Moon Grove presents 'Guides of Souls': A Conversation and Screening with Stephen Sutcliffe

What does a photograph carry with it? Not just an image, but the trace of a life, a death, an accident of light, evidence of something that refuses to fully disappear.

This event brings together artist Stephen Sutcliffe with curator, writer and therapist Benjamin Cook for a conversation about 'Psychopomp', Sutcliffe's current exhibition at Moon Grove in Rusholme.

The show draws on archival double exposed photographs related to Lindsay Anderson and Anthony Burgess, images where intention and accident are impossible to separate, where figures appear at once present and spectral. The discussion will explore the exhibition's preoccupations: doubling, archives, the uncanny, mortality, and the strange afterlives of photographs.

The conversation will be followed by a rarely screened episode from the BBC's Play for Today strand: A Photograph (1977), in which a mysterious image received in the post sets a couple on a course toward something they are wholly unprepared to encounter. Moving from psychological thriller into darker, stranger territory, the film shares with 'Psychopomp' an obsession with what photographs conceal as much as they reveal, and with the unsettling power of images that arrive without explanation.

Stephen Sutcliffe is an artist born in Harrogate in 1968, whose practice works across video, photography, collage and text. His work has been shown widely in the UK and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Rob Tufnell, London (2023), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2019), Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2017), and The Hepworth Wakefield (2017). In 2018 he collaborated with Graham Eatough on No End to Enderby, made for the Whitworth Gallery as part of Manchester International Festival, for which they received the Contemporary Arts Society Award. He won the Margaret Tait Award in 2012. His publications include at Fifty (Sternberg Press, 2019) and Much Obliged (Book Works, 2019).

Stephen Sutcliffe ‘Psychopomp’ continues at Moon Grove until 15th May 2026 www.moongrove.org