Common Ground at Manchester Craft & Design Centre
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Common Ground
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The Peak District is one of the most walked, photographed and painted landscapes in England – but Common Ground is less interested in what it looks like than what lies beneath it.
Running at Manchester Craft and Design Centre until late August, the exhibition brings together three Manchester Metropolitan University graduates: Freya Boothroyd, Abbie Fowler and Joab Harrison. Coming from different disciplines – ceramics, ecological art and filmmaking – they have made a genuinely collaborative show, sharing skills and methods across the work.
The artists hone in on process underpinning the Peak District as a place, taking in geological, material and ecological concerns. On the material side, Freya Boothroyd creates her work with wild clay gathered by hand from caves in the Peak District, bringing the place itself into the gallery.
Fowler’s sculptural and photographic work explores the intersection of art and ecology, questioning how we encounter the non-human world through material. Harrison, a Sheffield-based filmmaker, takes a different approach: his work is shaped by deep mapping, a practice developed by artist Clifford McLucas and archaeologist Michael Shanks that layers multiple kinds of knowledge about a place – its geology, its history, its sensory and personal resonances – resisting any single authoritative account of what a landscape is or means.
The Manchester Craft and Design Centre is itself a building with embedded material history – a former Victorian fish and poultry market in the Northern Quarter whose original stalls remain visible on the ground floor. Common Ground is MCDC’s 20th exhibition in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University – a two-decade commitment to showing what emerging makers can do when given a serious brief and real space to work in.
