Posts in Highlights Category

Salford Rediscovered is a celebratory closing party to mark the end of the Rediscovering Salford project, a city-wide programme of events which highlight and celebrate Salford’s green spaces – inspired by the launch of RHS Bridgewater gardens.  

From 2020 – 2022, Rediscovering Salford animated the city with new commissions, exhibitions, workshops and events. As it comes to a close, we will gather to share and celebrate with a bang across Salford Museum and Art Gallery, the University of Salford campus, and Peel Park. The event will include visual art, music, films, tours, performances and more. From an exclusive appearance of ‘Madam Mort’ as created by drag artist Cheddar Gorgeous, to mouth-watering street food from GRUB, and to family-friendly workshops, this is a party for anyone and everyone. Families can enjoy workshops and fun-for-all performances from 4:00-6:30 across The Crescent with receptions, live music and a growing ‘party vibe’ from 7:00 onwards.

After all the trials and tribulations of the last few years, we can’t wait to celebrate with everyone involved in making Rediscovering Salford such a vibrant project. We do hope you can join us as we celebrate in style on the 16th.

The full programme is now available over on the Eventbrite page, with the full listings of all the afternoon’s activities from curators tours to live DJs.

If you are planning on joining us on the 16th, please register for free here.

Ahead of the 16th, we still have two final events in the Rediscovering Salford programme:

Salford Rediscovered is led by the Salford Culture and Place Partnership, the University of Salford, Solid Ground, Salford City Council, Salford Museum and Art Gallery, and RHS Garden Bridgewater. Rediscovering Salford has created fantastic engagement and original commissions with Islington Mill, Paradise Works, START Creative, The Lowry and Walk the Plank. This programme is generously supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, as well as contributions from all the project partners.

Homage to the Rain by Antony Barkworth-Knight will be on display at RHS Garden Bridgewater from 27 May 2022 as part of new exhibition Planting for the Planet – alongside new work by local youth environment groups.

Gwen Riley Jones – Socially Engaged Photographer in Residence at the University of Salford Art Collection – has teamed up with RHS communities and youth environment charity Action for Conservation to create new artworks to demonstrate the essential relationship between people and plants to create climate resilient communities. 

A group of young people from Action for Conservation worked with Gwen to produce new pieces of artwork using experimental printmaking and photography techniques. They also visited the Collection’s new campus store to see a range of works up close, and to consider how art and visual media might help communicate environmental issues.

Alongside their own work, the group selected Homage to the Rain from the collection to add to the RHS display. The artwork was originally co-commissioned for the University of Salford Art Collection with Quays Culture, and the film premiered at Lightwaves Festival, Salford Quays, in December 2019. 

Homage to the Rain celebrates rain around the globe and explores how we react to it and how it changes our lives. Including video clips from every world continent, the film was produced via an online open call for contributors to send mobile phone clips of local rainfall. The short looped film is set to an original score by musicians Rob Turner (of Manchester jazz group Gogo Penguin), Sam Healey and Conor Miller.

“Through the prism of the phenomena of rainfall we will see how people are living around the world in 2019; what are our homes like? What environments do we live in? Our clothes, our culture, our surrounding landscape, our way of life. How is this transformed when it rains?” – Rebecca Rae-Evans, digital strategist for Homage to the Rain.  

The group of young people from Action for Conservation viewed the film and Mariam said, “I chose Antony Barkworth Knight’s Homage to the Rain, I like it because people are kind of hiding from the rain, it just shows you that people do not like rain, even though it’s very beneficial for them, they do not like it.”

The exhibition, Planting for the Planet, opens later this month at RHS Garden Bridgewater and runs throughout the summer. Find out more about the exhibition here.

The exhibition is developed in partnership with the RHS and IGNITION – an EU-funded project bringing together local government, universities, environmental organisations, businesses and the local community to find new ways of using plants and nature to protect communities from increased rainfall, flooding and heatwaves. 

