Friends of Rochdale Art Gallery enjoy ‘Mischief’ from Liz Collins

FRAG meeting Liz Collins

Friends of Rochdale Art Gallery (FRAG) gained insights into the latest exhibition at Touchstones with a talk and tour with Bryan Beresford, Curatorial & Community Engagement Coordinator on 13 October.

This month, all four gallery spaces have been taken over by an exhibition called ‘Mischief’, featuring new and archived work of New York-based queer feminist artist and designer, Liz Collins and curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson.

This was the artist’s first European exhibition and she spent two weeks in Rochdale fine-tuning it. She welcomed the connections to industrial making methods, from traditional and low-tech to modern hi-tech approaches, with implicit links to Rochdale’s own historic textile industry.

Alongside Collins’ large scale textile artworks, ‘Mischief’ gives space to the lives and experiences of queer people in Rochdale and other former mill towns in the North. So, Gallery 3 is given over to ‘Queer People, Places and Things’ from significant LGBTQ+ collections, including works from the Juan Yarur Torres Collection – Fundacion AMA in Chile, as well as pieces from the borough collections by a group of Rochdale locals and presented through a queer lens.

Through working with local, regional and national LGBTQ+ groups, ‘Mischief’ ties together Collins’ life and work with the often unheard and uncelebrated stories of queer history to be found in our own community.

Check it all out for yourself; it is on at Touchstones until 8 January 2023. For opening times visit: www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/events/70162/

The next FRAG meeting is on Thursday 10 November 2022. the topic is ‘Clarice Cliff – Genius or just in the right place at the right time?’

Pat Osborne, a member of the Cruise Lecturers Association, discusses Clarice Cliff and the work of this remarkable designer, whose brightly coloured, iconoclastic domestic ceramics are still extremely popular and highly collectable.

Tea, coffee & biscuits served from 1pm - Guest Speaker from 1.30pm - 2.30pm. Members £3, Non-members £4 on the door. All welcome. For further details please contact Jenny Buckley (Chair, FRAG) on 01706 358686 or Mark Doyle on 01706 924555.

Dr Joe Dawson