Sat 25 Oct - Sun 8 Feb
Just Browsing is a group exhibition that allows audiences to browse tactile works of art. The exhibition borrows from the retail area around Bluecoat’s gallery to offer an experience of art that can be touched, worn and bought to take home. Artists in the exhibition use textiles, ceramics, and scent to connect with audiences in a variety of ways.
The exhibition features works and products from artists Bruce Asbestos, Ffion Evans, Garth Gratrix, Ivy Kalungi, Lou Miller, Sufea Mohamad Noor, Lewis Prosser, Ben Saunders, Daniel Sean Kelly, Chester Tenneson, and Carla Wright.
This exhibition is part of our season Felt, which features a programme of exhibitions and events that allow audiences to go beyond looking, but also to touch, wear, hold, and take part, and experience art in new, hands-on ways.
Join us for a first look at the exhibitions and free creative activities in the gallery on Sat 25 Oct from 11am.
About the artists
Welsh artist Ffion Evans presents large wall hangings made from thick layers of fabric, quilting and tufting that invite us to move in close and feel her work. She creates bold work that uses materials and techniques that are traditionally associated with domesticity and femininity, which have often been maligned as inferior to purely visual forms of ‘fine art’.
East Sussex-based Carla Wright invites us to sit on her colourfully glazed ceramic stools. We experience her work not only as visually arresting, but also understand it through our bodies as the stools support our weight. Wright’s practice as a ceramicist is often social, both through how her work engages audiences and also through her ceramics studio, Common Clay, which provides workshops, residencies and social events in Bexhill-on-Sea. In Just Browsing, Wright’s sculptures serve to seat visitors around two large tables to engage with sculptures by Sufea Mohamad Noor, Daniel Sean Kelly, and Ffion Evans.
Sufea Mohamad Noor and Ffion Evans have both presented small scale sculptures to be held in the hand. Mohamad Noor often uses recycled and repurposed materials with visible wear , giving an indication of past owners of the materials that her sculptures are made from.
Daniel Sean Kelly presents objects that subvert fine dining. His surrealist teapots suggest a futile attempt at serving tea, destined to fail by the anxious face cut into the sides of the vessel.
Within the exhibition, T-shirts will be on show and available to buy by Bruce Asbestos, an artist who often blends the lines between high art, popular culture and personal branding. His ‘Hooboo’ and ‘Octopus’ characters were formed as part of a project with the Factory International Schools programme in Manchester and now feature as playful designs that can be bought and worn by visitors. In 2021, Asbestos hosted OK! Cherub!, a series of colourful inflatable sculptures, in the Bluecoat’s courtyard.
Chester Tenneson adds to a sense of playful mischief with his ’T-shirt sculpture performance’ Dance with me / don’t dance with me. A pair of t-shirts that instructs the wearer to take part in a piece of performance art.
Ben Saunders works across illustration, ceramics, and community events. With all his work, he aims to create a space for trans people to feel safe to embrace their body and sexuality, without fear of judgement which so many within the community face. At Bluecoat he presents t-shirts which celebrate trans bodies, which are often come under threat and censorship in public spaces such as galleries. Saunders will also host one of his Queer Pottery Workshops in the gallery in partnership with Homotopia Festival.
The act of trying on, and understanding an artwork through the body is explored further by absurdist basketmaker Lewis Prosser. His mask has been made to be worn by performers and audiences as part of a practice that uses traditional willow weaving to establish meaningful interaction between people, place and culture.
There will also be a film work in the gallery by Ivy Kalungi. In The Hair Shop, the artist has filmed interviews with black women in Belfast speaking about the personal and cultural significance of their hair. The women build a picture of the hair salon as a place that goes beyond personal care, and becomes a significant site of community. Kalungi and her interviewees describe the hair salon as a beacon of culture providing care, community and conversation that ranges from practical advice to politics.
Garth Gratrix draws on coastal culture in his installation Shy Girl. The work includes a series of custom made beach towels, with motifs that reference British seaside towns, working-class culture and LGBTQ identity. Shy Girl proposes browsing as a mode of queer navigation.
Lou Miller will present will present a new collaboration with textile artist Felicity Rowley. Soft Prompts is a series of hand-crafted cushions that challenge the culture of overworking, featuring prompts designed to disrupt our thinking around exhaustion, ambition, and worth.
Bruce Asbestos
Bruce Asbestos’ work draws from a rich history of painting, sculpture, popular culture, folklore and fairy tales. His work frequently mixes everyday objects with high art, fashion, and responds to global pop culture. His interdisciplinary practice combines performance, painting, clothing, social media, video games, curating and many collaborations.
Witty, seductive and extravagant; his playful use of popular culture, commerce and high art puts his own personal brand firmly within the realm of participation, play and pop art. The work uses spaces such as social media, the catwalk and virtual realities to create an accessible path through contemporary art.