With applications for the 22/23 Graduate Scholarship Programme now open (delivered in partnership with Castlefield Gallery) this month Graduate Associate Rowan Pritchard spoke with current graduate scholar Jeffrey Knopf. Graduating from MA Contemporary Fine Art in 2021, Knopf was awarded a studio space at Paradise Works here in Salford as part of a bespoke scholarship. We caught up with him at his studio for our ongoing ‘In the Studio’ feature.  

Hi Jeffrey, first of all, can you tell us a little about your creative practice?

My current practice involves the use of 3D scanning and printing technology. The end product being printed sculptures / components which I then juxtapose and balance with handmade and found items, to form new dialogues that question the human condition, fragility, loss, death and mental health. I am especially interested in the concepts of defamiliarisation and making the known become something other than what we recognise. 

As a 2021 graduate of the MA Contemporary Fine Art course, you were the recipient of the single MA graduate scholarship awarded. How have you found the scholarship programme so far?

The scholarship programme so far has been really good, I have had some really good one to one coaching sessions with Jo Clements as well as sessions with Matthew Pendergast, Deputy Director and curator at Castlefield Gallery.

A standout moment for me was being able to be part of Paradise Works open studio weekend. This was important as it gave me a chance to properly curate and showcase my work in my studio and to see some of my sculptures all set up together for the first time. I also really got a lot from the studio visits, seeing other scholars’ work practices and getting feedback on my own work, it gave me a lot to think about and ideas to put into action.

Even though the programme is nearing an end we still have a lot more to do including the mentor part of the programme which I am especially looking forward to. All I can say is that at this point I have gained a lot out of the experience so far.

And over the course of the programme so far, how do you feel your work has developed?

My work is constantly developing as I’m always striving to learn new skills and push it further but thanks to the studio space in Paradise Works I am able try out new ideas. I have to say that after Christmas I felt totally deflated and lost with what I was doing, I then had one of those light bulb moments where quite a few things slipped in to place and I’m excited to see what comes next.

That’s great to hear! We’re excited to see what comes next too – Are you working on anything at the moment?

I’m currently working towards an exhibition with the ceramic artist Angela Tait at the Gallery Frank Littleborough in October. I am also embarking on a collaboration with the artist Alan Baker based on the idea of traps.

As part of the scholarship programme, the collection will be acquiring some of your work. What does it mean to you to have your work in the University Art Collection?

From the start this has been really important to me, it’s up there with me getting a distinction for my MA, it feels like after 30 years of being an artist I have finally arrived. A piece of my work will be in a recognised collection.  

And have you thought at all about what you might want that piece to be? And how this might represent your practice?  

I have thought about this quite a bit since starting the project, the problem is I’m always producing work. I would like to work with the University of Salford Art Collection in the choosing of a piece or a collection of pieces of my work. I see this as a kind of snapshot moment, I want it to be representative of where I am at this point in my artistic career / journey.

Finally, with applications for the 2022/23 Graduate Scholarship Programme now open, do you have any advice for students who might be thinking of applying?  

My main answer is apply, as you have to be in it to win it, but what a great opportunity to be a part of! 

I very nearly did not apply, and now I’m so glad I did. I have to say as with all things in life you really only get out of it what you put in. I know for many it is hard to juggle art and work life, but this really is an exception, you may never get another chance to take part in something like this. Each part of this program is carefully thought out by the team of people involved to help you as a graduate artist to gain the confidence, skills, and the contacts to progress further in your artistic journey post university.  

I think you can tell from this I am really grateful to have been given the chance to be part of this, so I would like to take the opportunity here to say thank you to all those involved. 

Jeffrey Knopf’s art practice is interested in the past, present, and future, a scattering of forgotten memories and discarded components; these are then offset with scanned and 3D printed artifacts from museum collections. He is an artist interested in the creation of objects, and has exhibited work here in the UK, Switzerland, and the USA. During the past few years, he has moved away from the traditional way of working by sketching and designing a piece to something more intuitive in line with play and discovery.  

