COMPASS: Manchester

COMPASS: Manchester

Date: 26/09/2026

Time: 12:30pm - 4pm

Venue: The Salutation Pub

12 Higher Chatham Street, Manchester, M15 6ED

https://www.thesalutationpub.com/

Access: Limited access via a staircase. We will make our Residency Toolkit and COMPASS Artists booklet available online post-event, along with an event summary.

Event Details: Please join us for our Manchester sharing event of our COMPASS Project. Over the past year, COMPASS has connected artists Emma Illingworth and Margaret O’Brien (both Greater Manchester based) with Kimberley Foster and Jane Scobie (both Norfolk based) through residencies at Cromer Artspace and Rogue Artist Studios. The sharing event will include an update from each artist about their experiences and work so far along with a presentation from Chris Bailkoski covering COMPASS, artist residencies and funding strategies.

This project is kindly supported by Arts Council England and Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy

More Details: 

Tickets (link here): 40 free tickets. 20 travel bursaries available (up to £12.50, please email info@proforma.org.uk for more details)

Further Information: If you require any further information, please contact Chris Bailkoski at info@proforma.org.uk

About PROFORMA: 

Our vision at PROFORMA is to create a fairer and inclusive artworld for visual artists experiencing barriers to creative careers. We do this through artist development by provision of opportunities, sharing knowledge and mentorship. We try to promote best practice within the sector, especially within the artist-led culture. 

Our latest project, COMPASS, has supported the creation of new, critically engaged work by combining coastal, urban and rural perspectives. The project marks a new model for inter-regional artist-led collaboration for PROFORMA, promoting climate-conscious practices and inclusive, community-focused engagement. COMPASS supports a vision of creative practice that is slow, critical and relational, allowing the selected artists time to reflect, experiment and engage deeply with new contexts and communities. 

Artist Bios:

Kimberley Foster

Dr Kimberley Foster (sorhed) is an artist and academic whose practice research explores embodied approaches to intervention and interpretation in the art museum. She questions how a different material approach tethered to specifically tuned Pedagogical Art Objects can engage previously unheard voices and extend the art museum's materialised experience

Her objects are made to be physically encountered and question the potential of a prosthetic art pedagogy where tangible provocations create a critical and at times disobedient space for subjectivities. She is interested in speculative acts and performative engagements that enable reciprocal relationships between place, body, and matter.

Kimberley teaches across Practice-Research, Fine Art and Art Pedagogy, and is a Lecturer on MA Art Education, Culture and Practice at UCL (Institute of Education), and Fine Art Programme Tutor at OCA/OU. From 2023-25, she was a Visual Culture Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge University, Fitzwilliam Museum.

www.sorhed.com

Instagram: @kimberleyfostersorhed

Emma Illingworth

Emma Illingworth is a visual artist working in installation, video, photography, print, performance and text. Informed by a military upbringing in which home was constantly moving, her practice engages with the temporality of place. The mapping out of and reconnecting with past experiences through cultural and personal memory is central to her practice. Google Maps, YouTube, archival material, the postal system, environmental observations and found objects provide flawed methods of teleportation that she enjoys the limitations of. She is preoccupied with the spaces in between cultural markers and personal events, often borrowing and pulling the things that resonate and claiming them as her own. Her process is not singular, instead she collages her environment in order to draw her audience in through participatory engagement. 

Born in 2002, raised in West Yorkshire with an affinity for British motorways, currently living and working in Manchester with a studio at Paradise Works.

We selected Emma through MADE IT! 2024, Short Supply's annual North West graduate exhibition in collaboration with DMZ Studios

Instagram: @emmaillingworth_

Margaret O’Brien

Margaret O’Brien’s practice is experimental, combining analogue and digital processes with emerging technologies to create uncanny, charged environments. Her work examines the shifting conditions of human experience within an increasingly technological world through existential concepts such as fragility, precarity, human endeavour and the absurd, as these concerns unfold in everyday encounters. Failure is embraced as a valuable space of critical discovery, shaping both her process and the development of the work.

Her work has been supported by Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Ireland, the Arts and Humanities Research Board UK, and the Irish Research Council. International residencies including the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Helsinki International Artist Programme & Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; Leitrim Sculpture Centre; and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin. 

O’Brien is a former Lecturer in Fine Art with National College of Art & Design, Dublin, and Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork. She is currently Creative Programme and Artist Development Officer with St Helens Council, Merseyside.
https://www.margaretobrien.co.uk/

Instagram: @obrienmgt

Jane Scobie

Jane Scobie’s interdisciplinary practice is rooted in the rural landscape and seashore, her work questions our relationship with nonhuman entities. She completed MA Fine Art and Science at Central Saint Martins in 2024. Recent commissions include Estuary Festival ARISE programme (2026. Selected shows include Sounding The Wash sculpture trail for Lincolnshire Wild Life Trust (2025), Cromer Sculpture Open (2025), MetaNature BOTH London (2024),  Ground Beneath our Feet, Groundwork (2023), Edgelands, Wild Ken Hill (2022). Jane is a 2025 recipient a-n Artist Bursary. Ear of the Sea was nominated for NOVA 2024 and in 2024 Jane was shortlisted for UAL Sculpture/Clifford Chance Award and Maison/0 This Earth Award, she is a Groundwork Network Artist.

https://www.janescobie.com/

Instagram: @janescobieartist