SPARK #48: Collective Curating
🗓️ 6 June 2026, 11am - 1:30pm
📍Manchester Museum, M13 9PL
🌿Book free tickets in bio
SPARK #48 Collective Curating with Clare Gannaway and Alice Blackwell
What does it mean to make decisions collectively?
Curating can be a brilliant way to bring people together to design ways of being, creating and working together. It can be a joyful, non-hierarchical process in which everyone feels valued and collectively empowered.
In this workshop Clare and Alice will guide participants through a consensus-based method of facilitation to explore values and needs in relation to collective curating. What needs to be agreed and in place before we even start to make decisions together? How do we ensure that everyone’s contributions are valued?
Clare and Alice will facilitate the workshop with the aim of agreeing a set of shared principles to guide a collective curating process. At the end of the workshop you will be encouraged to reflect, and perhaps you will even be inspired to take action with next steps and curate something together…
This workshop is in development, so we’re making it free to attend. This is an ideal opportunity to be part of some emerging ideas and contribute to a creative experiment. Feedback will be very welcome.
Read more about Clare Gannaway and Alice Blackwell via the link!
🌍 Earth Day at Castlefield Gallery
At Castlefield Gallery, environmental responsibility is embedded in how we work, programme, and collaborate.
Since 2022, SPARK (@sparkartistsnetwork ) has grown its North West network of artists responding directly to the climate crisis. What began as a response to demand for low-carbon art-making has become an active, evolving community with monthly artist-led sessions, over 100 members, and ongoing conversations around how creative practice can intervene in the current trajectory toward climate breakdown.
(A new SPARK web page is coming soon — and find out more about the next session on the SPARK insta page.)
SPARK is completely free to join and attend, and all are welcome.
This commitment continues in our upcoming exhibition:
OUT HERE
3 May – 19 July
Preview: 30 April, 6–8pm
A group exhibition exploring our relationship with the natural world through drawing, film, painting, performance, photography, print, sculpture and site-specific work.
We’re pleased to welcome back Shezad Dawood, exhibiting alongside North of England–based artists Ashleigh Beattie, Emelia Hewitt, Steve Sutton, Adam Rawlinson and Keziah Thomas-Mellor.
This Earth Day, we’re recognising the role artists and communities play in shaping our future. 🌍
images:
1) Image of chromosomes (blue) lined up for cell division courtesy of Jane Stout, Indiana University. Used under a Creative Commons license /licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
2) Ashleigh Beattie, Cracked Earth (2025), Detail. Detail Clay on foil. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
3) Shezad Dawood, Leviathan Cycle, Episode 7_
Africana, Ken Bugul & Nemo, (2022). Commissioned by Toronto Biennial of Art and Leviathan – Human & Marine Ecology. Courtesy of the artist and UBIK Productions.
4) SPARK 47 image used - Nerissa Cargill Thompson – Choice (mixed media, 2022)
SPARK #47: Preston Double Dip
🗓️ 9 May 2026, 11am - 3pm
📍The Harris, PR1 2PP
🌿Book free tickets in bio
Our May SPARK session sees us taking a double dip in Preston. We’ll start with an artist tour of Nerissa Cargill Thompson’s solo exhibition ‘The Problem Lies Upstream’, followed by a workshop led by Jackie Haynes on Blue Sky Interventions into Climate Breakdown.
The Problem Lies Upstream refers to the fact that many of the problems on our coasts and beaches are caused by activity further away. Dropped litter and flushed sanitary products get washed down drains into the water system and eventually pumped out into the sea, where it is often joined by other beach litter left by day trippers.
In 2022 Fylde Council commissioned Nerissa to make the Green Loop collection in order to highlight the issue of plastic pollution on the Fylde coast – an important seaside area for the people of the North West and a place filled with memories of day trips and family fun. Nerissa made the pieces in response to research and beach cleans, finding out about local pollution issues from Love My Beach and the Ribble Rivers Trust as well as her own explorations. The collection formed an art trail across local businesses in Kirkham and St Annes.
