We know that they are melting, never to return. We know that they are so intrinsic to Icelandic culture that there is grief around their loss; a funeral was held for Okjokull, Iceland’s first glacier to disappear, and which once covered six square miles of deep ice.  

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Continuing: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE

The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial continues across the city and the public realm. There is the usual rich mix of institutional and ‘found’ spaces, with the city-wide arts festival a celebration of discovery as much as anything else. This iteration’s subtitle, BEDROCK, suggests nothing if not a solid foundation from which to build. Curator Marie-Anne McQuay and an array of international artists’ excavations of and responses to the city await. Check individual venues for opening days/times.

Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts; Liverpool Biennial: BEDROCK Review

Continuing: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE

Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the well-established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as ever. Taking place in an astonishing 120 locations, expect degree show first-timers to the likes of Rebecca Chesney, Johnny Vegas, and Brigitte Jurack (below).

Last Chance to See: The Drawing (Paper) Show 2025 @ The Bridewell Studios & Gallery – FREE

Drawing – so often seen merely as a preliminary step before getting down to the ‘real’ work of making art – is, quite rightly, celebrated in and of itself here. Featuring more than 50 artists from around the world, this latest iteration of the Drawing (Paper) Show, running until 31 July, both challenges our expectations of and celebrates the medium. Artists in the exhibition (including familiar names Caroline Gorick, Penny Davenport and Tomo) also appear in Drawing Paper, marking the publication’s 10th edition.

Barry Lyndon 3.40pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

“The extent to which Stanley Kubrick cared about producing quality films is made manifest in every frame of Barry Lyndon.” So said Rodney Hill in his essay on the film for Taschen’s excellent The Stanley Kubrick Archives. Something of an outlier in Kubrick’s oeuvre, Barry Lyndon (based on an 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray and back in cinemas to mark its 50th anniversary) follows the rise and fall of farm boy and ne’er do well, Redmond Barry, via duels, the Seven Years’ War and espionage.

The Matrix 7.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Tuesday – The Beaches of Agnès 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Autobiographical essay film from the late, great Agnès Varda (1928–2019). Looking back over her life, the then octogenarian Varda employs footage from her richly textured back catalogue to punctuate and illustrate her story. We’re lucky to be able to join her.

Further Reading: The Big Interview: Agnès Varda 

Wednesday – Exhibition Continues: Broken Grey Wires: Who Wants Flowers When They are Dead? 6pm @ Williamson Art Gallery and Museum – FREE

One of the true universals of life is the inevitability of death – yours, mine, and everyone we will ever know. And, yet, almost as universal is the difficulty with which we find thinking and talking about the subject. As with so much else, it is left to art to help make sense of it. This new group exhibition is such an attempt. Exploring grief, loss, identity and community, Who Wants Flowers When They are Dead brings together works by more than a dozen artists to ‘offer a space to reflect, connect, and begin processing experiences of loss’. Includes work by Candy Chang, Ana Mendieta, Lizz Brady and more.

Thursday – The War of the Worlds 1.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

It is 130 years since the first publication of H.G. Wells’ source material, and this 1953 adaptation was the first to bring the marauding aliens from Mars to the big screen. A questioning of the validity of ongoing British colonialism wrapped in a brilliant story, it is more than simply ‘scientific romance’ as Wells termed his output; a box office success, Byron Haskin’s cinematic outing, including some great special effects, does it justice.

Liverpool Biennial 2025: Drop-in Weekly Tea and Talk Tours 2pm @ 20 Jordan Street – FREE

This does what it says on the tin tour offers a way to ease yourself in to the Biennial if all those sites, artists and the theme itself prove a bit overwhelming – it can be a lot to take in. If our experience of this edition’s Biennial volunteers is anything to go by, you’ll be in safe, informative, hands.

Friday – Last Chance to See: Dorothy X Hot Grls Watch Sports: EURO SUMMER @ Dorothy, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool – FREE

On the back of another international triumph for the Lionesses, this exhibition – a celebration and also questioning of how far the women’s game has come – feels like required viewing. Curated by Hot Grls Watch Sports founder Nali Simukulwa, it features photography and more from Caitlin Marie Sullivan, Jacqui McAssey (GIRLFANS), Ufuoma Art, and Simukulwa.

Jules et Jim 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

The famed 1962 love triangle drama, Jules et Jim, stars Henri Serre and Oskar Werner as the titular lifelong friends, each besotted with Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine. More an analysis of the complexities of love and friendship than traditional romance, and as tragic as it is effervescent, the iconic film is, perhaps not, the date movie people might imagine.

Saturday – Pulled Apart By Horses Loserpalooza IV 1pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £20

Two stages and nine bands make up Loserpalooza IV, Society of Losers’ all-dayer headlined by shouty alt-rock from Leeds’ Pulled Apart by Horses. They’re joined by, among others, local punks Crapsons, feminist alt-punk from Two Tonne Machete, and Riot Grrrl-inflected grunge from Petrichor.

Sunday – Exhibition: (M)other Collective: (M)other Wild: artists working across the island from 10am, Hilbre Island – FREE

Accessible on foot from West Kirby, Hilbre Island has something of the magical, even folkloric, about it. As such, it is a seductive setting for art, artists and the wider public. This new exhibition from (M)other Collective makes good use of this context, with a series of outdoor works exploring ‘the balance of natural life cycles endangered by modern society’.

