Any attempt to describe the arts scene in Greater Manchester will always include blind spots and omissions, so foreground the process of this attempt as a ‘snapshot’. I’m writing as an artist and freelancer, who is not only new to calling themselves an artist but also hasn’t had a straightforward trajectory of coming up through institutions like an art school or having studio space. However, being new to the scene can perhaps present an interesting opportunity. Here are the things that have appeared on my radar in 2025 through going to openings, meeting other artists, and generally coming to arts in Greater Manchester (GM) with few preconceptions and little insider experience. The starting point of my snapshot of the scene is centred on the place I call home - Manchester borough - but also includes events and art spaces in the neighbouring cities of Salford and Stockport.
Where is the art happening?
Openings and events are mostly taking place in studio spaces, with a small but growing scene of commercial galleries and spaces. Many of the studios are well-established: AWOL studios in central Manchester, Paradise Works and Islington Mill in Salford, 1853 Mill in Oldham, and Bankley Studios in Levenshulme for example. All are housed in the ex-mills, works and warehouses that come to mind when one thinks of the industrial landscape of Manchester. An outlier in geography, in the less gentrified East of the city, there is Rogue studios, a converted Victorian school, whilst Longsight Art Space in the South East of the city is a community and exhibition space in a historic converted Cooperative Wholesale building. Many of these are not just working studios but are significant parts of the ecosystem of visual arts in the city. In the last year, AWOL, Paradise Works and Bankley Studios have run open calls or art prizes which attract local artists to apply to and visit the subsequent exhibitions. These studio spaces then serve as entry points into Manchester’s art scene, as well as the working spaces where studio holders make their work.
The existing studios cluster around central Manchester because they are survivors of an early phase of Manchester’ art scene in which affordable spaces were more commonly available - it feels less likely today that new studio space could be found in the heart of Manchester due to increasing rents. Whilst many of the spaces in Manchester feel like legacy institutions, Stockport is seen increasingly as an artistic and cultural destination where new venues and possibilities are more possible. A significant new part of the GM arts scene is PINK in Stockport. PINK moved into a converted 1960s office block in Stockport city centre in 2023, having previously been based in central Manchester. Now well-established in Stockport, PINK’s huge multi-levelled studio and exhibition space is led by the curator Katy Morison. In the past few months alone, I’ve visited PINK to see a varied programme of art, all produced to an incredibly high standard: a full evening programme of performance art and happenings curated by the artists Rowland Hill and Darren Nixon, multi-disciplinary work that centres on ceramics by artist Pippa Eason, as well as an exhibition of large-format photography by Lewis David Oldham.
In addition to studios as the centre-points of the GM arts scene, a number of more commercial spaces stand out. In central Manchester, SeeSaw is a co-working space and cafe that hosts rotating exhibitions by local artists and collective in its cafe space, with an additional exhibition space in the basement of the converted warehouse it calls home – and was previously home to PINK, before its move to Stockport. The Smolensk Gallery is a commercial art gallery in the more upmarket district of Spinningfields, Central Manchester which has called Manchester home since 2020, describing itself as: ‘Irreverent. Independent. Unapologetically Northern’. Alongside this more established and high-end commercial gallery there have emerged in recent years a number of commercial gallery spaces in the Northern Quarter of the Manchester city centre: the event and art space Texture, Saan1 art gallery and an even newer arrival, the art gallery Black Redstart.
Aesthetics and approaches in Manchester scenes
An attempt to present even a general summary of artistic trends within the Manchester art scene is bound to struggle, given that the work produced is incredibly diverse in terms of media, content and approaches. However, there are some themes which I find particularly interesting in respect to the artistic ecosystem of the Greater Manchester area: themes centring on ideas of ‘place’, artistic and curatorial approaches premised on ‘community’ and finally work which broadly plays on ideas of ‘utopia’/’dystopia’.
Place
Paradise Up North, at Paradise Works in Salford, curated by Jessia Bennet, was an exhibition which came from an open call, describing itself as a ‘celebration, interrogation, and reimagining of Northern identity’. I found that it opened up ideas of thinking about Northern identity in ways that were playful and self-aware whilst also deploying a sense of humour in tackling imagery of the North as industrial, gritty, and working-class. The puncturing of cliché felt smart and considered. Subversive in its playfulness, the exhibition also included art which felt intimate, utopian, queer, and introduced a rich and varied sense of ‘place’. This idea of place was also addressed in another exhibition in the following month by the Division of Labour gallery, also resident at Paradise Works. The show ‘Village Greens, Hillsides and Conurbations’ included works such as sketchbooks from journeys around northern towns by artist John-Paul Brown, contemporary traditional landscape painting from Lewis Graham as well as work by Angelina May Davies which seemed to work in a dream-like mode that felt inspired by both surrealism and pop art. In both exhibitions it felt like the sense of ‘place’ - so often a topic of cultural interrogation in discussions about the North - was addressed in ways which presented an exciting sense of possibility and diversity of experience.
