Art Assembly legacies

Posted on 2 July 2022

Art Assembly Manchester took place on the 18 June, 2022. This page houses a number of legacies from the Art Assembly commissions and projects that we developed between artists and learning groups from across the city. Explore and enjoy!

Art Assembly Manchester was a free one day festival with the theme of City as Art School that championed culture, art and creativity and showed how everywhere has the potential to become a place of creative learning.

Art Assembly 2022 was developed by Art Fund with some of Manchester’s leading arts organisations including Castlefield Gallery, HOME, Manchester Art Gallery, The Whitworth and The Manchester College.

The Botanical Society: Look Between the Cracks in The Pavement, 2022

Artists: Anna F C Smith and Helen Mather with Tiarna, Fatima, Elly, Kacey, Fatima, Tabitha, Phoebe, Agatha, Louix, Aidan, Angelica – Fashion students from The Manchester College

This project was inspired by 19th Century working class Botanical Societies. These autodidactic radical societies defied the expectations of their class to learn about their changing environments. Using their model of co-learning, the students observed and documented urban nature in their own hand made observational notebooks. Developing image making through workshops, the group have created an identity though pattern for a 21st century Botanical Society, which aims to disseminate the desire to observe urban nature and share a feeling of being part of a botanical community.

To read the publication click HERE

Three Worlds

Artist: David Blandy with Niamh Ball, Raven Keating, George Parker Conway from Venture Arts

Through a series of online workshops, artist David Blandy and young artists from the Venture Arts studio have been reimagining Manchester 8000 years from now. For Art Assembly, the group transformed their collaborative work into an immersive installation at Manchester Art Gallery – inviting the public to join them in speculative world-building and share their own vision for Manchester far into the future. This is a project to imagine other ways of being.

On the day of the festival, families were invited to take part in a drawing & zine workshop. The drawings can be seen HERE

Shifting landscapes, 2022

Artists: Ian Cale and Parham Ghalamdar in collaboration with students of the Manchester College (Nina jones, Erica Rafael, Grace Pollitt, Alyssa Kershaw, Sasha Caufield, Millie Down, Georgina Salmon, Wiktoria Wiliczka, Harley Jade Chesworth, Leila Annand, Zoe Webster, Crystal Priest, Fiza Khan, Kira Quinnell, Alishba Hussain, Heidi Simmons – students from The Manchester College

Parham Ghalamdar co-commission with Art & Design students from The Manchester College has created digital works and paintings capturing the less obvious spaces and beauties of the city. Students were asked to produce drawings of urban landscapes and maps of different routes during road trips visiting artist studios, exhibitions, institutions, and art collections. An A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) engine was trained to study student’s drawings alongside drawings and maps of Manchester held in Manchester Art Gallery’s collection to find patterns and similarities in shapes and colours. The results were videos and still images depicting a third inventive apparition of Manchester looking like a shifting cityscape in fluctuation.