Amanda Ryan
The Old Chapel: Meeting acrylic paint, spray paint & charcoal on canvas
HOME
Creatives Now presents HOME, a multidisciplinary exhibition celebrating the diverse artistic expressions of both professional and emerging artists from across the Northwest region.
Creatives Now embraces a spirit of inclusion, diversity, and intergenerational dialogue. In our safe space, we have invited creators of all ages to explore the many facets of 'home.'
The exhibition features a wide range of themes, from the comforting and familiar aspects of home life—such as family, craft, dwelling, love of locality, rest and relaxation, home studios, our pets, and the textures of domesticity—to the eerie and unsettling, reflected in the German term "unheimlich," meaning "not from the home" or unfamiliar. Here, artists delve into deeper, often challenging topics like insularity and introversion, domestic abuse, intergenerational and cultural differences within families, immigrant experiences, language barriers, managing protected characteristics, neurodivergence, and the concept of 'home' found in transient or unconventional spaces.
Through this exhibition, Creatives Now opens a conversation about what 'home' truly means in its many forms and interpretations.
Yaqeen Alkabi Triptych acrylic paint on board
from A fake dream about a washed tumour – a poem by Alejandro Burbano
This is the water talking: In Quito the water from the river, is a mint water, every time I see the river, from the above, the above foam, M-a-c-h-á-n-g-a-r-a, try to say it, don´t forget the accent, the mountains choking your name. This is the water dreaming: A tumour, a word, more than one, more than you.
Sweet Lemon – a poem by Skye Radford
kiss leaf tips, ripening by 8 o’clock flecks pass the sky spaces the wind waves shapes, a familiar oak green
Sees the sun as a burning anchor Behind, a brushing backdrop of northern peaks; northern homes
running the canal on the same track, or branching
roots unseen
Maria Gergius Assimilation acrylic paint on canvas board 2024
right: Anna
Fish film poster and film 2024
far right: Charlie Simpson cover,
Media Magazine 2024
below: Eve Kelly Tight Fit digital illustration/digital print 2022
Merezeh
Phunk
right: Aidan Hart Self-Portrait acrylic on canvas 2024
below left: Oliver Ridings Vil Doing Burlesque photograph 2024
below right: Joseph Conlon Split acyrilic on canvas 2024
How to Feel – an installation from Creatives
Ruby specialises in comics and visual storytelling and draws her inspiration from lived experiences. She is an experienced community arts facilitator. Ruby is the director of Ink and Imagination Festival and Creatives Now's Artist in Residence.
This evocative art installation merges the idea of 'home' with the urban landscape, exploring themes of resilience, trauma, and the experiences of women in public spaces.
The artist uses elements from her graphic novel, paintings, sound, and projections to create a space that reflects on personal and societal challenges.
The installation's interior, marked with chalk drawings, evolves as visitors move through, symbolising the fluidity of memory and experience.
“A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.”
“My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't, and so on.”
―Jean Rhys,Good Morning, Midnight (1939)
This novel explores themes of isolation, identity, and despair through the experiences of its protagonist, Sasha Jansen, in Paris.
Caz Latham
View from Bury Art Museum acrylic on canvas
“The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever.”
―Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
The novel is a landmark work of magical realism that tells the story of the Buendía family over several generations in the fictional town of Macondo. The passage describes the character Aureliano's love for Remedios, capturing the novel's blend of poetic language and magical elements.
top left: Beatričė Rastaitytė, Unseen Family Traditions, acrylic on cavas, 2023; top right: Jennifer Gilmour, Bolton: Most Haunted, print of collated water colour sketches, 2024; bottom left: Karen Walker, Tea and Toys, oil on canvas, 2024; bottom right: Olivia Hawkswell, I Choose You, oil on canvas, 2024
“Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.”
―Gaston Bachelard,The Poetics of Space (1958)
This book explores the concept of space in relation to human experience, focusing on the emotional and imaginative aspects of different kinds of spaces, particularly those associated with the idea of "home."
left: Anya Birch Laundry Lean III acrylic and digital 2024
right: Bryn Richards HOME digital print banner 2024
“Through the old word bauen, we find the answer: ich bin really means I dwell. The way in which I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell.”
―Martin Heidegger Building, Dwelling, Thinking (1951)
This essay explores the relationship between building and dwelling, offering a philosophical perspective on architecture and the meaning of living spaces.
HOME – a poem by Anna Merezeh
Home is a place Like the warmth that thaws my apathy; we are unfamiliar.
I crossed state lines Just to hear my mother tongue again.
"Odogwu!" The men hail at my father's car. I feel an involuntary smile sweep across my face, a hint of warmth brushed aside.
I hear children bicker in a language I almost recognise. It is music coming only from the unfamiliar voice of strangers, But from the lips of my father, it is a judgement. A demand that I must respond in the language I almost recognise.
It is a painful reminder Of what beautiful sounds my lips could make Before the curled tongue of colonised words Settled fully into my throat.
What brought me here?
"Here", where my parents were born. Or “here”, home?
When home is a safe place far away from unruly familiarity, Only wedding bells and funeral song pulls you back.
The latter stronger than the former.
Months after my mother went… home. This is what has brought me back here. As I linger on the tagline, "Adaugo goes home", I lock up my smile to ward off unruly familiarity And questions from blood-related strangers
“Why have you cut your hair, girl?” Umm-
“Smile more baby girl, you look so down about your mum.”
Wha-
“Why are you so big, girl?” I don't-
“You're a child, but you have the body of a woman” Okay?-
“Where are you going so fast?”
I'm 21-
“Why don't you speak your language?”
I understand it-
“You're so fat now, child.” Am I?-
“Wow, what a big girl you are, ripe for marriage.”
Eww-
"Death teaches us the importance of eternal life" Us?-
"Don't worry, soon you shall meet to part no more" Soon!?
Home is the place where you are laid to rest. But I am just a woman. So I ask myself if my final home will be a house Built by the man I loved first or the man I loved last.
“Nna ga nu” [her father will marry her] A spinster who never left her father’s house, The greatest stain upon a woman's name. Poor thing, no place of her own; homeless till death.
I supposed it’s lucky that mama didn’t go home With such a pitiful blot on her legacy.
Going home, beautifully decorated. Birds singing as she is lowered. Women wailing in a language I almost recognise. That sound that almost feels like home.
above: Cotton Queens Childhood Memories knitted blanket 2024
below: Oliver Ridings Nana Making Chips photograph 2017
Yaqeen Alkaabi Anya Birch
Alejandro Burbano, Joseph Conlon
Cotton Queens
Maria Gerguis
Jennifer Gilmour Aidan Hart
Olivia Hawkswell
Eve Kelly Caz Latham
Sophie Macdonald
Amanda Ryan
Charlie Simpson
Karen Walker
Ruby Unsworth
Olivia Hawkswell
The Goat, The Bad & The Ugly oil on canvas