathan Coley talked to Lesley Guy at The Bowes Museum about the installation of two major works, one in the grounds and one amongst the collections, both on display until 1 Mar 2026.

Stella Baraklianou found both 'a sense of fixedness and the possibility of escape' at Paula Chambers: Still. Stray. Stowaway. at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University, which you can see until 27 Sep.

Mymona Bibi shines a light on some of the fantastic work being carried out by facilitator Johurun Nessa and others as part of the Gopshop Bangladeshi Women’s Group in Newcastle.

Alice Bradshaw reviewed the ambitious and expansive Memorial Gestures exhibition at the 1912 Mill at Sunny Bank Mills, the culmination of three years of artist, writer and translator residencies at Holocaust Centre North, Huddersfield.

Francesca Brooks heard talks, saw paintings and found a welcoming, 'improvised and generative' atmosphere the Pearls Painting Symposium at the Birley Project Space, Preston.

And that’s all for now; thanks for reading! There’s plenty more coming up in August, including a great new essay by Laura Harris about living alongside the biennial in Liverpool and the idea of a biennial as a sedimentary layer – set to appear here on Substack very very soon, so subscribe to read that in full once it’s out!

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Love and solidarity from Ben and the Corridor8 team