The sculptures / assemblages serve as reminders of fallen empires, the fragments of which are found online or scanned directly from museum collections, to be taken apart and reassembled to create new forms and dialogues. Balanced and teetering on the edge of collapse, the sculptures/ assemblages are a metaphor for how fragile the interaction of technology, humans and the world is, reminding us to slow down and take stock of what we have in front of us and what can be lost over time.  

www.jeffreyknopf.co.uk / @jeffrey_knopf

Applications are now open for the 2022/23 Graduate Scholarship Programme.
Deadline 9.00am Monday 23rd May 2022
Click here for all the information and how to apply.

Our outgoing Digital Content and Engagement Officer, Alistair Small, offers some reflections on the collection’s digitisation project and new online catalogue.

I’m now coming to the end of my time working with the University of Salford Art Collection as Digital Content and Engagement Officer. Since last September we’ve seen a step-change in the accessibility of the University’s collection, facilitated by a move to a new, purpose-built Art Store in the heart of the campus and our growing Online Catalogue.

Through this project, we’ve been able to open up opportunities for engagement with the collection in both online and real space, and lay the foundations for a collection that is accessible to all, and used by students, staff and the wider community. Our Socially Engaged Photographer in Residence – Gwen Riley Jones – has recently facilitated the first visits to our new store, with Salford Youth Council and Action for Conservation. These visits prompted enthusiastic and heated debates around the definitions of art and how it can function in wider society and hit home the importance of viewing works in person. Ahead of the visits, both groups were invited to use the Online Catalogue to browse and select works to then view in person in the stores, giving them agency over the visit. These are exactly the kinds of interactions we hoped to facilitate through this project: using digital platforms as a point of entry to the collection and to generate interest in and engagement with our work, and with art and visual culture more generally.

Moreover, collections are holders and producers of cultural heritage and making them visible is crucial in opening up critical dialogues around collecting practices and institutional practices. It is hoped that the online collection will support the work and research of students and staff across the University, particularly around the creation of cultural narratives and institutional practices: what’s collected and what’s left out, and how does this influence definitions of culture, and historical narratives?

The practicalities of digitising a large number of artworks and creating a framework in which to show them has required a lot of collaboration – with photographers, web developers and our colleagues in the Archive and Library. There’s so much variation in the collection both in terms of medium (with works ranging from prints and drawings to performance objects and Augmented Reality installations) and in terms of the amount of contextual information held by the University – particularly with works from the collection’s early days. This has facilitated many conversations about what it means to represent a work online, and what risks being lost through this representation. The digitisation process can also elevate the works in the collection. I’ve found it particularly satisfying to make visible works which are otherwise hidden in drawers and plan chests or haven’t been on public display for years.

Digital photography also allows new details to emerge and for works to be studied in greater detail – for example in the below Self-Portrait by Albert Adams: the detail can reveal brush strokes and movement that show the painter’s process and technique – his creative process frozen in time, his hand made present.

The digitisation process has also opened up the possibility of drawing new connections between works, offered by the ability to position disparate works together, side-by-side within a digital, flat space. The catalogue home page also randomly regenerates the order of works, creating new and previously unexplored comparisons, and generating visual connections between works.

To date we have made over 200 works from the collection available to view online, and we’re uploading new works every week. There’s over 800 artworks in the collection, not to mention the various studio objects and documents in its care.

Moving forward, the collection – both in its online and physical spaces – will be a site of activity, with new tools allowing users to curate their selections further, and there’s a lot of potential for residencies working with the collection, for artists and researchers alike.

• Up to £1000 cash 
• Studio space for up to 12 months 
• Mentor support, coaching, and guidance 
• Professional development opportunities 
• Opportunity to have work permanently acquired into the University of Salford Art Collection 

The Graduate Scholarship Programme, now in its eighth year, is open for applications for the 2022 cohort. 

The 12-month scheme, managed by the University of Salford Art Collection in collaboration with Castlefield Gallery, supports artists in the crucial first year after graduation – providing time, space, and resources to continue developing a professional contemporary practice. 

