This is where you will find information on our upcoming events, artist residencies and previous exhibitions.
If you would like to find out more about our visual arts programme and the range of artists and organisations we work with please click here.
Residency 6th-12th May. Exhibition Launch Thursday 9th May 6pm. Performances 6.20pm and 7.20pm. (20 minute duration)
Manchester based sound artist Callum Higgins often draws on the use of found objects along with DIY constructed circuitry to create his pieces. Work displayed at his recent residency at Lionel Dobie Project has shown these elements to be used to build experiences that are both aesthetically strong and highly involving.
For Development 3, Higgins utilises a collection of sourced slides and a number of self constructed devices to create a performance that will convert the very light produced by the slides into new sounds.
Residency 20th-26th May. Opening Saturday 25th May 4pm. FREE. Followed by Herbal Sessions 10pm. £5otd.
On May 25th at Islington Mill the OneFiveEight collective will be holding the event 'Expo:02' in association with Herbal Sessions. After OneFiveEight's first ever exhibition at Kraak Gallery earlier in the year, the collective are keen to continue promoting creativity in unpretentious surroundings, proving that you don't have to be an art critic to appreciate art. This time they will be offering visitors the chance to get involved with the creation of artwork within the exhibition. At Expo:02 the collective will invite you to help decorate the gallery with existing members of OneFiveEight and guest artists. The gallery will be transformed into an exhibition with a difference.
Later in the evening Herbal Sessions will be holding their well established club night which features many of the OneFiveEight collective under their DJ pseudonyms. With visuals throughout the night that will combine the artwork on display with live footage, this event will bring art and music together in a way never experienced before. More info on how you can get involved can be found on OneFiveEight.co.uk.
Artists include Luke Breen, James Hayes, Joe Smith, Dave Healy (aka Infected By Design), Helen Peart, Mike Newton and Heather Fitt.
4th-21st July
Exhibition Launch Friday 5th July 7-10pm.
For three weeks in July you will be able to once again experience the work of Alistair McClymont (the architect of the human sized tornado) and Sophie Clements (make of 360 degree bullet short video) who will collaborate for the first time. Take the journey up the stairwell to our fifth floor where the texture, volume and light of the space will take you back to how the Mill felt 200 years ago. The space was last used by Lucy Newman Cleeve, founder and director of Man & Eve Gallery in London who curated the hugely successful group exhibition 'Brittle Crazie Glasse' hosted by the Mill and annexed to the Manchester Contemporary.
Lucy is committed to curating art that speaks for itself in producing, encountering and promoting visual-tactile images. With Alistair and Sophie's work being two of the highlights from 'Brittle Crazie Glasse' they will let loose their chaotic forces of turbulence once again to create a new series of work.
June-July
Launch TBA
A performance installation by Maurice Carlin involves the 'publishing' of a vast warehouse space in Salford, 'Regents Trading Estate,' through a public durational printing process. Over 400 individual CMYK relief prints will be taken from the buildings surfaces, accumulating to transform the interior into a psych glitch-like version of itself. Open to the public across a 2 month period, the work will slowly develp simultaneously within the space of the warehouse and online via a specially tailored 1:1 scale webstream. This 'split scene' scenario aims to contrast the physical public realm with the new communal space of the screen, questioning how notions of 'immersion' and 'expression' are experienced in both.
4th July-21st July
Events TBA
Jen Wu will turn sculpture into event as she relocates a 6 metre brick wall down Chapel Street as a monument to the collective action and legacy of Mancunian creative DIY. A meditation on history and progress based on the Greater Mancunian summers of 1989 and 2011 - the summers of love and riots - 'The Wall' is the staging of two parallel histories, of rave and regeneration.
We offer residencies to visiting artists, providing accommodation (in our artist led Bed and Breakfast), studio space and exhibition space independently under Islington Mill Arts Club and with partner organisations.
Each residency provides a unique contribution to our artistic programme, including artistic talks, exhibitions and performances sharing with the public, local artists and our tenants an insight into our work. Often artists that develop work at Islington Mill early on in their career or mid-career, are offered further opportunties through our networks of arts organisations and artists.
Highlghts include Brooklyn based performance artists, feline lovers and glitter addicts CHERYL who took us on a glitter fuelled dance party journey which lead up to their culminative event Royal Ruckus. We have also taken part in Flux Factory NYC Exchange, done an international exchange with La Escocesa Studios in Barcelona with artist Diego Mallo, ran an open call residency with artist David Wojtowycz and hosted a month long residency with Volkov Commanders which led up to ORBIT-A Show in Seven Parts.
Islington Mill regularly collaborates with arts organisations, festivals and galleries in the North West to support the development and delivery of artist's projects. Past collaborators have include, Salford University, Quarantine theatre company, Chinese Arts Centre, AND Festival, Asia Triennial, Littoral Trust, Future Everything and International 3.
Islington Mill Art Academy is a free self-organised Art School that is actively engaged in the Mill's visual arts programme, regularly collaborating with visiting artists. It was set up in 2007 by a group of art foundation students, dissatisfied with the quality and standards in University fine art courses open to them at that time. A number of founding members of the group had been familar with the Mill and decided that the array of creative practitioners, events and performances that happened there provided the perfect backdrop for the project.
The Academy exist to experiment wtih what an education in art can be, where it can take place and how it can be paid for. It is open to anyone who would like to be an artist and who is interested in taking responsibility for, and direction of the way in which they intend to do this. The artists in the group take all of the decisions related to their personal learning process and put these decisions into practice themselves.
Past collaborators include Bik Van Der Pol, Caner Aslan, Pippa Koszerek and Martin Holman.