SPARK #28: No Ball Games
Artist Katy McGahan hosts a session looking at campaigns for urban green spaces across time. Until very recently there were no parks in Manchester city centre. Now there is one, Mayfield Park, built as part of the ongoing 10-year redevelopment of the Mayfield area behind Piccadilly Station. It is Manchester’s first new city park in a century. It’s fair to say that Manchester needs more parks and green space – especially given that Manchester City Council has pledged to be a zero carbon city by 2038, 12 years earlier than the national target, and in 2019 declared a climate emergency.
While high-rise housing and office blocks are proliferating and redefining the architectural character and cultural identity of Manchester, at ground level some important grassroots work is being done to hold Manchester City Council to its environmental commitments. Following a screening of the 1972 documentary It’s Ours Whatever They Say, which charts a battle between a group of women and Holloway council over the provision of a playground in a run-down area of north London, Trees Not Cars co-founder Gemma Cameron will speak about the Ancoats Trees Not Cars campaign which resonates strongly with the historic playground campaigns of the 1970s. Trees Not Cars are campaigning to have a derelict patch of land in Ancoats converted into a much-needed park where local people and nature can thrive.
Katy McGahan who is organising a set of participatory creative workshops with local people who live in and around the Ancoats site, will introduce the film.
KATY MCGAHAN
Katy McGahan is a filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist based in the High Peak, Derbyshire. She uses moving image, audio, collaborative practice and activism to interrogate the tensions that exist between our ongoing disconnection with the rest of the living world and our simultaneous efforts to re-connect with it. She is interested in making work that re-evaluates our place within nature in this time of flux. She runs participatory workshops and radical film and audio courses under the banner of Hyenas in Petticoats. She is a founding member of the Notice This Tree climate action group who are currently touring towns and cities across the UK.
SPARK
The SPARK network was set up by Castlefield Gallery in 2022 to facilitate a Greater Manchester/North West-based network of artists wanting to intervene in the climate crisis. The gallery initiated SPARK in response to the high demand for places on the 2021/22 SUSTAIN programme focussed on low carbon artmaking. SPARK #28 follows on from the first twenty-seven SPARK sessions at Manchester Art Gallery, Rogue, The Birley (Preston), Eccles Friends Meeting House, Manchester Museum, AIR Gallery, Paradise Works, Editional Studio, Cadishead and Little Woolden Moss, Gallery Oldham, the John Rylands Library, Dunham Massey, Lindow Moss and Castlefield Viaduct. SPARK recently had a group exhibition, also called SPARK, and events programme at Rogue Studios.
LINKS
Katy McGahan's website
katymcgahan.comSPARK's instagram
@sparkartistsnetworkImages
- Banner: Trees Not Cars placards
- Image: Still from It’s Ours Whatever They Say (1972)