Common Thread 1pm @ Birch Studios, Hamilton Square, Birkenhead – FREE

Workshop focused on making, mending and community building in the face of fast fashion. Held at artist-led Birch Studios, who are in the middle of an incredible show a week run during the Independents Biennial.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: The Matrix trailer; Brigitte Jurack, install photography, VGM; The Beaches of Agnès Varda trailer; BEDROCK/Liverpool Biennial; Jules et Jim trailer; Pulled Apart by Horses 

As interdisciplinary as its other programmes, Photography MA students are experimenting with everything from analogue to neuroscience, fabrication and sculpture. Laura Robertson talks to their Professor of Art and Experimental Media, the artist James Coupe, to find out more…

A sculpture graduate whose artwork challenges our ideas of machine learning, surveillance, and exploitative online labour, artist and Professor James Coupe is pushing us to consider the human impact of Big Tech and Big Data. Since joining the Royal College of Art in 2023, as Head of Photography MA and Professor of Art and Experimental Media, Coupe has been pushing innovation amongst the students there.

Meeting on Zoom, we discussed his own artwork and exhibitions, his formative experiences teaching Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington in Seattle, and how this shaped his PhD and current teaching at RCA, as well as his birthplace in Blackpool, and the current art scene there and around England.

Below is the point where we addressed the big questions – what is photography now, exactly? To all of us, but especially to new students? How are emerging technologies impacting photography as we know it?

What kind of photographic methods are your students employing at the moment?

Well, it depends what we mean by a photographic method, you know?

You tell me! [both laugh]

There’s an interesting book by Antoine Traisnel, called Capture [American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition, 2020] which talks about our transition from a society that captured animals through hunting, to one that eventually, following the invention of photography, more often would capture them with a camera. In other words, the camera becomes a weapon of some sort, which begs the question: is it simply the act of ‘capturing’ something that makes it photographic? Joanna Zylinska has taken this in another direction in her book Nonhuman Photography (2017), discussing ways in which photographs today are often generated by algorithms rather than people.

So in our Photography MA programme, we’re seeing a very expanded idea of photography, and disrupting the traditional notion that we need a camera at all in order to take a photograph. Instead, it’s a process that can be entirely synthetic. It could be driven by datasets, with AI learning what something looks like and generating images. So photographic processes have recently exploded and opened up to involve all sorts of different things.

Beyond synthetic media, we see a real breadth in the students we have working here, some of them use analogue cameras, but others are working with performance, ecology, writing, moving image, installation, neuroscience, fabrication… they’re still framing their practises as in dialogue with photography, and benefit from having something to push up against.

That’s a good point in which to flip back to your own artwork. I enjoyed the absurdity and terror in your artwork I am not a Robot (2019, pictured above), a riff on a ‘worker cage’ from real Amazon patents, that protects (imprisons?) humans from the potential harm caused by powerful robotic machinery. What was the catalyst for this?

I see my work as more concerned with systems than with objects, which of course connects to what we were just saying about photographic processes. I think it is important to understand that artworks don’t begin and end with their frames, but rather they are part of a wider environment, which includes you. Artworks can make things visible that maybe you take for granted. They can highlight our complicity in the themes that they explore, rather than enable us to stand on the outside of them as passive observers. These general principles are important in my practise.

Do you find that putting your work in a public gallery punches through that kind of acceptance or passivity we have with tech? For example, the Captcha “I’m not a robot” test – as you said in the text for that installation, ‘unlike the Turing Test, which asks computers to convince us they are human, today, humans are perpetually asked to convince computers that they are not robots.’ Almost like Victorian labour practises, which were horrible for people, and the environment, and politically awful – here we are today, accepting and submitting to systems in order to get our Amazon Parcels.

I think hierarchies of labour, and visibility as well, are crucial for us to understand those sorts of systems. A lot of my earlier work was focused on surveillance and cameras, and how our relationships with surveillance systems create new kinds of narrative: a surveillance cinema if you like.

Things changed, maybe around the time of Edward Snowden’s revelations, with a shift in our understanding of surveillance as something that was focused on being seen by a camera, to more data-driven scenarios that are focused on collecting and comparing information. Here images become almost incidental. Instead, patterns of data, read by machines rather than people, become what matters.

This is especially relevant for online labour practises in particular, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with?

Like an electronic workforce or gig economy?

It’s one of the leading provider of cloud-based crowdworking. It is named after an 18th century chess-playing robot, which toured the Palaces of Europe and would challenge  people to a game of chess and often beat them. I’m sure you can guess how it worked.

A man hidden inside??

Hidden within, twiddling these mechanisms. So – it was a human, pretending to be a machine. And Amazon’s decision to use this name tells us a lot about labour and visibility.

In my work, General Intellect (2015), I hired hundreds of Mechanical Turk workers to make videos of themselves, once an hour, for eight consecutive hours. The workers became visible as a result, and showed us that many of them were invisible in other kinds of ways too: working from home, disabled, stay-at-home parents, and so on.

