Thursdays are for gallery openings; and Castlefield gallery, the evening of the 30th October, hosted the opening of It Requires Getting Lost. The exhibition will run from the 1st November 2025 until the 22nd February 2026, and it joins together projections, sound-works, and sculptural installations.
The contemporary art gallery brings together three northern UK-based artists – Gregory Herbert, Malik Jama, and Jocelyn McGregor, in conversation with major works drawn from the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA)/Indrė Roberts Collection. Boasting the likes of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Noemie Goudal, Gregory Herbert, Pierre Huyghe, Malik Jama, Leon Kossoff, Jocelyn McGregor, and Wolfgang Tillmans, this array of artists spans mediums and geographies. Castlefield links them through an intention ‘to be at ease with the unknown’.
Opening night at the gallery
Herbert’s work, which explores the entanglements of human and non-human worlds, felt in dialogue with McGregor’s sculptural biomorphs and Jarma’s projection mapping of industrial architectures. All three had spent time together in research visits, from the Anderton Boat Life to Yordas cave, which helped to ground their commissions in environments where nature and human artefact collide.
Attendees were encouraged to watch a striking moment of live activation in McGregor’s sculptural installation – an organic, semi-translucent form suggestive of a hybrid between humanity and nature. Three performers dressed in dark clothing stood close to the sculpture with their bodies pressed gently against its surface. Transparent tubes extended from the structure into their mouths, and through a slow, deliberate rhythm, they used foot-pumps to push water through the tubes.
At the base of the stairs, Jarma’s shifting projections cast pools of colour across the floor, bleeding into one another in a slow, tidal motion. Opposite, a tall wall became a responsive surface, its hues sliding from deep blue to burnt orange to soft green, echoing the works’ organic rhythm. This interplay of light transformed transitional spaces, the corridors and thresholds, into active parts of the exhibition. They became zones of immersion, drawing visitors into a choreography of movement and reflection that expanded the gallery’s architecture into a living and breathing environment.
The performance encapsulated the exhibition’s intention: to surrender to disorientation and rediscover connection through embodied experience, or, as the press release puts it, in ‘the dark of not knowing we might actually find hope’. Take this as a sign if you find yourself in the neighborhood, to spend some time with the creations of North’s very own artists.
