Preview - It Requires getting Lost

It Requires Getting Lost is the result of a unique partnership between the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA), Venture Arts and Castlefield Gallery. Three artists working in the North of England –– Gregory Herbert, Malik Jama and Jocelyn McGregor –– have been invited by the partner organisations to work in dialogue with one another and in response to major works from one of the UK’s most significant private collections, the David and Indrė Roberts Collection (managed by RIA). These major works, co-selected by all involved, will be featured in the exhibition.

Spending time with the collection commenced a research period designed to support Herbert, Jama and McGregor to develop new work for the exhibition at Castlefield Gallery. These new works will be exhibited alongside the works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Noemie Goudal, Pierre Huyghe, Leon Kossoff, and Wolfgang Tillmans from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. Sharing and exploring together has shaped Hebert, Jama and McGregor’s development process.

The artists have together experienced one another’s sources of inspiration, including places and spaces where humanity and nature come into contact in unexpected ways. To date these have included Anderson boat lift, a wishing well in Alderley Edge and Yordas Cave in Ingleton. Guiding the artists’ research and overall exhibition are shared interests in the complex entanglement of human and non-human worlds, and testing the boundaries between the natural and artificial, making and material, intention and accident.

Selected and commissioned works featured in It Requires Getting Lost will span film, photography, painting, sound, projection mapping, and sculpture. A diverse group of works, together they point to what can be discovered in embracing the unknown. The exhibition will ask if we can resist the drive to want to be all knowing and to have all the answers, and instead accept not knowing. What might we learn? If we ‘get lost’, might we discover, see, and hear anew, including what nature has to share with us?

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Exhibition continues: 1 November – 22 February 2025

It Requires Getting Lost is commissioned and produced by Castlefield Gallery, the Roberts Institute of Art and Venture Arts, with additional support from the Brian Mercer Trust and The Haworth Trust. Castlefield Gallery and Venture Arts are generously funded by Arts Council England and Manchester City Council.