Join Clarissa Corfe, Creative Producer for Visual Art at HOME, for a tour of two exciting new solo exhibitions – Gabriel Kidd’s I found the giant and he was dead and Nicola Ellis’ Exercises in Knowing.
Visitors to this space are invited to immerse themselves in varied works that explore diverse themes such as mythology, materials, ecology, industry, history and labour.
Recoverist Culture Fix is our programme of regular, specially curated cultural events. Part of Portraits of Recovery’s commitment to increasing access and engagement with the arts for people and communities in recovery, Recoverist Culture Fix is also a chance to meet like-minded people, make friends and enjoy a rich cultural experience in Greater Manchester.
Our aim is to empower those in recovery by fostering their cultural participation, demystifying contemporary art, and amplifying the voices of an often marginalised community. Through culture, we build ambition and empower a stigmatised community to drive systemic change.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS
‘I found the giant and he was dead’ by Gabriel Kidd
Through sculpture, drawing, sound, and writing, Kidd’s work utilises queer tactics of parody, fluidity and vitality, to explore mythology, ecology and history.
In Gabriel Kidd’s first institutional solo show, they have created an immersive work of figurative and sound pieces inspired by local folktale, landscape, erosion, and medieval notions of time. Naturally dyed silk (with weeds, wayside trees or healing herbs), whittled pine arrows, poured/cast latex skin and eggs, and Kozo paper architectural forms are painstakingly crafted and stitched together with mass produced sequins or acrylic nails. In a series of vignettes, emotionally suggestive human forms appear in the ruined remains of a hilltop domestic dwelling.
Private moments between figurative sculptures are drawn out through the reimagined folktale of two giants, Alderman and Alphin (from the valley of Greenfield, Saddleworth) who become embroiled in a tale of friendship, love, jealousy, revenge, and loss. Husk-like in their fragility, Kidd’s figures – queer, camp, decaying, putrid, oily, beautiful – commune in indeterminate dialogue. A unifying soundtrack developed in collaboration with organist and composer Willow Swan, creates a disquieting ambience. Church organs, phone recordings of techno music, field recordings of wind, water and rain, come together to underscore the installation as a site of aftermath and memory.
The relationship between interior and exterior worlds is explored throughout the work. Through gestures and signals performed in gay cruising culture, the poised, slouched, or side-lying, the figures invoke a knowing desire, blurring a sense of individuality, empowerment, and destruction. A series of windows, slits and sightlines carved from antique wood suggestive of medieval church squints, surround the gallery walls. Treated with the same fleshy materials as the bodies, they imbue the architecture of the building with the same viscous physical and psychic properties.
Materials, their provenance, cultural, social, and political significances, are important to Kidd, woven into queered perspectives on natural process, religion and gay culture. The work challenges the notions of permanency, monumentality of traditional sculpture, and gender-essentialism. In this work, traditional understandings of sexuality, gender and identity are powerfully subverted through instances of fragility, precarity and not-knowing, finding resilience through transition and the natural evolution of materials.
‘Exercises in Knowing’ by Nicola Ellis
For this exhibition, Exercises in Knowing, Nicola Ellis has created three new bodies of work that extend her ongoing collaboration with the steel enclosure manufacturer Ritherdon & Co in Darwen, Lancashire. In it, Ellis explores how we relate to industry, materials, and labour, highlighting the role of sensory and tacit knowledge in these relationships, as well as the ways such knowledge is communicated.
Ellis’ work is often created in response to contexts outside of traditional art environments, using discarded or overlooked materials, substances or subjects within industrial or scientific contexts. By combining sculpted, found and digitally manipulated materials, she creates forms that retain the traces of their origins exploring their ecologies and legacies.
Subject To Use
Subject To Use is a series of sculptures made from plaster of Paris featuring fabricators carrying out gestures or actions performed daily. Worked into plinths, the gestured limbs coordinate to apply personal protective equipment, drive a forklift, or lift steel components. These works become studies of hands interacting with tools or machines, displaying the dexterity and control, immortalised into plaster evoking classical sculpture, and statue.
