Redactions at texture

For the four artists in texture’s reopening show, redaction is not absence but method – a way of exploring things that have been officially ignored, coded, buried or suppressed.

texture’s long been one of our favourite small galleries, so it was pretty gutting to hear about the closure of the Ardwick site last year. Alas, texture 1.0 is dead. But long live texture 2.0, opening this June in Cheetham Hill.

From the outset, this re-opening show enacts its own thesis: the press materials for redactions arrived partly redacted. It’s consistent with texture’s longstanding resistance to over-narrating what you’re about to see, but it also makes the point of this particular exhibition very clear. That is – that what gets suppressed doesn’t just disappear; omission itself is visible, and for these four artists, becomes material to work with.

Sheffield sculptor Thomas Griffiths reworks and casts everyday objects, stripping back their functionality to expose what’s been overlooked. Queer references seep through familiar industrial forms with a humour that never quite conceals the seriousness beneath. Jonah Hoffman, a recent Goldsmiths MFA graduate, paints exclusively in cobalt blue: a material whose origins run through lithium-ion batteries and the Democratic Republic of Congo, deep into the history of colonial extraction. The colour is beautiful; the history behind it is not.

Birmingham-based Emily Scarrott approaches suppression from a different direction, treating evidence-gathering as a form of resistance. Using handmade chainmail as her primary medium, she builds work from sci-fi, fantasy and unexplained phenomena including UFO sightings, which she treats as legitimate cultural and political history.

Joe O’Rourke, the only Manchester-based artist in the group, builds pictures from found and repurposed imagery, accumulating and selectively masking AKA redacting to highlight rather than erase. A prize-winner at the John Moores Painting Prize, his instinct for finding meaning in overlooked materials runs through everything he makes.

texture itself has spent the past year in something like redaction of its own – the Ardwick site gone, the programme paused, the gallery briefly absent from view. That it returns with a show about what absence makes possible feels quite fitting.