Within the context of an exhibition, audiences – and me as the artist – find ourselves in a complicated position as viewers. We are not on the outside, we can’t just be passive observers, we are part of a hierarchy of visibility, labour and privilege as we are forced to think about what it means to be able to watch these people working, and what work means today. Returning to the questions around photographic method, we can very much see a work like this as a kind of camera, but one that captures us, too.

I saw your exhibition of artists’ self-portraits [The Chinese Rooms, 2020], and that also feeds into this conversation… Paintings of people who are usually anonymous, employed by an online system to create paintings to order. And I wonder what the power-play there – between ordering work, watching the work or seeing it unfold in a gallery, critiquing (as were doing now)?

Exactly – visibility becomes a matter of privilege, as does who is looking at whom. It puts the audience in a complicated position. But then, do we want art to be an entertaining, comfortable experience, or do we want it to be one that is difficult and highlights these contradictions? Not just contradictions in terms of the relationship between the audience and the artwork, but also for me, too, as the author. I’m not neutral.

I’m working with these communities, having human conversations with marginalised people about representation, and what that feels like, what that sounds like. The Mechanical Turk workers that I corresponded with told me that the task returned a sense of agency to them, that they felt like themselves rather than just like a machine, So as the orchestrator of this artwork, I have to think very carefully about how I form the task, about what exactly I ask the crowdworkers to do. My goal was to provide some of that human agency within a system that’s fundamentally trying to take it away. That’s the challenge, but of course that is not a straightforward power dynamic.

Which leads me on to: how do you teach this? [both laugh] The theory, tech, how does that all come together in the classroom?

It’s not purely theoretical, it’s not purely practice-driven, it’s really about a research-driven approach to practice in which experimentation can go beyond just intuition and trial and error. It’s about supporting students with their ideas and helping them learn to follow the very best, most interesting, most appropriate way to explore that idea, regardless of where it takes them in terms of materials, media or site.

Do you collaborate with any external partners or venues or organisations?

Yes certainly. Imperial College London has become an important partner for a lot of the AI research that I’m doing. And our students do a number of offsite projects throughout the year. In May, we have our students participating in Offprint at Tate Modern, and also a series of four exhibitions at Television Centre in White City.

One thing that’s quite unusual about the RCA, that maybe feeds an interdisciplinary mindset, is the setup of their technical services. When I was at art school studying sculpture, we’d have two or three technicians, one in the wood shop, one in a metal shop, etc. And those are who you have to help you make your work. If you wanted to stretch a canvas down the corridor, then they might not want to talk to you about that [laughs].

But the RCA technical service staff are all shared across the whole institution, which means that if we want to have our students learn about neuroscience, or something like that, then there is somebody, somewhere, who they can talk to – whether it has a conventional relationship to photography or not.

Where there’s gaps, if we think of something that doesn’t have provision in the technical staff, then in some ways that’s a provocation to the institution to try and fill that gap. In that sense, we have this interesting reciprocity between a research-driven approach to teaching, and the ability to meet that research with the technical resources that are required for it.

What are you looking for in prospective students?

I think it’s a broad church. When it comes to what they want to do with photography, whether they are interested in analogue or digital media, darkroom processes or other expanded practices, then we have great staff and resources for them to do well – from photographers like Sarah Jones, Rut Blees Luxemburg and Olivier Richon to Edward Thomasson and Tom Lovelace who work with performance, as well as artists such as Abbas Zahedi, Lisa Chang Lee and Chooc Ly Tan whose practices span sound, installation and sculpture.

So it is a programme where students come in from many different disciplines and backgrounds, but all of whom want to explore the dialogue between Photography and the work that they are making.

I would advise prospective students to think about the materials you’re going to work with, in order to be able to find the right fit for your ideas. Tell us about the conceptual underpinnings of your practice and show us you know how to make those ideas become experiences. Who are you going to work with, what resources do you need? Let us know why the Photography programme is the right fit for you.

In your portfolio, give us a hint of the flexibility and openness in your practice, that makes you want to learn and experiment. We want to see a willingness to take things apart and put them back together again, and a willingness to exchange with the academic community that’s here. Help us to see you understand the relationship between photography and other contemporary art practises, or contemporary art as a broad idea, and what role photography plays within that.

Do you mean, for example, that you’d like students to be asking questions in their application? To be curious about not knowing outcomes, but wanting to kind of explore or push or challenge prior knowledge?

That’s a great way to put it. It is such an interesting time to be thinking about and working with images. Current estimates suggest around 5 billion photographs are being taken everyday, and of course the vast majority of those are not being printed, framed and hung on a wall. So photography opens up important conversations around reproduction, appropriation, materiality, networks, sharing, authorship, originality, consent and so on. We want students to be responding to these things and really experimenting with how we experience photography in the world today.

What would you say is a signature of RCA Photography MA?

Something that we brought into the programme over the last couple of years has been what we call a ‘practice group’ model. We have fourteen staff in Photography at the moment, working across a very broad range of areas – print, performance, moving image,  sculpture, new media, audio, etc. This reflects the dynamic range of practices that are students come in with, and want to explore when they arrive.

We wanted to find ways to support these practice areas, establish dialogue between them, and fully leverage the cross-disciplinary research and expertise of our programme staff.

