20 January – 30th March 2024
Creating Place II featured new commissions by Wigan borough artists Nicolette Lafonseca, Julie McKiernan, Helen Mather & Anna FC Smith, and Joe Whitmore, presenting diverse perspectives on our local heritage and environment in a series of multi-media installations.
Joe Whitmore is a painter who works predominantly from life, with a particular interest in portraits. His recent practice documents the lives of local people and landscapes in paint to reveal the character of his town. He has travelled extensively including Hong Kong, Poland, and New Zealand. For his Creating Place II commission, Joe worked with the Drumcroon Collection to present a series of portraits inspired by key works from the collection.
Anna FC Smith is a multimedia artist who explores social history, folk culture, and ritual through historical and anthropological research. Helen Mather is an artist whose practice involves community engagement with communal making, discussion, and collaboration at its centre. Together, their work in Creating Place II explored the new green heritage of post-industrial landscapes; how we think about these spaces now, and how they become part of our contemporary civic identity.
Nicolette Lafonseca is a creative polymath who uses a variety of visual art media with storytelling at the core. Her project focused on natural pigments which can be found in the local environment of Leigh, typically in plants that can be seen all around us, but also from other sources such as soils, brick dust, and rust.
Julie McKiernan is a writer who enables individuals, community groups, and charities to tell their stories, express their views, convey information and change people’s perceptions. Julie collaborated with local artist Corrie Shelley on their ‘Share the Care’ project, focusing on care providers, their personal stories and why they chose to work in Adult Social Care, as well as celebrating Adult Social Care provision in Leigh.