143 (I Love You) Public Work Shop at Manchester Art Gallery
The “Map” workshop outcome: participants were to write down a place they love into the outlined map of Greater Manchester; the purpose being to harness love for places, a crucial aspect of love in the eyes of The Circle Collective.
This project saw Will and four other art students (Grace O’Kelly, Grace Bute, Theo Mills, Rebekah Hughes) come together in August 2022 to create and host a week of community-based workshops commissioned by Manchester Art Gallery, which probed into the notion of love. Devised and inspired alongside the British Art Show 9, the project 143(I Love You), involved three days of public workshops in clay making, love letter writing and mapping. The project allowed participants to navigate forms of love that challenged “amatonormativity”, a theory devised by Elizabeth Brake which critiques the notion that humans prosper with exclusively romantic love.[1]
The Circle Collective was formed as part of Manchester School of Art’s collaborative module Unit X in spring 2022. The students were asked to work with Manchester Art Gallery to develop proposals for “socially engaged art” projects linked to the curatorial themes of the British Art Show 9, a significant touring exhibition of British art which was visiting Manchester at the time. After presenting their idea to Manchester Art Gallery, the Circle Collective’s proposal was commissioned to be part of the Manchester Art Agents’ programme and the BAS9 in Manchester.[2]
The workshops took place in August 2022 in the main gallery space of Manchester Art Gallery, alongside works such as The Good Samaritan (1850) by George Frederick Watts — a piece that encapsulated the values of the group’s project.[3]
The collaboration was a major turning point in Will’s artistic and historical training, strengthening his professional practice, his research, and his knowledge of the operations of public art galleries.[4]
Notes
[1] Elizabeth Brake, ‘Amatonormativity’, Elizabeth Brake (webpage), https://elizabethbrake.com/amatonormativity/ [accessed 25 July 2025]
[2] “Art Agents”, Manchester Art Gallery (webpage), 27 January 2023, https://manchesterartgallery.org/event/art-agents/ [accessed 25 July 2025]
[3] ‘Art and LGBTQIA+ Communities’, Manchester Art Gallery (webpage), https://collections.manchesterartgallery.org/collections/narrative/b7d9862c-c93b-3a71-be3e-6c227c9e0079/ [accessed 25 July 2025].
[4] You can find out more about the project by visiting the Manchester School of Art news page by following this link: https://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/news/item-7273689/