So we run around ten different practice groups each year, each focused on things like ecology, materiality, synthetic media, the relationship between image and text, and so on. The students sign up at the start of the year to be in one of these groups, and meet every couple of weeks with a faculty lead for a three-hour group tutorial, field trip or workshop. My group had a great visit to the Tate to see the Electric Dreams show, and we have a workshop coming up on AI poetics.

So it’s a structure that allows some degree of directed learning to occur alongside the more self-directed studio practice that students engage with the rest of the time. It’s a model that has been very successful in challenging our students to explore new ideas, while trying to meet them where they want to be as well.

Laura Robertson

Interested in applying to the Royal College of Art to study Photography? There are scholarships available across courses: see more on the RCA website

Credits from top: James Coupe, I am not a Robot (2019), from the exhibition EXERCISES IN PASSIVITY at the Prichard Gallery, 2020. Photography MA graduates, Royal College of Art: Kun Song, One; Danilo Zocatelli Cesco, Dear Father; Gregor Petrikovič

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – 8½ 5pm @ FACT Liverpool –£8.50

Fellini’s film about filmmaking, 8½ finds Marcello Mastroianni’s blocked Guido wrestling with his directorial career. A self-referential triumph, it is considered one of the greatest commentaries on film ever committed to, well, film.

Tuesday – Exhibition Continues: Graham Crowley: I Paint Shadows @ the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

John Moores Painting Prize winner Graham Crowley first showed at the Walker in 1976, having found inspiration there as a young artist earlier in the decade. Crowley, who has said: “I paint shadows. Light fascinates me…” has now returned to the gallery with this aptly titled solo show. Call for entries for this year’s John Moores Painting Prize close 5pm, 24 March.

Exhibition Continues: No Iconic Images @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

A show asking pertinent questions of photojournalism – ‘What images of conflicts do we need? Do we believe in what we see?’ – No Iconic Images: Views of War, arrives at a time during which conflict rages everywhere you care to look. Once considered crucial in bringing the visual story to the eyes of the wider world, the exhibition interrogates conflict’s portrayal, and what, in today’s climate of proliferation, saturation and desensitisation, can possibly cut through to reach picture editors, audiences and politicians alike.

Dig! XX 7.15pm @ FACT Liverpool – £14

Winner of the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Dig! is the real life story of friendship and professional rivalry between Portland bands The Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and their leaders Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Anton Newcombe. Filmmaker Ondi Timoner set out wanting to explore the scene they were in the vanguard of and ended up with one of the best music docs ever committed to film. For this 20th anniversary release, Dig! has been augmented with 40mins additional footage and new commentary (from BJM’s Joel Gion), for this extended one-off screening.

From the archive: The Big Interview: Anton Newcombe

Wednesday – Meet the Artist: Chris Shaw 6.30pm @ Tate Liverpool – £5/£3

Chris Shaw’s photographs make for a compelling introduction to the current Tate Liverpool exhibition, The Plant That Stowed Away, the title of which is drawn from the annotated series: I see no ships but the plant that stowed away. Catch the photographer in conversation this evening with Dr Christine Eyene on Shaw’s Weeds of Wallasey, the agency of plants, and maritime Liverpool.

Warpaint – Women at War + Recorded Q&A 7.50pm @ FACT Liverpool – £14

Margy Kinmonth has, quietly, steadfastly, and for some time, been exploring the lives of those in and around art. From Eric Ravilious to art in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, the director-producer has an eye for the story between the lines, which she has now turned to a female perspective on the frontline.

From the archive: Revolution: New Art For A New World

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Interlude 6pm @ The Royal Standard, Liverpool – FREE

Group exhibition from Liverpool-based artist trio, Marginalia. Featuring: Jessie Birkett, whose work incorporates mythologies and the sublime; painter, India Clarke; Marginalia collective founder, writer-artist Elodie Horsewell; multidisciplinary installation artist, Ren Yeates Black; collagist Erin Shawe; and Beatrice Gillard.

Friday – In Conversation: Landlines Studio 6pm @ Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead – FREE

With Un/Earthed, Angela Stringer and Nicky Perrin – collectively, Landlines Studio – address and explore the alchemy and storytelling potential of the land. Join the artist duo this evening to hear about their process, inspirations, themes and retrospective exhibition, on display at the Williamson until 30 June.

Tribute to Max Richter 7pm @ the Tung Auditorium, Liverpool – £20-£35

Whether you realise it or not, neo-classical composer Max Richter has elevated many a film and TV show – from Shutter Island and Arrival to Black Mirror, The Leftovers, and Bridgerton of all things. Indeed, for a while there, his Blue Notebooks was ubiquitous. Lending a gravitas such productions mightn’t realise alone, it is unsurprising that Richter is now subject to tributes such as this by Mystery Ensemble, who bring his interpretation of Vivaldi’s The Four Season’s to the Tung. Stellar stuff.

Saturday – Eraserhead 8.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.50

David Lynch’s debut feature, Eraserhead announced a remarkable new voice in Western Cinema. It is a darkly surreal vision of a film, which continues to intrigue almost half a century after its release.