With Preston being upstream of the Fylde Coast, showing these works at The Harris acts as a reminder of the knock-on effects of our actions on local areas that are dear to us and also on the wider world.
After visiting Nerissa’s exhibition at The Harris, we’ll take a 2-minute walk down to The Birley where the House of Haynes Costume Exhibition and Archive will be open to the public. After a lunch break (please bring a packed lunch!), Jackie Haynes will take us through a Costumed Writing Exercise: Blue Sky Interventions into Climate Breakdown. Inspired by John-Paul Brown and Sophy King’s exhibition The Guardians of Living Matter, we’ll create a costumed persona and find out how he/she/they contributed to solving the climate crisis.
Image - Even the Sea isn’t Blue, Nerissa Cargill Thompson, courtesy of the artist
SPARK #46: Images For These Times
Saturday 4th April, 11AM - 1PM
Manchester Museum, Top Floor Classroom
Register via Linktree in bio
With local elections taking place in May, what information and ideas do we want to put out into the world? What images can we make to counter narratives of grievance and division, and help create the world we want? ⭐
Jane Lawson hosts this practical session where we’ll make images to share in the runup to the elections. Jane will bring a selection of visual research to draw on, including feminist agitprop and the Cuban posters that inspired her designs for the compost toilets at Kingsnorth Camp for Climate Action.
Please bring yourselves, ideas, longings and any art materials you’d like to use. We’ll provide paper, pens, pencils, collage material, scissors and random art materials.
ACCESS INFO
The session will take place in the top floor classroom at Manchester Museum. This space is wheelchair accessible.
Please see /visit-us/access/ for further access info.
Image: Jane Lawson - design for compost toilet, 2008
SPARK #45: Guardians of Living Matter
Saturday 7th March, 11am - 1pm
The Lowry, Pier 8, The Quays, Salford, M50 3AZ
For our March SPARK session we travel not only to the Lowry in Salford, but to the year 2076 when, thanks to an extraordinary collaboration with our non-human allies, we have successfully navigated the climate crisis. The convergence of new low-carbon artificial intelligence and natural mycelium networks - the underground fungal threads that connect and sustain fungal and plant life - has given humanity a second chance as custodians of planetary care.
But how did we get here?
SPARK members and multidisciplinary artists John-Paul Brown and Sophy King will take us on a journey of speculation and discovery, to explore what the world might look like when humanity and more-than-human intelligence come together. Creating space for possibility and hope, The Guardians of Living Matter is an interdisciplinary exhibition that imagines an optimistic and radical future in which a community of the more-than-human has emerged following the entanglement of mycelial networks with AI.
The exhibition centres around a vast, multi-sensory installation: a living sculpture of mycelium and AI. Surrounding it are a research lab and new works by Brown and King, exploring the entangled relationships between artificial and fungal intelligence. Together, these elements interweave climate research with low-carbon AI prototyping, inviting visitors to consider futures grounded in care, imagination, and collective action.
Co-commissioned with Lowry’s Artist Development programme as part of ‘Developed With’, The Guardians of Living Matter has been supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, with additional support from the University of Salford, SODA (School of Digital Arts) at Manchester Metropolitan University, HOME Manchester, Rogue Artists’ Studios CIC, and Royal Exchange Theatre.
Book tickets in bio!
Photo credit: Michael Pollard
Please join us in Manchester Art Gallery’s ground floor studio, to mark the beginning of spring! We’ll share food and make zines with offerings for the year to come. SPARK #44 will be hosted by artists Jane Lawson and Jackie Haynes. In the UK we’re used to celebrating the start of the year on 1st January, but this isn’t universal; for example, Chinese New Year is in February and Iranian New Year is in March. In the Celtic calendar, 1st February – halfway between the Winter Solstice and the spring equinox - marks the festival of Imbolc - the start of spring, traditionally dedicated to Saint Brigid. It is a time of year to reflect on what is wanting to emerge and what do we need to tend to?
