Mary Lou Lawless-Gill: Goof City at UNITOM Projects

We love to see a new gallery opening in Manchester, especially one that, fresh out of the blocks, is championing a local emerging artist. UNITOM Projects – the new exhibition arm of UNITOM, the visual culture bookshop – launches in St John’s with a solo show by recent Manchester School of Art graduate Mary Lou Lawless-Gill.

The 21-year-old painter’s work circles the Beat Generation: its street-level energy, its conviction that art and community and laughter matter more than productivity, its mythology of the city as a place of creative possibility.

Goof City takes its title from a concept coined by poet and activist Ed Sanders – introduced in his 1963 Poem from Jail – describing an imagined anarchic society built around art and community, historically associated with New York’s East Village. Lawless-Gill, who won the MAFA Graduate Award for Painting at her 2025 degree show, assembles fictional scenes from photographs, film, music, and memory. Built in thin, provisional oil layers, her figures have a dusty, airy quality – caught somewhere between movement and stillness, occupying moments that feel familiar and just out of reach.

Lawless-Gill describes her paintings as balancing “openness with concealment”, where meaning shifts between what is seen and what is remembered. The titles draw directly from the Beat and countercultural literary world she’s working within: Idiot Wind, Revolutionary Letters, Poems in Praise of My Husband – Dylan, Diane di Prima, the whole register. In a sense, she’s building her own version of Goof City from the same materials.

As a bookshop, UNITOM has spent five years making itself an essential part of Manchester’s visual culture. Opening a dedicated exhibition space – with plans for around six shows a year – and choosing to launch it with an emerging local painter feels like a natural and very pleasing next step.