From the archive: The Death of America: David Lynch’s My Head is Disconnected

Sunday – John Cale 7.30pm @ Liverpool Philharmonic Hall £35-£52

What is there left to say about John Cale? Born of Welsh mining stock; maverick composer and viola player; founder member of The Velvet Underground; producer of Nico’s best records; solo artist. Now 83, the previous two years have seen Cale release a pair of very well-received new records, the latter of which – POPtical Illusion – he’s currently touring. What is there left to say about Cale? There’s life in the avant-garde dog yet.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: 8 1/2 trailer; Dig! XX trailer; Chris Shaw, Weeds of Wallasey, 2007-12 © Chris Shaw; Warpaint – Women at War trailer; Mystery Ensemble trailer; Eraserhead trailer; Homepage: Raymond and his sons. Raymond Hubbard lost his leg in Baghdad on July 4, 2006, when a Russian-made 122 mm rocket crashed twenty feet from the guard post where he was stationed. Darien, Wisconsin, USA, 2007 © Peter van Agtmael / Magnum Photos

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Exhibition Continues: Between the Earth and the Sky @ New Adelphi Exhibition Gallery, Salford University – FREE

A hidden gem of the region’s art spaces, New Adelphi Exhibition Gallery regularly showcases works from the University of Salford’s collection. Between the Earth and the Sky (open from last week) is the latest to catch the eye. With contemporary print, photography and video, the group show – which includes work by Darren Almond, Jessica El Mal, Mishka Henner, Bridget Riley, and Liang Yue – reflects on nature’s transitional and transformative moments.

In the Mood for Love 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.50

Wong Kar-Wai’s films are synonymous with beauty, melancholy, and unexplored desire. To have seen one of his films is to have, for its running time at the very least, lived all of those things and more. For many, that film will likely be In the Mood for Love, starring a ravishing will they won’t they Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Exploring their unconsummated relationship – which the pair toy with, and that we luxuriate in – the director has described it as akin to “two people dancing together slowly.”

Tuesday – The Merchant of Venice 1936 7.30pm @ the Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool – £11-£41

The play that opened my eyes to theatre and, specifically, Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice revolves around the titular merchant, Antonio, defaulting on his debt to moneylender, Shylock. Written in the 16th century, for this new adaptation the action has been transposed to a London on the eve of the Second World War, with the role of Shylock now occupied by TV’s Tracy-Ann Oberman. It arrives in Liverpool on the back of raves and sell out audiences in the West End.

Wednesday – Exhibition Opening: The Plant That Stowed Away @ Tate Liverpool – FREE

Bearing an exhibition title that, owing to its poetic ambiguity, puts one in mind of Biennials of yesteryear, The Plant That Stowed Away brings together Tate collection works to speak to the global movements of flora, positioning Liverpool as a starting point. Featuring works by Wirral-born photographer Chris Shaw and Atkinson Grimshaw’s Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, alongside an international cast of artists including Cristina de Middel, Kader Attia and Wangechi Mutu, it speaks to post-industrialisation, colonisation, and migration.

Macbeth 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £22

Another reimagining of Shakespeare this week sees David Tenant and Cush Jumbo star in this new version of the Bard’s famed Scottish Play, filmed live at London’s Donmar Warehouse especially for the big screen.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Rave On 5pm @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

With new exhibition For Your Pleasure’s lens trained on the queer club culture of 1990s UK, and Rave On’s celebration of the roughly overlapping 80s and 90s Liverpool rave scenes, Open Eye Gallery seems to have declared February to be party time. Get down to Mann Island for a nostalgic glimpse of clubbing pre Instagram and TikTok.

Exploring Family History, Migration, & Memory Through Poetry w/Jennifer Lee Tsai 5.30pm @ the Bluecoat – FREE

Jennifer Lee Tsai, poet and Bluecoat artist in residence, recently featured in the gallery’s But Does it Speak?, a season exploring language in a gallery setting, with the film, Fallen Star. She returns today for this free generative poetry workshop looking at family history, migration and memory.

Further Reading: Jennifer Lee Tsai’s Fallen Star

Friday – The Brian Jonestown Massacre 7pm @ the Liverpool Olympia – £36.85

90s psych-rock scene survivors, The Brian Joenstown Massacre, land in Liverpool tonight to get your weekend off with a bang. Their leader, Anton Newcombe (above), features on the latest podcast from our pals, Dead Air Records.

Further Reading: The Big Interview: Anton Newcombe

Saturday – The Graduate 3pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.50

Best known for Mrs. Robinson’s seduction of Dustin Hoffman’s Ben (and the related soundtrack), from today’s perspective, that almost fabled film of ennui and in-between-ness, The Graduate, is also a strange insight into the cultural mores of the period – not least, a particular brand of male entitlement both on and off screen.

