Where did it all go wrong?

There’s a case to be made that, in cultures in which the idea metastasised, the subjugation of nature was the first colonial project. Once the seed has been planted, the belief that what’s beyond the branch of humanity one happens to perch upon is there to be of service, is there to be conquered, grows out of all proportion so that one can no longer hope to see the wood for the trees. Or the change for the climate.

Each to their varying degree, the works which make up Out Here, the new group show at Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery, put things back in their place, insisting that the concrete and glass that reach up to the heaven of a breathable atmosphere are built on borrowed earth.

The observation is brought home most vividly by Ashleigh Beattie’s Cracked Earth, a piece specific to the site’s architecture, in which a layer of wild clay cracks into mosaics of drought on Castlefield‘s interior surfaces, as though it has risen up from the water table beneath its foundations.

A breath of kindred inspiration seems to move through the teeming abstractions of Adam Rawlinson, whose presence is felt both through a quartet of works in oil pastel on the ground floor and a larger piece, Some Trees Are So Tall…, below street level. Losing oneself in the verdure of the latter, its floral eruptions like an augury of reclamation, one begins to see spirits take on form. Neither animal nor vegetable, they wear the elemental guise of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing, as dreamed into being by Alan Moore, a manifestation of an intelligence with roots more ancient than this late-budding species.

Applied pareidolia also animates the work of Steve Sutton, both beyond the gallery (in photographic form) and inside it, discerning the face of humanity in the mirror of its absence. Unlike, for example, Sophy King, whose arboreal presences, most recently seen at the Lowry in Salford, seem to manifest through the cracks in the orderly walls of gallery spaces, Sutton’s found materials seem tamed, almost de-natured.

There’s order, too, in the photographs curated by Emelia Hewitt which evoke the reassuring solidity of plates from an old encyclopaedia. This might result merely in a display of nature taxonomised and uprooted, except that Hewitt has processed the prints, not with more traditional darkroom chemicals, but with light itself and dyes derived from berries. One floral lumen print in particular seems to phosphoresce with the firework spark of vertebrate synapses or the auras manifested by Kirlian photography.

It’s a visceral energy that swirls, too, in the spirals of Kezia Thomas-Mellor’s post-performance piece, summoned into being on the exhibition’s opening night. A trinity of vein-dark sigils, the broken remnants of the oil sticks that formed them lie visible beneath it, like lipstick traces of its self-possessed kineticism.

Bringing matters to a close, Shezad Dawood is represented by Africana, Bugul & Nemo, the seventh film of his ongoing Leviathan cycle. Taking the form of a documentary made a quarter of a century from now in a post-colonial Senegal, it’s a prefigurative piece, imagining the best that could happen. All the more so in times in which billionaires have seized upon the warnings of dystopian science fiction as though they were step-by-step instruction manuals, Dawood’s film illuminates the importance of continuing to dream new utopias.

Too shop-soiled to be stardust, too tarnished to be golden, the human race will need to come back down from its increasingly precarious perch if it’s ever going to make good on Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock wish to go back to the garden. Torn open for lithium, exhausted my monoculture, now nature itself requires nurturing. Off Manchester’s Deansgate, Out Here offers a window box to the possibilities.

Let the sun shine in.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Adam Rawlinson, Some trees are so tall, while others they stay small, Out Here at Castlefield Gallery (2026), courtesy of Jules Lister

 

Out There is at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester until July 19, 2026. For more information, click here.