A presentation of a new work by artist Belshah for Recoverist Month 2026.
Launch Event: Thurs 17th Sept, 6-9pm – exhibition preview is free but ticketed. Book here.
After Interaction: Explorations in Co-Creation is a public response and follow up to Artefacts of Interaction (2025), a project led by Portraits of Recovery in partnership with HOME and Venture Arts. It culminated in a co-created exhibition presented in Home’s Granada Foundation Galleries during Recoverist Month 2025. Lead artist Belshah’s ongoing artistic proposition is centred on co-production and explores the terrain where neurodivergence, substance use (prescribed or illicit), and artistic practice can intersect.
With contributions from over thirty participants, and poignantly visible from the street, After Interaction transforms the window into a public space for reflection. Passersby are invited to consider how shared acts of making and collaborative creation can build relationships, forge friendships, and create powerful images that hold individual contributions within a larger, shared act of making: stronger united than divided.
After Interaction is a digital composite created using drawings contributed by participants at a workshop during Dry January 2026. The accumulated imagery offers new visual perspectives, while seeking to communicate something of the original workshop through Belshah’s artistic lens. The large-scale print is contextualised with a selection of original workshop contributions displayed alongside.
Artefacts of Interaction, was a collaboration with artists Alana Lake, Ben Goring, Jaymus and Jennie Franklin. It marked a creative springboard for Belshah towards a methodology and collaborative process of co-production (as discussed by John Berger in Ways of Seeing). The artist continued with this exploration through two public facing workshops, first in September 2025, and then during Dry January 2026, the latter going on to form the basis of this new work.
About the artist:
Belshah is a Manchester-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the collision of mythology, history and contemporary technology. Working primarily across painting, drawing and installation, they combine ancient symbolism with digital culture to examine power, identity and the systems through which we understand ourselves.
Influenced by classical mythology, Jarman, Blake, sci-fi and internet culture, their work frequently takes the form of layered artefacts, ruins and fragments from imagined histories. Their ADHD informs a highly associative approach to pattern, research and image-making, allowing references from different periods and disciplines to coexist within the same work. Belshah is currently developing a mythology in which their work exists.
Belshah has exhibited across the UK including at HOME Manchester and FirstSite Essex and continues to develop collaborative projects centred on accessibility, neurodivergence and shared creative authorship.
Belshah’s process was first inspired as a participant in Sarah-Joy Ford’s project and exhibition, 10 Artists 10 Years at the Granada Foundation Galleries, celebrating HOME’s 10-year anniversary.
Recoverist Month, through exhibitions, performances and creative events, places the arts at the centre of conversations on substance use and recovery. Held every September to mark International Recovery Month, this annual programme brings artists, communities and audiences together across venues around the UK, making a vibrant contribution to the contemporary cultural landscape.