Sunday – Liverpool Poetry: Reading & Discussion w/Pauline Rowe 1pm @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

More poetry to round off your week, coming in the form of this Pauline Rowe-led reading and discussion reflecting on 1967′s The Mersey Sound, an anthology which launched the careers of Liverpool trio Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten into the stratosphere. This workshop considers their legacy and asks what it means to be a Liverpool poet today.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: In the Mood for Love still; The Merchant of Venice 1936 trailer; Chris Shaw, Weeds of Wallasey, 2007-12 © Chris Shaw; Anton Newcombe; The Mersey Sound

Pushing the idea of jewellery to breaking point, Royal College of Art tutor Jonathan Boyd is encouraging the next generation of designers and artists to exponentially challenge their practice. He tells Laura Robertson about the experimentation, the expertise, and the RCA’s dedicated postgraduate scholarship for British silversmiths…

Originally from Aberdeen, Jonathan Boyd has spent most of his life in Glasgow. Talking to me over Zoom, he sits on an iconic orange and red 1980s Glasgow bus seat, which reminds me of the Liverpool buses I grew up with. The walls behind him are plastered with pages of handwriting, photographs and ink drawings. It’s not what I expected from a jeweller – but what was I expecting?

Head of Programme for Jewellery & Metal MA (JaM) at the Royal College of Art, I was interested to find out how Boyd’s own artwork impacts his students. His recent exhibition – Thoughts Between the Land and the Sea: Raising the Doggerland – featured animations, spoken word, sculptures, texts and sketchbooks.

A multi-award-winning artist, jeweller and academic, Boyd was a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art for nine years and he has degrees from the RCA and GSA. His work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts collections. He is represented by Gallery Marzee in The Netherlands.

TDN: You’re making work about language and object, can you expand on that?

JB: So I’m sort of a jeweller, but I’m probably working on the edges of jewellery and fine art. It’s a weird place to be, but I’m interested in jewellery as an art form because it connects with the body and the person in really strange ways. My own practice was sort of driven by a neurodivergent inability to read when I was growing up, and I became fascinated by typography and the image of language.

It’s no surprise, then, that your RCA2023 graduate show really pushed at what we’d conceive as jewellery and metal work. There was a social distancing belt made of arms, animations of dreams, a bikini made from feathers and gold…

Yes, there were so many incredible makers. Two people who for me exemplify what we were doing are Lili Murphy-Johnson, who was the first Jewellery & Metal student to be nominated as a Bloomberg New Contemporary, who would buy cheap earrings from Accessorize and remake them in fine gold, and put them back in the shop; and Elaheh Naghi Ganji, who was making incredibly powerful, quiet pieces, where she was writing protest letters, using an eraser to rub them out, and then collecting those rubbings and turning them into pearls.

What about RCA2024? Can you introduce us to a couple of stand-out postgraduates?

So this year, one metal student is amazing, Yating Zheng. Inspired by her relationship with her Grandmother, she made this teapot which she talks to, slowly transformed through silver-smithing techniques, into this bodily, insane and amazingly-crafted teapot with a belly. Margo Misiak-Orlovic has made like a body of potatoes: it’s really strange but she’s looking at ways of thinking like a non-human. She’s been recording sound by submerging speakers in the ground, and made a series of jewellery objects and wall objects that are electroformed. The electroforming process is a lot like a type of rooting, growing, where you’ve got an object in a metal tank submerged in acid. An electric current is put through them and the metal reaches out to each other neurons or something crazy.

Jewellers, silversmiths and performance artists: all of whom are interested in the body and how we understand the world of things. Jewellery is something that connects, it is really symbiotic. You wear this ring because it symbolises something, but actually, it’s more than the symbol – it becomes you. And when you take it off, your body feels heavier.

And so there’s something there about our students understanding the world through jewellery, as a thought process, and through metal as a medium for expression.

It’s a progressive way of looking at jewellery and metal work that clearly fits with your own ideas of what it can be. What do you want to do with the programme moving forward?

We want to enable people to work across a spectrum of creative practices. We’ve got a lot of students working in biomaterials, looking at making things that are sustainable and ethical.

I’ve worked very closely with Dr Peter Oakley, who’s the RCA’s Reader in Material Culture. His area of interest is fair trade metals and so, together, we’ve created a research cluster, where all the staff come together. We share our research and it’s a lovely, peer relationship of understanding.

Because we were able to do that, we’re able to share really effectively with the students a teaching of ethics, carbon emissions, luxury goods sector, etc. For me, it’s about creating this type of jewellery thinking, which enables them to create their own approaches.

How about heritage or rare crafts, native crafts? I believe you offer a scholarship in British silver? Why?

The South Square Trust Scholarship is really important to us. What interests me about interdisciplinary work is that it comes from people working with real disciplinary expertise. Heritage is knowing, that tacit understanding of metal, and how it moves and how you shape it and how things are formed. Things move in different ways, depending on environmental pressures: silversmiths know that when you apply heat, things change. We want to keep that connection to our heritage alive, but also think, where does that discipline go now? What does it mean to be using these materials? There are still traditional vessels, but do we need to question their function? Do we need to question their environmental stability? Do we need to question?

So even just a teapot, although it’s made of aluminium, there’s something there about taking silversmithing and applying narrative to it and saying, actually, this object isn’t just this memory, this is familial, this is my life. You get it because it’s autobiography.

How do people apply for The South Square Trust Scholarship (for Home students using silver in their practice: £10,000 towards living costs)? What are you looking for in the MA application that would make them eligible?

It’s worth mentioning that this scholarship is still to be awarded for the 2024/25 academic year. It’s offered to a high scoring applicant to JaM, so anyone interested should apply asap!

