I hope all is well and life seems a little calmer for you now, 2023, installation at Castlefield Gallery made collaboratively with Grace Collins. 

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Archives at Play 2 was the second in a two-part series of exhibitions inviting an exciting roster of artists to delve into Castlefield Gallery’s archive. These exhibitions are part of a process of reflection as the gallery approaches its 40th year in 2024 and looks ahead to the next 40 years of working with artists. 

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I hope all is well and life seems a little calmer for you now interrogates how we store and use archive material. It responds to themes identified in the Castlefield Gallery archive by the curator. These themes are: people connecting to art, financial sustainability, decision making, timely & relevant, and artist-led.

 

Gibson and Collins collaborated to create a space invoking the 40 year past, present and future of the gallery through a process of ‘fictioning’; re-imagining and romanticising relics from the archive. 

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Archives at Play is a research project led by curator Thomas Dukes as part of a collaborative PhD between Castlefield Gallery and Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. Through events, exhibitions and collaborations, Dukes is looking at how we can activate the archive to ask what Castlefield Gallery means to the communities around us.