PIVOT: Editions 

Affordable editioned work by five artists based across the North West. 

Artists: Pat Flynn, Garth Gratrix, Bridget O’Gorman, Salma Noor and Chester Tenneson.  

These five artists are currently taking part in the inaugural PIVOT programme: a scheme delivered in partnership by Castlefield Gallery and the Bluecoat, Liverpool which includes bespoke mentoring and skills development for mid-career artists. 

Pat Flynn’s work highlights the seductive qualities of Hollywood films, computer games, consumer goods and advertising. He makes digitally-rendered hyper-real images that over expose these qualities; exploring how our relationship to beliefs, rituals, ideologies, morality and mortality are caught up with images and objects. patflynn.co.uk

Garth Gratrix’s work deals with queerness and, or queering; how working with materials, language and space can remain ‘slippery’, experimental, and curious. Their minimal practice explores how ‘queer’ is embedded within construction materials such as wood, concrete, metal, and paint. Looking at how dating apps, such as Grindr, feed into performance anxiety and societal fears of ‘measuring up’, Gratrix creates installations that reclaim and reframe Language, expectation, scale, and nonsense. garthgratrix.com

Bridget O’Gorman works with text, live events, video and sculptural installation.  Her enquiries move between mental, material and embodied perspectives; considering otherness with speculative and expanded corporeal experiences. She is currently researching a new departure in her work, reflecting on the disabled experience in relation to gender, creativity and access. bridgetgorman.com

Salma Noor’s multimedia practice includes the use of digital platforms to interrogate the structures of power that we inhabit and those which inhabit us. She splices historical imagery, often sourced from familial archives, into GIFs, computer animated collages and immersive installations. Noor is the co-founder of DAAD Futurism with Amrita Dhallu and Helen Starr and was both a member and in-house designer of the Radical Womxn’s DANCE Party —  a Liverpool-based collective which organised events as a form of protest to bring awareness to the struggles of womxn in anti-capitalist movements. behance.net/Salma_Noor

Chester Tenneson’s work explores the absurdity within the norms of institutional design and authority, examining the idiosyncratic nature of commonplace objects and language. His position as a transgender man is important; his artworks frequently reflect his experience as an outsider from everyday norms and language, which have a cisgender base. His artworks question the absurdity of these everyday norms, playing with gendered gestures and objects, as well as more general rules and instructions which command our everyday experience and public placing. chestertenneson.com

PIVOT is delivered in partnership by Bluecoat and Castlefield Gallery. Both organisations share the vision that the North West of England is a place where artists are able to live and work whilst experiencing national and international success. With over five years experience and a strong track record in the field of contemporary visual art, each artist has been awarded a £5000 bursary and access to a programme that supports their practice over an 18 month period.