Collaborative approaches and community
In August, I caught the exhibition Femininity as Subject at Manchester Metropolitan’s Grosvenor art school site, a project of curator Beatrice Jane Penny. The exhibition’s starting point was ideas of femininity, which grew out of a drive to respond to the reactionary turn in contemporary British politics, as represented by the April 2025 Supreme Court Ruling on gender. Featuring seven artists working in different disciplines, it too was a highly diverse collection of work, but what was particularly interesting was the processes which went into the creation of the exhibition. Jane Penny discussed this as a ‘collaborative approach’ taken between curator and artists, with much of the work emerging out of creative prompts as part of artistic workshops. This collaborative approach fostered what Jane Penny calls: ‘a sense of community during the stages of production … creating a safe environment for artists to express their evolving responses as the exhibition progressed’. It’s this drive towards collaboration and the creation of community which feels a significant part of Manchester’s art scene. It could be that the size of the GM scene allows artists to easily connect, opening up opportunities for collaboration and developing a sense of community. In light of this, it’s unsurprising that Manchester’s scene is home to a number of artist collectives and collaborative projects. Even in exhibitions which are not explicitly ‘group’ shows - such as Pippa Eason’s ‘Four-Fold Reverie’ at PINK - the work which was largely sculpture was supplemented by collaboration with stage and space designers, musicians and film artists. On the point of collaboration and community, Eason’s fellow PINK studio holder artist Rowland Hill told me in an interview:
“There’s a sense of mutual support and people are generally up for collaborating, for showing up and giving something a go.”
Political responses: dystopias and utopias
Most work I’ve encountered in the past year can be said in some way to interrogate and respond to the political landscape in a myriad of ways, including work that is more opaque or uses tones of irony or even nihilism. This was on display in the exhibition We Coulda Had Blue Skies by Evita Ziemele at Rogue Studios. Ziemele’s work - which comprises painting, sculpture and printwork - utilises imagery such as Hello Kitty, Mickey Mouse and the Pink Panther alongside mannequin-like bodies in ways which feels absurd and unsettling: ‘sardonic expressions of a pessimistic discontent’ in Ziemele’s exhibition text. The play with mass-media imagery in surrealist and often dark tones also appeared in the paintings by artist 4J3B at BlackRedStart gallery in their show ‘Is This A Dream?’. Responses to our current political landscape then seem to include both the dystopian (I think here about the end sentence of Ziemele’s exhibition notes, ‘the future could have been great … but we’ve fucked it’) through to potential utopias, for example, through the solo touring show by artist Sarah Al-Sarraj ‘Limbs of the Lunar Disk’ at the Longsight Art Space. Her representational painting work suggests alternative worlds and ways of being in the hope of answering the question suggested in the copy for the exhibition: ‘how do we create intergenerational justice for those yet to come?’.
Trends and tendencies:
The arts scene in Greater Manchester feels like it’s thriving - the range of media, styles and approaches on show seem indicative of a healthy and exciting scene in which well-established studio spaces play a significant role. With studios being a major point of interaction between artists, there’s a sense of collaboration and community. In particular, the quality of work exhibited is striking, with events at PINK studios in Stockport showcasing work that is experimental, bolder - open to taking risks. In the words of artist and PINK studio holder Rowland Hill: ‘PINK allows for … amorphous, ambitious, boundary pushing activity’ in a way which feels extremely precious within the GM arts scene.
However, the case of Stockport is a particular one worth drawing attention to. At present there’s a certain ‘buzz’ around Stockport’s arts scene, thanks in part to the described work at PINK. However, this buzz is also in no small part thanks to a deliberate and concerted effort of Stockport Council planners and development officers. Encouraging arts investment is seen as a part of commercial development of the area, not merely a good in itself. Whilst council support and encouragement of the arts it to be welcomed at a time when making art feels like an increasingly precarious and privileged activity, under our current climate it raises questions of how this support affects what art is made, how it is made, and who it is made for.
Commercialisation and financial precarity linger around the edges of the arts scene in Manchester and are often topics of discussion. Whilst the existing studio spaces are focus points of opportunity and collaboration, there is a sense of their precarity too. Central Manchester is a hugely desirable location with rents to match it, making it more challenging to hold events which are less commercial. It is perhaps no accident that the most interesting and enjoyable work, in my opinion, has been that in Salford and in Stockport. Increasingly, galleries and studies have to make commercial decisions that detract from the kind of long-term nurturing of artists and bold risk-taking that is vital in an organic and experimental arts scene.
Whilst the emergence of the small and very new commercial galleries in the centre of Manchester are to be welcomed and suggest a potential positive trend, their longer-term financial viability remains to be seen. It’s likely that the commercial pressures of the environment will drive a push towards what curator Beatrice Jane Penny described as, “finished, polished works”, instead of art which is process-driven, messy, and able to take risks.
There is a hope amongst many in the arts scene here in GM that increasing council interest in the ‘health’ of the arts ecosystem can help to sustain the venues where art work is made and exhibited. However, I have concerns that this is rarely more than thinking of our arts scene in ‘survival’ mode against the pricing out of artists and art spaces. In practice, this will see existing arts spaces being largely protected, whilst being subject to increasingly commercial pressures. I’m struck by the answer given by Rowland Hill when asked, are you optimistic for the future of the arts scene here in Greater Manchester?
“What’s missing is the willingness to create conditions for something new to happen now. If affordable spaces were prioritised and artists were trusted to generate momentum, this would inevitably create more potential for change and social, political and artistic momentum of all kinds — which I remain cautiously hopeful for. Until then, Manchester risks becoming a museum of itself.”
The incredibly rich and varied art scene in Manchester does give me cause to be ‘cautiously hopeful’, whilst the pressures placed on it by a rapidly changing commercialisation of the city create a sense of precarity in Manchester itself. A future ‘snapshot’ of the arts scene may find that it is only outside of central Manchester that bolder, more DIY-oriented, and experimental work can happen.