The bespoke programme includes: studio space in Salford with one of our partners: Hot Bed Press, Islington Mill, Paradise Works, support from Redeye, The Photography Network – alongside mentoring and cash for materials, travel, or other costs. 

Eligibility: 

The scheme is only open to University of Salford final year undergraduates from the School of Arts and Media (who are due to graduate or complete their studies in July 2022) – plus there will be a maximum of one scholarship open to an MA graduate (due to graduate or complete in September 2022). 

Please note: some details of the scheme are subject to changes in COVID-19 restrictions. Full guidance is included on the application form (below). 

Read more about the scheme here, and find out more about our previous scholars here. 

APPLY NOW:
Deadline 9.00am Monday 23rd May 2022
To apply: Send in your completed application form, plus your CV (up to 2 pages) and image, video or sound files of your work (up to 4 files).
Full details & contact info in the application form:
Click here to download: 2022 Application form

Please contact artcollection@salford.ac.uk for any issues or questions.

Ahead of our artist tours this weekend (Sat 2nd) of The Storm Cone – an augmented reality app by Laura Daly, which explores the site of the former bandstand in Peel Park – we share a guest post by University Archivist Alexandra Mitchell. The unique collection of material in the University’s Brass Band Archives was one of the early inspirations for the project – here Alex shares some selected items.

Find out more about the University Archives on their new online platform here – Salford Digital Archives

Brass bands have a long history in Salford and the North West and Laura Daly’s amazing The Storm Cone put me in mind of one of our archive collections, the Roy Newsome Brass Band Archive. The collection is a treasure trove of documents, posters, photos, publications and music scores about brass bands and brass banding in the UK. It was put together by Dr Roy Newsome, who was Head of Band Studies at the University during the 1970s and 1980s. Highlights from the collection include an almost complete run of the Brass Band News – a newspaper (which the title suggests!!) about the brass band scene which ran from 1881 to 1956. It might sound niche, but it is fantastic source for understanding the history and popularity of brass banding and how it intersected with what was going on in the wider world. It contains some fantastic adverts for instruments and clothing, as well as articles and reproduced scores. In fact, Brass Band News is just one of many serial publications, magazines or newspapers that we hold on the brass band theme.

Other popular historical items from the collection include programmes from the Brass Band Contests that were held up the road from Salford at Belle Vue, Manchester since the 19th century. The collection also includes posters from some other early organised brass band events.

There is also an array of music scores and band parts, many of which are out-of-print or rare manuscripts, which were donated to Dr Newsome by various people and bands themselves. Keeping with the Belle Vue theme, this material includes test pieces that were used in the contests as early as 1875.

Thanks to Dr Newsome’s enthusiasm and expert knowledge of brass bands music, the collection is an amazing and unique resource for anyone interested in the field. From the histories of individual brass bands and major personalities, to over 300 vinyl recordings and photograph of the brass band ‘scene’ in the 1970s and 1980s, the collection touches on all aspects of brass band culture in the UK.

26th March – 11th June 2022
at Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool

& from 15th July 2022
at Salford Museum & Art Gallery

‘Stirrings’ will be the first major solo exhibition by Rachel Goodyear in a North-West museum and art gallery. It has been co-commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery and the University of Salford Art Collection and will include new large-scale drawings and a new animation. While the animation shows Goodyear experimenting with structure and sound, the new works on paper see the artist working at a scale larger than ever before.

Over her 20-year career, Goodyear has retained a core commitment to the act of drawing, as well as a commitment to the expansion of drawing as a medium. Throughout her practice, her drawings have found their way onto bus tickets, diary pages and envelopes; as well as onto more conventional sources of paper; while her experiments with drawing as a form, have seen her works take shape as sculpture, animation, performance and installation. For this new exhibition, Goodyear has experimented with scale, making her largest and most detailed drawing to date. With heightened detail, bodies contort, a wolf-pack is tangled into a single entity of snarls and fur and figures explore sensations that hold an ambiguous balance of pleasure and discomfort.

