Art gallery prioritising Northern or working class artists

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Izzie Beirne Presents 'By The Ruins Often I Pass' - Exhibition at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery in Blackburn

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Marc Hulson's paintings are notable for their intense green, but their rich imaginarium demands deeper attention.
Each work conjures alternative realities—composed scenes with familiar objects interrupted by supernatural or folkloric elements. Hulson begins by building physical models, creating layered, uncanny worlds that remain deliberately ambiguous.
The figures seem isolated, trapped, their physicality crushed or enveloped by their environments. Through them, Hulson explores the body as vessel—robotic or animal—versus the sentient beings we imagine ourselves to be.
While employing theatrical masks and props, the paintings resist linear narrative. Instead, they function as contemplative devices focusing on complex questions where enigmas converge.
Themes of gender ambiguity, the otherworldly and mundane coalesce into portraits of 'self as other.' His work speaks to those with irreconcilable desires to escape through screens, novels, daydreams, or rituals.

Marc Hulson Complications

Common Ground brings together new and unseen works by multidisciplinary artist Jamie Holman, whose practice fuses traditional craft with industrial production. Spanning painting, textiles, sculpture, and audio, Holman's work reflects on the resilience and evolving identity of working-class communities in the UK.

Curated by Hope Gallegos, the exhibition is shaped by a personal connection. Both Gallegos and Holman are children of military fathers—an unexpected shared history that became their "common ground." Through this lens, Gallegos found deep affinity with Northern England's industrial heritage, reading Holman's work as a reflection of community, transformation, and inherited strength.

The exhibition unfolds across three floors of Saan1, each level representing Northern identity. From pub culture and public streets to civic power and governance, this layered structure offers an immersive journey through the everyday rituals, spaces, and systems that define working-class life.

 Jamie Holman Common Ground

Boardroom Baroque presents Peter Layzell's darkly satirical paintings of suited men brawling across parliamentary pews, capturing a world where political decorum explosively gives way to disorder. As global politics descend into social media spectacle with leaders clashing online and toxic masculinity spreading through influencers like Andrew Tate, Layzell channels this modern unrest through baroque drama, creating densely populated scenes inspired by Tintoretto that pulse with kinetic energy, equal parts satire and spectacle of governance unravelling in real time.

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Boardroom Baroque by Peter Layzell

From the romantic to the horrific, Beirne's work exists in constant push and pull. The paintings allude to filmic language - screen grabs plucked from Greenaway's visceral 1989 masterpiece and transformed. Depicted are remnants of social settings: glasses discarded, doors left ajar with darkness beckoning, alluding to horror tropes.

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Pick It Out Of Your Teeth Afterwards Izzie Beirne

Pick It Out Of Your Teeth Afterwards: Izzie Beirne

People in Pubs is alternatively monikered ‘The Third Place.’

Urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg defines a third place as a place of refuge other than the home or workplace where people can regularly visit and commune with friends, neighbors, coworkers, and even strangers.

The great British pub is depicted by ten artists, through familiar motifs, ephemera and an acknowledgement of a collective nostalgia for a space that was once a cypher for British identity, community and collective identity.

Robin Broadley, Jim Brook, Jack Brown, Grace Clifford, RJ Fernandez, Leo Fitzmaurice, Laura Greenhalf, Jamie Holman, Eleanor McLean, & Richard Shields

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People In Pubs

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