Ffion Evans
Ffion Evans is a Welsh Textile artist who creates tactile, sensory artworks that invite play, encouraging curiosity and moments of joy. Working primarily with soft sculptures, she explores texture, scent, and form to connect viewers with materials and everyday objects in meaningful ways.
Working within arts, health, and education, Ffion practices therapeutic creativity, using art to support well-being and accessibility. Her arts-in-health projects include workshops and collaborations that engage and uplift individuals, especially in relation to mental health and elderly care.
Through her practice, Ffion aims to provide creative experiences that promote care, connection, and improved quality of life for those she works with.
Garth Gratrix
Garth Gratrix (they/them) is a visual artist, independent curator and founding director of Blackpool’s leading studio and project space – Abingdon Studios, established in 2013. Gratrix’s work navigates the intersections of materiality, identity and queerness, often drawing from coastal culture and everyday objects.
Their practice remains in constant negotiation with space, material and meaning – engaging queerness as both a conceptual strategy and an inherent material condition. Their installations offer a balance between formal display and conceptual frolic.
Ivy Kalungi
Born in Uganda, and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Kalungi’s practice centres on storytelling through materiality and collaboration, shedding light on the nuanced complexities of identity and belonging. Through sculpture, installation, video, and social practice, she explores themes that navigate the intersections of migration concerns, identity construction, and symbolism, which have shaped her personal philosophy.
Her work encapsulates the duality of diasporic selfhood, embodying a persistent hybridity that oscillates between cultures, trauma, and recovery. The choice of materials reflects this complexity, offering a tangible representation of lived experiences.
Lou Miller
Lou Miller is a banner maker, textile artist, and activist based in Manchester, UK. Her practice is rooted in the traditions of collective making and protest art, drawing on the history of textiles as a medium for storytelling, solidarity, and political expression.
Miller’s work is often created out of collaborative workshops and partnerships with grassroots groups, trade unions, and artists, foregrounding the creative potential of shared labour and lived experience. Through this approach, the banners and textile pieces become more than aesthetic objects—they function as tools for visibility, resistance, and hope.
Lewis Prosser
Lewis Prosser is an absurdist basketmaker, artist, and curator based in Wales, UK. He uses heritage craft techniques and performance to explore themes of regional identity, cultural exchange, and public ceremony.
His practice investigates the relationship between tangible objects and the intangible elements of culture: memory, ritual, and social practice, using basketry to trace connections between objects, place, and collective experience.
Through speculative forms and improvised performance, Prosser blends meticulous craftsmanship with moments of unpredictability and humour, highlighting the human qualities embedded in the act of making. He is drawn to collaboration as a way of disrupting certainty, inviting unexpectedness and reflection into the work.
Ben Saunders
Ben Saunders is a queer, trans masc ceramicist, events producer and exhibition curator based in Manchester, as well as the Creative Director of STRAP Magazine - a trans masc 18+ magazine.
His work focuses on community building within the queer and trans masc communities, exploring themes surrounding intimacy, pleasure, sex and the trans body. Through all of his work, Ben aims to create a space for trans people to feel able to embrace their bodies and sexualities without fear of stigmatisation, fetishisation or judgement.
Carla Wright
Carla Wright is an artist working in ceramic sculpture, sound and wall-based works that explore community architecture and shared spaces of gathering. Her practice centres clay as both a material and a means of connection.
Carla’s work draws on the architecture she grew up around - playground structures, community centres, youth clubs and public murals. Motifs from modernist climbing frames, concrete stepping stones, linoleum flooring and decorative fragments are reimagined through ceramic ‘drawings’ and sculptural assemblages—groupings of forms that support, lean on, gossip and play with one another.
Sufea Mohamad Noor
Sufea Mohamad Noor is an artist, curator and fundraiser from Liverpool. She is interested in social history, understanding materials and learning skills to make. Her practice use words, textiles and food to tell untold stories, explore personal memories and bring people together.
Mohamad Noor started her Resource Room in 2020 and has been making work entirely using materials deconstructed from reclaimed objects, as a pledge to reduce her carbon footprint by avoiding the use of new materials.
Chester Tenneson
Chester Tenneson’s work is conceptually led, driven by language and text with outputs in painting, writing, performance, sculpture and print. He is interested in the absurdity and peculiar nature of institutional language and behaviour, drawing influence from archives, signage, written rules, taxonomies and tropes of advertising.
His perspective as a transgender man is important to the work - he sits outside of much institutional language, often due to institutional misrepresentation or lack of visibility. Humour is deployed as a strategy to disarm / challenge this institutional language and hegemony. Chester plays the role of a peripheral trickster, poking fun at institutional authority and sometimes invites the audience to join in.
Daniel Sean Kelly
Daniel Sean Kelly is an artist based in Leicester. He uses analogue media to express the ideas of a brain developed under digital conditions, and is currently making drawings and ceramics. Some of his interests include; being a body in real and imagined space, objects that misbehave or communicate unreliably, and the expression of agency through material culture in post-industrial societies.