Goodyear often describes her drawings as ‘fragments’ – like glimpses from a half remembered dream or a distorted memory – frozen in a moment. For ‘Stirrings’, alongside new works on paper, Goodyear has also developed a major new installation. With nods to mythological journeys into the Underworld, Dante’s levels of Hell and our continuous scrolling through social media, Goodyear’s animation takes the form of a never-ending descent. With a specially commissioned soundtrack by Matt Wand, Goodyear’s frozen moments are locked in time to be repeated forever.

Elements from the exhibition will be jointly acquired into the permanent collections of Grundy Art Gallery and the University of Salford Art Collection. The exhibition will also tour to Salford Museum and Art Gallery from 15 July 2022.

Artists include: Mollie Balshaw, Jesse Glazzard, Sadé Mica, and SHARP

Theirs, Yours, Ours brings together the work of four University of Salford Alumni who explore queer and non-binary perspectives through print, photography, painting, and installation.

From the 1990s to today, the artists in this exhibition explore what it means to be represented, celebrate identities that lie beyond traditional gender expectations, and reflect on the shifts in identity that take place over time. Together, they consider: What does it mean to be, and look, ‘queer’? How are we limited by society’s binary expectations? And in what way does existing beyond them free us?

With work made during the artists’ time at University and as Graduate Scholars, along-side more recent work, together Theirs, Yours, Ours celebrates the possibilities of queer and non-binary identity, while also reflecting the shifts and transitions in identity that take place over time.

Read more:
– Exhibition Introduction
– Exhibition Handout

Dancing With Elvis (1999-2021) by artist SHARP was made in the late 1990s when Section 28 legislation severely limited LGBTQ+ freedom of expression. The work reflects their butch dyke and non-binary identity at a time of censorship across education, the mainstream media, and everyday life.

Jesse Glazzard’s LGBT+ Letters (2018-19) counters the ‘complete lack of queer visibility’ he was met with upon coming out at secondary school through intimate snapshots accompanied by hand-written accounts of the subjects’ own experiences of queerness and representation.

Sade Mica series of screenprints draws on their own identity, experiences and environments. The open-ended question in screenprint Sheddin’ (2018) asks: ‘Me hair’s gone, now what?’ and brims with the excitement of queer possibility and the anxiety of uncertainty that comes hand in hand.

Mollie Balshaw’s paintings in the ‘expanded field’ extend beyond the traditional bounds and restrictions of both painting and portraiture – to reflect the expansive, multi-dimensional, and even sometimes playful nature of non-binary experience.

SHARP graduated from BA Visual Arts and Culture in 1999, Glazzard from BA Fashion Image Making and Styling in 2018, Mica from BA Fine Art in 2018 and Balshaw from BA Fine Art in 2019.

Exhibition Dates: 
Wednesday 30 March 2022 – Friday 30 September 2022 (closed bank holidays).
Opening hours: Monday – Friday 10am – 4pm
Admission: Free
Venue: New Adelphi Exhibition Gallery, University of Salford, University Road West, M5 4BR

Accessibility Information:  

The New Adelphi Exhibition Gallery is located on the ground floor of the New Adelphi building. The gallery is wheelchair accessible, with seating, toilets, and a shop/cafe for refreshments available within the New Adelphi building.  

For full accessibility information including parking, facilities, and details for each entrance, please see the New Adelphi building guide on AccessAble, available here.  

If you have any additional questions or concerns about visiting the New Adelphi Exhibition Gallery, don’t hesitate to email us at artcollection@salford.ac.uk. 

Rediscovering Salford: Tours of The Storm Cone and Exhibition Launch

Join us on Saturday 2 April as we celebrate the final months of Rediscovering Salford, a city-wide creative programme which highlights Salford’s parks and green spaces.

Artist Laura Daly will lead tours of her augmented reality artwork The Storm Cone in Peel Park, and you can see Lowri Evans’ new exhibition Leaves / Leaving in the Museum and meet the artist. You can also still visit the exhibition You Belong Here which runs until 19 June.

