Horace Lindezey, ‘Backtracks’ Collaboration.

Venture Arts is now one of Manchester’s leading artist studios and I’m really delighted that over the past few years our studio artists have started to gain opportunities, commissions, and recognition for their wide-ranging talents in a way that just didn’t seem possible when we started out.

We’ve been working with learning disabled and neurodivergent artists for over 30 years and through our innovative studio programmes, cultural inclusion initiatives, world class exhibitions and numerous collaborative projects, we have gone some way to removing the sizeable barriers to the arts that our community faces. 

The Venture Arts studio is a hive of activity: open six days a week we work with over 100 neurodivergent and learning disabled artists, aged 8-80, from within our studio and we reach many more through outreach projects, partnerships, and our work in education. 

Putting artists in the lead has always been the focus for us, they drive their creative development, led by their lived experience, passions, and identity. A fabulous team support them on their creative journeys and I’m so proud to work alongside such experience and talent. We offer a wide range of art specialisms from our studio in Hulme, from ceramics, photography, printing and painting, to textiles, animation, illustration and more, giving people choice and varied opportunities to then grow their own arts practice. And they do just this, showing and selling work globally.  

Our vision has always been for learning disabled people to be recognised and valued in the arts, a vision that has come a long way in Venture Arts’ 30-year history. Just in the past couple of years, for example, our artists have received major commissions from the likes of the Government Art Collection, Quays Culture and The National Festival of Making, and exhibited nationally and internationally at major arts venues including the Royal Society of Sculptors, Manchester Museum, TJ Boulting, The Portico, The Whitworth, Venice Biennale, RHS Bridgewater, The Lowry, and many more. Today learning disabled artists are being included and celebrated in a way that focuses entirely on amplifying their artistic voice, rather than being included as part of an institutions’ wider ‘learning and engagement’ objectives, as was so often the case in the past.  

There’s still much work to do though to ensure an equitable, inclusive, and diverse arts sector. Integral to pursuing our vision has been the constant need to look outwards, building collaborations and partnerships for our studio artists within the art world. Recognising the importance of this, we have expanded our programme, introducing our Colab Series. Thanks to funding from the Art Fund, in 2023 we set this up as a flexible, agile, and outward-facing approach to commissioning artists to make work in collaboration and equally.   

The programme is led by our Creative Producer, Sarah Boulter, who initiates new projects by carefully identifying contemporary artists whose practices harmonise and communicate in some way with specific artists we work with here in the studio. Together they have the freedom to explore, experiment, research, and play, letting projects evolve without the constraints of a prescribed or expected outcome. This year alone, artists have dived into poetry happenings, Polish contemporary dance, football trophies, massive light projections in German nightclubs, reggae playlists and sculptural painting…  

One of our current CoLab projects involves Venture Arts studio artist, James Desser and sculptor, Jeffrey Knopf, who have been working together this year exploring contemporary space-age worlds through model design and 3D print. The practices of these two artists complement each other by unearthing new creatures, bending time, and building mythical layers of sci-fi history through objects created. They’ve made robots together, languishing in nature, as though left behind from a futuristic battle centuries before. James and Jeffrey’s relationship has flourished, learning from each other, and both expanding on their own creative experiences.   

We have another exciting collaboration between Venture Arts artist Andrew Hylton and painter, Linda Hemmersbach. Their practice has involved making large experimental paintings and sculptural drawings using canvas and aluminium, playing with fast paced layers of colour, paint, pen, chalk, and pastels. They’ve based their project at Hulme Community Garden Centre and have allowed their intuitive paintings to be influenced by the beautiful surroundings there. They look for no forced outcome, simply to simultaneously expand mutual practices, inspire each other and have time to explore a new way of working. In a very different type of collaboration, Venture Arts’, Horace Lindezey, contemporary dancer, Rafal Dziemidok and musician, Daniel Hendrickson together produced BACKTRACKS, a multidisciplinary collaboration, which was shown at the Venice Biennale this year. This sound and dance installation was made in response to Lindezey’s sound work and playlist, ‘They built the flats in ’69’. This initial work, detailing Horace’s experiences growing up in Hulme, was commissioned by Castlefield Gallery. The collaboration was a partnership with Taupunkt e.V. in Chemnitz and “searches for traces of the past, via an exploration of the sound of records from a time long gone, played too often, held too close.”  

James Desser and Jeffrey Knopf

Venture Arts is part of a growing movement to redress the balance in terms of disability representation in the arts. CoLab Series is just one of the groundbreaking programmes that we run, it’s there to ensure that learning disabled artists are represented and included in the visual arts alongside other artists. Our Conversations Series work in the same way, through longer term co-creation residencies, always in partnership with a major institution. The arts training and career development that we provide in house is also second to none; facilitated by artists who have huge knowledge of the arts and neurodiversity.   

I’m really excited for the future as we work alongside other artists, arts organisations, and academic institutions to build and grow this superb work across the globe. We are also delighted that Arts Council England, the Clothworkers Foundation and many others are supporting us to completely reconfigure our studio in Hulme in 2025, enabling us to provide more opportunity for more people, designing and building a new fully accessible art space to ensure that our artists can continue to make astonishing and thought-provoking work long into the future!   

Find out more at venturearts.org