We invite SPARK members to bring food to share, and ideas to offer. We’ll make simple 6 or 12 page cut-and-fold zines of our beacons for fruitfulness in 2026. These beacons could include; regenerative ways of making art, poems, resources, practical skills for low impact living, imagery, inspirations, climate solutions, throughtopias, slogans, tips for adapting to climate impacts – whatever beacons you want to offer. We’ll start the session with a short brainstorm of what we think the year ahead will hold, and use this to give a framework for the year to come.
We’ll provide A4 paper, a steel ruler, a cutting board and a scalpel. Do bring A3 paper if you want to work larger. Please bring anything you’d like to draw with, and something edible to share.
Image: The lighthouse on the Zad at full moon; image credit Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
For our first session of 2026, Castlefield Gallery Curator Matthew Pendergast will host a tour of our current exhibition It Requires Getting Lost, followed by a discussion around the show’s key themes - our relationship with nature, and what happens if we allow ourselves to get lost?
It Requires Getting Lost features work by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Noémie Goudal, Gregory Herbert, Pierre Huyghe, Malik Jama, Leon Kossoff, Jocelyn McGregor and Wolfgang Tillmans, The exhibition is the result of a unique partnership between the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA), Venture Arts and Castlefield Gallery in which three artists working in the North of England - Gregory Herbert, Malik Jama and Jocelyn McGregor - have been invited to work in dialogue with one another and in response to major works from one of the UK’s most significant private collections, the David and Indrė Roberts Collection (managed by RIA).
The artists’ research has focussed on places and spaces where humanity and nature come into contact in unexpected ways, including Anderson boat lift, a wishing well in Alderley Edge and Yordas Cave in Ingleton. Guiding the artists’ research and overall exhibition are shared interests in the complex entanglement of human and non-human worlds, and testing the boundaries between the natural and artificial, making and material, intention and accident.
The works in It Requires Getting Lost span film, photography, painting, sound, projection mapping, and sculpture. A diverse group of works, together they point to what can be discovered in embracing the unknown. If we can resist the desire to have all the answers, and instead accept not knowing, what might we learn? If we ‘get lost’, might we discover, see, and hear anew, including what nature has to share with us?
Access Info
Castlefield Gallery is wheelchair accessible.
Assistance dogs are welcome.
Booking link in bio!
Image: Jocelyn McGregor - Karst Window (2025), courtesy of Jules Lister
SPARK #42 Giving and Getting
Saturday 6 December 11-1pm
Top floor classroom, Manchester Museum
More info and book in bio!
For our December session, we will gather in Manchester Museum’s top floor classroom, reflect on the year to end and the year to come, and make cards for Stan’s Secret Santa. We’ll make and talk and ponder and plan, in a session hosted by SPARK co-ordinator Jane Lawson. Please bring ideas for sessions you’d like to see or host in 2026.
The Stan in question is none other than Manchester Museum’s Tyrannosaurus Rex Stanta Claws, who is collecting gifts and food to donate to Manchester-based charities Barnabus, Mustard Tree and Wood Street Mission. We’ll make single sided A5 cards so that no envelopes are required and the images are a gift in themselves.
Jane will bring A5 watercolour paper and card and some drawing kit – but please bring any materials you’d like to use! Ideally low enviromental impact materials, or materials that have been sitting around unused.
You’re also welcome to bring donations of art materials (as long as new/unopened) and artworks.
Access Info
The session will take place in the top floor classroom at Manchester Museum. This space is wheelchair accessible. Full info is available on @mcrmuseum website.
Image: 2022 Christmas card, Jane Lawson
Follow the link in bio for full info and to book a free spot !
Join us in standing up for Nature on Tuesday 4 November for Remember Nature 2025.