Arc
The video work Arc is a split screen work shot from nine angles around the welding booth at Ritherdon using an array of digital cameras. Within the heat of the confined space and the intense UV light, the routine, technical skills and knowledge accumulated by the fabricators are apparent, accompanied by sounds from the booth and live radio vibrations.
Retro Activity Series: Residual architecture
This is a series of large works suspended throughout the space, flat, almost paper-like sheets of steel with punched out voids which act as an angular oculus through which to view the other works in the exhibition. Reclaimed recyclable waste materials from the Ritherdon manufacturing line – they are the skeletal remains of steel sheets used to produce casing for EV street chargers and similar steel enclosures which house the street-side electrical units that power outdoor street lighting, traffic lights, smart motorways and more.
The handling of tools—acquired not through manuals but over years of observation, practice, and repetition—is a source of familial connection for Ellis. This work expresses a deep reverence for skills usually hidden behind factory walls and now – often assumed to be automated. Over the last 30 years, the UK’s manufacturing sector has declined, and the economy has shifted toward services, this reflects a structural shift rather than a contraction of output, as services have expanded much more rapidly than manufacturing has shrunk. This exhibition celebrates the communities still centred around manufacturing and manual making, highlights our symbiotic relationship with materials and tools, and emphasises the value of doing things by hand—even within a digitally organised system—reminding us that people remain central to creating the infrastructure that surrounds us.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
About Gabriel Kidd
Gabriel Kidd graduated with an MFA in Fine Art at Slade School of Art. They have exhibited in group and solo exhibitions throughout London and the North West. Solo exhibitions include I’ve always kept a unicorn, Pipeline, London. Selected group exhibitions include Strings Attached II, Pipeline Gallery, Chimera in a vat, Hypha Studios, London, Cloister Stone, Pipeline, London, Heartlands, Flexitron Gallery, London, Give Me an Inch, Pipeline, London, finetoothcomb, Greatorex Gallery, London, Blue tac on a spike is no good, EC2A 2BS, London, In the membrane, Paradise Works, Salford, The Alumni Strike Back with Short Supply, Paradise Works, Salford, and New Contemporaries 2022, South London Gallery, London & Humber Street Gallery, Hull
They have won awards such as The Haworth Trust New Graduate Award with Paradise Works, The Milein Cosman Scholarship for Drawing (funding the Slade MFA), and The Adrian Carruthers ACME early careers award (won for the Slade degree show). In 2021 they won a position on the Grampus Heritage placement at Cyprus College of Arts, Lempa.
About Nicola Ellis
Nicola Ellis is a North West–based artist whose work has been exhibited across the UK and Europe. Recent exhibitions include presentations at Pipeline Contemporary, Workplace, DOX (Prague), Copperfield Gallery, Platform A Gallery, Fitzrovia Gallery, and Bury Sculpture Centre. Ellis has also undertaken residencies in a wide range of contexts, from large-scale industrial environments such as the global steel manufacturing headquarters of the Pittini Group in Osoppo, Italy, to more intimate, small-scale settings including her father’s home inventor’s shed.
Following an Art in Manufacturing residency as part of the National Festival of Making in 2018, she has developed a long-term relationship with Ritherdon & Co. Ltd, a manufacturer of steel enclosures based in Darwen, Lancashire. The success of this residency led to the two-year Arts Council England-funded placement “Return to Ritherdon,” which resulted in an unprecedented invitation to remain in residence indefinitely. Ellis will continue to observe, participate in, and occasionally disrupt the ecosystem of the factory while working alongside—and in collaboration with—the Ritherdon workforce.
She is a member of Incidental Unit, the current iteration of the Artist Placement Group, which was conceived by Barbara Steveni in 1966 and co-founded with Barry Flanagan, David Hall, John Latham, Anna Ridley and Jeffrey Shaw in London in the late 1960s. Incidental Unit
Her work has been acquired by private and national public collections, including the Government Art Collection and the Arts Council Collection. She is the recipient of a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award, a Henry Moore Artist Research Fellowship, and several Arts Council England grants to support the development of her work.