We’re looking for people working in metal, who want to challenge and question their practice. I think so many people look to study an MA because they’ve been working for a long period of time, and they just need time to think. So often we’re taught in a certain way, especially in apprenticeships or undergraduate degrees, and you get to the point where you think, no, I need this to be something else and I need to reframe what I’m doing.

We are looking for applicants to highlight their craft skills; to show us the way that person sees the world. Tell us: how do you capture the world? How do you understand the world, visually, aesthetically, materially? So, if you’re taking photographs as research and then that develops into pieces of work, that development process is what we want to see and hear more about. Development shows us how you shift from an idea, through to how you progress, and back to idea to ‘thing’.

Try to articulate what is elemental to your practice, and how it’s developed, that’s it.

Would you also want to kind of hear what they specifically want to learn at the RCA, to push it to a step change?

Yeah, it’s good to have an idea of where you want to go. But knowing that when you come to the RCA, there’s a very good chance that your ideas will change fairly radically fairly quickly! Some people don’t study an MA because there isn’t a scholarship.

The RCA is renowned for its staff expertise. Tell me more about the technical and academic staff you work with.

We’ve got incredible facilities, stone cutting and a silversmithing room etc., but what’s really amazing is that our technical and academic staff are practising artists. They’re all working at the tops of their fields. People like Mary Ann Simmons, who has work in the British Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Pete Musson, not only is he a really well established silversmith, he works with companies as a design consultant, for Stella McCartney, Cubitts eyewear, Microsoft. Mah Rana, one of the key figures of contemporary jewellery in the 1990s, is now an expert in Psychology. Sophie Boons is studying a radical PhD where she’s growing rubies straight into rings. We are all questioning materials, and the meanings that come with material. The way we run the programme is that we break jewellery and metal into these smaller philosophies, that we call platforms. One of them is about digital; I run one about science and art; one is dedicated to metal. We’re really trying to foster an environment of critical working.

As told to Laura Robertson

Applications for the September 2024 intake of the Jewellery & Metal MA are still open, but places are limited. Visit the RCA website to find out more

Ask the RCA Student Team for advice about any scholarship, grant or bursary you might be eligible for… Including The South Square Trust Scholarship (for Home students using silver in their practice: £10,000 towards living costs)

See a host of RCA2024 exhibitions until 4 August 2024, across the RCA’s Battersea and White City campuses, and the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. See here for more details 

This article was sponsored by the RCA

Image credits from top: Yating Zheng (2024); Lili Murphy-Johnson (2023); Margo Misiak-Orlovic (2024); Jonathan Boyd, with work from Doggerland (2020)

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Exhibition Continues (until 31 May): Life at Arena 12-4pm @ Bridewell Studios & Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

Exhibition showcasing artists drawn from the current roster of members of Arena Studios and Gallery.

Trainspotting 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Danny Boyle’s lurid, high-octane adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s 1993 Edinburgh-set tales of drugs, friendship and debauchery is back in cinemas having been treated to a 4K restoration. Choose Life. Screens again Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Tuesday – The Tara Clerkin Trio 7.15pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £13.50

Inspired by jazz, trip hop, electronica, psychedelia & minimalism, the The Tara Clerkin Trio (veterans of the Bristol music scene Pat Benjamin, Sunny Joe Paradisos and Clerkin) land at Future Yard armed with ‘looped and layered clarinet, vocals, samples, keys & percussion’. Lovely stuff.

Wednesday – Come, Come to Mama – Performance by Dahong Hongxuan Wang 2pm @ the Bluecoat – FREE

In artist Dahong Hongxuan Wang’s film Role Model (top), she plays Chinese-American star Anna May Wong, retracing the actor’s footsteps to consider her journey to her ancestral hometown. Come, Come to Mama promises an intimate performance that includes food, song and story-telling in which Dahong will draw on her identity and experiences portraying Wong who, to paraphrase, was rejected by the Chinese for being ‘too American’ and by Hollywood because of systemic racism.

Exhibition Opening: Bonds/Ripples 6pm @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

Exhibition of new graduate works drawn from from BA Photography and Social Practice (UCEN Manchester) and  BA (Hons) in Digital Imaging and Photography (Hugh Baird College). Variously addressing shared experiences, grief, place and memory, the future of the form – if appearances are anything to go by – is in good hands.

Thursday – Scratch #1 8pm @ Mirage Bar, Islington Mill, Salford – from £4

Inaugural Scratch – “a chance for creatives to test their performance based work for an audience.” Held at Salford’s artist-led space, Islington Mill, and hosted by long time pals of the publication, the phenom that is Short Supply, expect “live painting, clowning and audio visual wonder” from a variety of artists honing their craft.

Friday – Liz Roche Company: Sentient 7.30pm @ Everyman, Liverpool – from £11

A work featuring dancers, saxophone and early electronic instrument ondes Martenot, and voice acting from Adrian Dunbar, Liz Roche Company’s Sentient (above) responds to Samuel Beckett’s work of existentialism and loss, Molloy. Part of Beckett: Unbound.