Click the link in bio to learn more about the programme and book your free tickets.
Image: Yu-Chen Wang, Nature Remembered, detail.
SPARK #41: Remember Nature
Saturday 25th October 11.00 – 1.00 (please note this is not our usual first Saturday in the month)
Top Floor Classroom, Manchester Museum
More info and to book in Linktree
Tuesday 4th November is the 10th anniversary of artist Gustav Mezger’s call for all creatives to Remember Nature and to ‘follow the path of ethics into aesthetics’. Since Metzger’s death in 2017, Phil Barton has organised a public-facing Day of Action to Remember Nature every other year on 4th November – in Salford, Kings Cross, Launceston & Rossendale – and this year has invited local SPARK members to join him in organising a Day of Action at Platt Hall. Rae Story @verdant.city , @helenaleestudios , Sara Davies @sarakrissy , Steve Sutton @sculpturejourney , @robinaakhterullah , Jane Andrews and Phil Barton @philbxyz will lead a variety of walks and workshops.
SPARK #41 will focus on the radical and visionary artist, with a presentation and discussion about his life, work and legacy, and will include creative exercises inviting participants to reflect on the connections, or otherwise, between their own practice and Metzger’s legacy.
Please bring a sketchbook and your preferred drawing materials to the workshop.
Alongside the 4th November Platt Hall), Castlefield Gallery is participating in the national project Remember Nature 2025 @remembernaturemetzger and has commissioned @yuchenwang__ who will be hosting a walk from Manchester City Art Gallery to @hulmegardencentre where a variety of informal presentations and discussions will take place. A walk led by local ecoactivity Jane Morris will link the activity at Platt Fields and Hulme Garden Centre.
/event/remember-nature-2025/.
#RNGM25
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Access Info
The classroom is wheelchair-accessible; full access info available on @mcrmuseum website
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Images:
1. 2023 Remember Nature banner
2. Work by Steve Sutton (photo by Jane Selva)
3. Sara Davies: Platt Fields willow charcoal
4. Jane Andrews: Remember Nature
5. Helena Lee: Horseweed
6. Rae Story: Platt Fields Lake
7. Work by Robina Ullah
8. Phil Barton: Printing the 2023 Remember Nature banner
SPARK #40 @ Fragments of Time
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE TIMES IN THIS IMAGE ARE WRONG AND WE ARE MEETING AT 11:30, NOT 11!
Sat 4 Oct 2025 11:30-1:30
Salford Museum and Art Gallery, The Crescent, M5 4WU
More info and to book in Linktree
For our October SPARK session, Lizzie King and Naomi Kendrick host a visit to Fragments of Time at Salford Museum and Art Gallery. This is an opportunity to see the show and hear Lizzie and Naomi talk about their work. There will be time for discussion exploring the themes and a listening exercise focusing on our connection with nature that lives with us indoors.
Fragments of Time presents work by four female artists brought together through their artistic practice exploring fragility, place, and change.
@naomi_kendrick works mainly in drawing, examining fragility and strength, parental ageing and mortality. @lizziekingartist looks at the floor of the East Wing as a living breathing thing in an immersive soundscape.
@maggiethompsonprintmaker / and @suegrantwright2 are printmakers looking at how places change over time and how time is fragile. Maggie explores the area of Greengate through its archive photographs while Sue works directly from its floors, studying how these are shaped over time.
Lizzie King’s piece Connecting the Tree and the Foot is a four speaker sound installation examining the relationship between humans and the extended lives of trees past their natural life. The gallery has a sprung dance floor; not long after the floor was laid, glasses of water were used to test the size and effect of vibrations from the gallery floor to the galleries bellow, and in Lizzie’s work they are used as ways of us seeing the interaction we have with the floor.
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Access Info
The gallery is wheelchair-accessible.
Please see /visit/accessibility/ for further access info.
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Image: Connecting the Tree to the Foot - silver gelatin print by Lizzie King
