Artist Inspired By Warrington Museum Returns For Exhibition

An artist inspired by Warrington Museum & Art Gallery's collection has returned to the venue with an exhibition of her own.

Hannah Leighton-Boyce's works range from site-specific and ephemeral actions, to drawing, sound and installation, and her working methods combine material and process-led exploration with present day and archival research.

She explores place, object and body relations through themes of surface and erasure, embodiment and connectivity.

For Dreaming of Dead Fish, her solo exhibition at Warrington Museum & Art Gallery, Leighton-Boyce has developed a series of newly-commissioned works using un-accessioned items in the museum collection alongside glass, soot, slide film and projection.

This new body of work, commissioned by Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival with funding from Arts Council England, has been inspired by items in the museum's ephemera collection.

The Invisible Girl, for example, is a Victorian object of curiosity on display in the Warrington Town Hall 1840 exhibition, within which a diminutive figure was either suspended in mid-air in a globe or represented through a disembodied voice.

Visibility, separation and embodiment have fed into Hannah's research and studio practice.

The relationship between the works and their environment, and the materials and processes chosen, capture senses of longing and touch, proximity and distance; acting like a series of extended moments and pauses, they attest to the fragility of experience.

Accompanying the exhibition is a newly commissioned essay by Dr Craig Staff.

- Hannah Leighton-Boyce lives and works in Manchester.

- She studied at Winchester School of Art (2005) and completed the MA at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, in 2012.

- Recent works include: a series of sculptures exploring salt as a metaphor for the body, developed through a residency at the Glasgow Women's Library and exhibited at Castlefield Gallery (2018); a collaborative live sculpture made with residents of Helmshore, Lancashire (2014) set within the context of the area's industrial heritage; and a sound installation at Touchstones Rochdale (2016) funded by a New Opportunities Award (New Expressions3), which explored ideas of disembodiment and labour through the resonant properties and work history of objects within the museum's collection.

- Recent group exhibitions include Ruth Barker & Hannah Leighton-Boyce, Castlefield Gallery (2018); Excuse Me While I am Changing, Rogue Projects Space, Manchester (2016); New Work, The Manchester Contemporary (2016); Women Artists from 1861 - 2015, Touchstones Rochdale; For Posterity, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2015); and People and Process: A History of Salts Mill, Salts Mill, Saltaire.

- She has works in private and public collections including Salford University Arts Collection, Touchstones Rochdale, and Salts Mill and Ackworth Quaker School, both in West Yorkshire.

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