The exhibition opening is from 2:00 – 4:00pm. Please book your visit to the museum to attend. Tours of The Storm Cone will be at 12pm and 2pm and need to be booked separately.

In addition, there are monthly curator tours of the exhibition, including BSL and Audio Described sessions – plus an artist talk with Laura Daly on 19th May. For all dates, further information, and free ticket booking, visit the Salford Museum & Art Gallery ‘What’s on’ page.

You can also read more about the artists & exhibition on the project website.

Gwen gets to know members of Salford Youth Council. Their conversation begins by discussing ‘What is NOT art?’

Getting to know each other – the importance of listening

In November I started attending meetings of Salford Youth Council (SYC), a youth voice group for anyone aged 11-21 who lives, is educated, or works in Salford. The group meet on a weekly basis, to plan events, work on campaigns, and promote positive stories of young people in Salford. SYC are the home of the Young Mayor and Member of Youth Parliament for Salford. 

When I first joined the group I began by listening, and joining in conversation when appropriate. I was there to get to know the group, its members and to start to understand how the groups works. 

SYC were working on a range of projects, including how to tackle hate crime, child obesity and sexual harassment in schools. They began work on a photo project for Holocaust Memorial Day, they had to take images and write a caption to the prompt – ‘One day…’. The group came up with some brilliant images and captions. I joined in to review the images each week and then the group would go out and take more images. Some people knew how they wanted to caption their images, but sometimes the whole group would collaborate to produce a caption that everyone agreed on. One member of the group is a wordsmith and wrote incredibly poetic captions for other people’s images.  

The images were shared at an event as part of Holocaust Memorial Day remembrance in Salford. You can view the images being read by member of the group, and Salford Young Mayor, Rosie https://twitter.com/salfordyouth1/status/1486807661211537411 

Questioning is so important – what is NOT art?

In January I started working directly with members of the group. In the first session we had Amber, Alex, Chinaleigh and Ollie. As a place to start from I asked them ‘What is NOT art?’ which prompted a passionate and wide-ranging discussion. I recorded the conversation and have written up what they said. The group also had a roll of paper to write their responses or draw on if they preferred to contribute that way.  

Chinaleigh said ‘everything in the world could be art in its own way’ 

Ollie said ‘nothing is art – literally nothing. Nothing is not art, but nothing is also art.’ 

Alex said ‘absence of anything is art, if someone can find some kind of meaning to it or feels something then it’s probably art.’ 

We agreed that anything can be art – so I took them back to the original question – what is not art? 

‘I was going to say things that you can’t feel or see, something that doesn’t make you feel something’ 

‘You can put a filing cabinet in an empty room and someone will find a message in it.’ 

‘Is destruction art?’ – ‘I think the general consensus is yeah’ 

Amber said ‘my favourite artist uses the pain he has gone through in life to create his art. I think that’s really cool’. 

I asked can the messages in the making of the art be different to the message the audience gets from the art? 

‘Everyone can bring their own meanings’ 

Chinaleigh said ‘so like a poppy, people could say it’s for rememberace and stuff for the soldiers, but it could also be red for blood’. 

One the walls of the room we were sat in were some medical drawings, so I asked is medicine art? 

‘It can be. Science is a pretty artistic thing. Science is art – you have to draw everything out like lungs and things’ 

‘But when you think about it, everything is art, cos art is such a varied thing’. 

What makes good art or bad art? 

‘That is really subjective’ (x2) 

So, thinking about the University of Salford Art Collection, I asked them, if you were in charge how would you decide which art is good art and which art is bad art? 

‘If you want to reach as many people as possible, the people deciding should be a group with totally different interests and stuff’ 

‘You need a variety of people deciding, unless there is a theme’. 

Creating through conversation

While we were talking, Chinaleigh, who is a cadet and had come straight from training, she was dressed in a green camouflage uniform, drew this brilliant graphic image of the word ‘art’. I love it and have made it into a sticker for her and to share with the groups.