Nancy Collantine: Whistle Down the Wind at Unitom Projects

Nancy Collantine doesn’t paint landscapes so much as use them. Whistle Down the Wind, her new body of work at UNITOM Projects, begins with drawings made directly in the landscapes of Northern England. But they end up something else entirely: abstract paintings built from gesture, layers and chance, exploring the connection between geography and the body. What ends up on the wall is less a version of a place than a record of what gesture, paint and chance did to it.

That priority runs through how Collantine talks about her own work more broadly. She has described her process as painting, drawing and sometimes installation, built around layering, editing and cutting back. It’s a way of working out how she actually feels about a subject, she says, rather than describing it directly. Whistle Down the Wind is a continuation of that instinct – geography here is a starting point, a pretext, not a subject to be rendered.

Collantine came to painting relatively late, after 25 years working in advertising and the cultural sector, training through the Turps Correspondence Course and the Islington Mill Art Academy rather than a conventional art school route. She works from a studio in Goyt Mill, a former textile mill in Marple, and is a member of The Pearls, a Northern collective of female painters. That background has brought real recognition: she was longlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2025 and won the Castlefield Gallery Award at the Manchester Open in 2022.

UNITOM Projects opened in June with Goof City, a solo debut for recent Manchester School of Art graduate Mary Lou Lawless-Gill – a choice that suggested this new space, grown from a bookshop with five years embedded in Manchester’s visual culture, would be for backing individual local painters. Whistle Down the Wind holds to that: another solo show by a painter rooted in Greater Manchester. If this it to be the venue’s general policy, it’s one we can very much get behind.