Saturday – Exhibition Continues (Until 8 June): The Town is The Gallery, Convenience Gallery pop-up, Birkenhead – FREE

When stores such as M&S desert the high-street, worse things can happen than their premises being taken over by art and artists. Such is the case with Convenience Gallery’s The Town is The Gallery. Rather than a closed husk of a building, the space is currently occupied by Leo Fitzmaurice’s site-specific work, FIT IT, in response to “the physical fabric of the store itself” and In a Past Line, by Kate Bigley, an artist “utilizing architecture and playing with structures to reimagine a space.”

Sunday – Last Chance To See: On the other side @ FACT Liverpool – FREE

Exhibition of new work from artists Melanie Crean and Katrina Palmer, as well as Pilvi Takala’s Close Watch (chosen for the Finnish Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2022, above) that considers collaboration, systems of control and, ultimately, human nature, comes to a close.

Last Chance To See: Infinite Encounters @ Liverpool Cathedral – FREE

Group exhibition Infinite Encounters has been made with the senses in mind. Visitors are invited to engage with conceptual artist Rasheed Araeen’s ever-changing sculpture, Zero to Infinity, and similarly (although it will be the olfaction sense activated here), with Frances Disley’s Holodeck Program 106. Myriam Thyes’ video work Mutable Worlds presents the viewer with an interactive journey, while Neringa Naujokaite’s Horizon considers the urban environment through sound. From the Archive: The Big Interview: Rasheed Araeen

Mike Pinnington

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Exhibition Continues: Infinite Encounters @ Liverpool Cathedral – FREE

Group exhibition Infinite Encounters has been curated with the senses in mind. Actively engage with conceptual artist Rasheed Araeen’s ever-changing sculpture, Zero to Infinity, and breathe in the sweet fragrances of Frances Disley’s Holodeck Program 106. Myriam Thyes’ video work Mutable Worlds presents the viewer with an interactive journey, while Neringa Naujokaite’s Horizon considers the urban environment through sound. From the Archive: The Big Interview: Rasheed Araeen

The Banned Book Club: Taking a Stand Against Book Bans 7pm, Online – £3

This year’s Writing on the Wall Festival, inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (and subtitled Fahrenheit 2024) leans into its timely and urgent theme here, as this online talk addresses access to – and it’s a sign of how far to the right we’ve swung in recent times that I say this – banned books. Dr. Torsten Reimer, University Librarian and Dean of the University Library, and Laura Sill, Head of Acquisitions, at the University of Chicago discuss an initiative that ensures readers access to free eBooks of banned titles.

Fargo 8.50pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.20

“This is a true story” a title card tells audiences at the beginning of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, their 1996 film about frustration, small town plotting, kidnap and murder. It’s a simple conceit and an intriguing beginning to a great neo-noir film, back in cinemas as part of Picturehouse’s look back at the brothers’ oeuvre.

Tuesday – Cola 7.15pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £13

Emerging from the ashes of Ought – whose barnstorming debut More Than Any Other Day recently turned 10 (!) – Cola are that band’s Ben Stidworthy and Tim Darcy, with Evan Cartwright (US Girls/The Weather Station) joining on drums. Named for the sugary addictive soft drink synonymous with rotten teeth and the so-called American Dream, their moniker also stands for Cost of Living Adjustment – an indication that these are people in touch with the world. New record, The Gloss, is out next month.

Wednesday – Shallow Grave 30th Anniversary Screening 8.45pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

30 years? How did that happen? Director Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave’s trio of flatmates (baby Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox and Christopher Eccleston) come into an unexpected windfall – and come face to face with the consequences of greed and betrayal.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Would You Land an Airplane There? Susan Leask: New Sculptures 6pm @ Bridewell Studios & Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

Sculptor Susan Leask, who repurposes found materials and unconventional material such as polystyrene packaging, introduces new works that “hint at stories, thoughts and places” at the Bridewell. Read Jon Barraclough’s new profile of the artist.

Friday – Wolfgang Flür 7.30pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £24

Kraftwerk’s drummer between 1973 and 1986, Wolfgang Flür’s performance MUSIK SOLDAT – including videos and images from shows past and present and, of course, electro – arrives in Birkenhead.

Saturday – Casey Orr Artist Talk and SEPN NW Meet-Up 2pm @ Open Eye Gallery – FREE (RSVP)

For more than a decade, Casey Orr has travelled the country with her pop-up studio, photographing young people on Saturday afternoons. An exploration of fashion, culture, identity and the ritualised nature of weekends out with your mates, here, Orr discusses the first retrospective exhibition of her work (currently on display at Open Eye Gallery) with the Socially Engaged Photography Network’s North West coordinator, Liz Wewiora.

Sunday – Last Chance To See: Lāsma Poiša: I became a mother @ Warrington Museum & Art Gallery – FREE

Winner of the Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival Prize in 2022 and shortlisted for 2023′s BJP Portrait of Britain 2023, photographer Lāsma Poiša describes her candid series I became a mother as “a personal journey into a universal female experience of metamorphosis, evolution, and recovery.” Catch the exhibition, which closes today, while you can.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: Rasheed Araeen, Zero to Infinity, installation shot; Fargo trailer; Cola/The Gloss; Susan Leask (sculpture detail); Casey Orr