(Re)collection at saan1

Memory is a complicated thing, and this exhibition at Saan1 lets it be just that. Across three floors of the Northern Quarter gallery, three independent curators pursue distinct interpretations of memory, while contributing to a wider dialogue about place, identity and lived experience.

On the ground floor, Michelle Tierney’s selection explores ecological memory: the possibility that landscapes themselves hold traces of lived experience. The relationship between people and the natural world runs through Mike Kelly’s experimental photographic processes, while Olivia Madland Shorter turns to traditional fibre techniques to examine rural identity and material heritage.

Collage, photography and drawing let Hope Rea turn overlooked moments into layered compositions that blur memory, landscape and imagination. Nabeel Ijaz’s multidisciplinary practice works through light and perception, and in Eli Clack’s sculpture and mixed media, natural forms come across as already shaped by experience, embedded within the landscape itself. Together, the five practices invite a slow pace of looking, and a reconsideration of the familiar.

Upstairs, Daisy Gunn’s floor turns to process and materials as carriers of memory. Cyanotypes and foraged materials run through Nicola Lewis-Dixon’s photography, while Paulina Kurzydlowska works across painting, textiles and digital processes, using repetition and pattern to connect memory, ritual and the natural world. Olivia Jenks’s intimate paintings explore queerness, identity and nature through shifts in scale and perspective, with more work from Eli Clack and Olivia Madland Shorter – already seen downstairs, but focused here on materiality and making rather than landscape.

At the top, Gareth Ogden’s floor is the most direct about memory’s instability, gathering six artists whose work considers how memories are held, transformed and reimagined through objects, images and lived experience. Ancient and neo-pagan symbolism runs through Nancy’s McCarthy Deity series, which draws on figures of aspiration and self-reflection, while Olena Hvozdieva turns to ceramics and found objects to work through displacement and a longing for home.

Leona’s practice takes a different route into memory altogether, using collaborative workshops and found materials to reflect on stories held in common rather than individually. Photography, moving image, printmaking and archive material all pass through Charlie Sharp’s hands, tracing the connections between personal record and collective history. Mike Kelly also returns here, his photographic processes pointed, this time, at memory’s fluidity.

Three curators, 13 artists, and ideas of memory that are never reconciled – just layered, three floors up.