Category Archives: Default
The Writing We Don’t Count: How Funding Reports Became Unpaid Labour in Regional Galleries
When I ran a gallery in Manchester, I spent more time writing about art than showing it. Not criticism — that would have been a pleasure. I mean the other writing: project narratives, outcome reports, case studies, impact statements, social … Continue reading
How Migration Shapes Contemporary British Art: Labour, Rent and the Right to Stay
Ask where contemporary British art comes from and the standard answers point to art schools, prizes and a handful of London rooms. Ask who actually makes it, and you get a different story. Migrants and their children are the artists, … Continue reading
How Migration Shapes Contemporary British Art: Exile, Labour and the Regional Question
Migration shapes contemporary British art in three connected ways: it changes who makes art here, it changes what the art is about, and it decides who gets paid. That is the short version. The longer version is what this article … Continue reading
Migration Shapes Contemporary British Art: A View from the Post-Industrial City
Migration is not a theme in contemporary British art; it is a structural condition of it. The artists who have kept studios open in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent over the past two decades have often arrived from elsewhere: from … Continue reading
Movement as Material: How Migration Rebuilds British Art
Migration isn’t a theme you can hang on a gallery wall. It’s a material condition of art-making in Britain today—something that shapes the very stuff of production, not just the subject matter. The movement of bodies across borders, the friction … Continue reading
How Migration Actually Shapes British Art: Labour, Place, and the Refusal to Be Packaged
What Migration Actually Does to a National Art Scene Migration isn’t a curatorial theme. It’s a structural condition of British art, and it has been for decades. When we talk about how migration shapes contemporary British art, we’re not talking … Continue reading
On the Violence of ‘Emerging Artist’ as Permanent Description
I first clocked the problem at a funding panel in 2019. We were reviewing applications for Arts Council England’s Project Grants. Across the table, a curator I respected described a forty-three-year-old painter as ’emerging.’ The artist had been making work … Continue reading
How Migration Shapes Contemporary British Art: A View from the Ground
Migration isn’t a theme in British art. It’s a structural condition. Walk through studios in Birmingham, Leicester, or the outer boroughs of London and the question is rarely whether an artist’s work addresses movement. It’s how directly they’re willing to … Continue reading
How Migration Shapes Contemporary British Art: Beyond the London Bubble
When we talk about British art, we usually mean London. The galleries, the auction houses, the biennial circuit. But the real story of British art over the last seventy years is a story of movement—of artists, ideas, and whole communities … Continue reading
Migration and the Making of British Art: A View from the Margins
Introduction: The Unspoken Engine of British Art Walk through any major British gallery, biennial, or degree show and you’ll see it. The mark of artists who crossed borders. Yet the institutional story still treats migration as a side plot—a ‘diversity’ … Continue reading