To coincide with the launch of the new publication, Radical Pairings, the National Festival of Making will exhibit the work of five women Art in Manufacturing artists: Jacqueline Donachie, Nicola Ellis, Raisa Kabir, Hannah Leighton-Boyce and Liz Wilson.

In Blackburn in 2022, five women artists exhibited new work created during residencies with manufacturers in the North. Ranging from three months to two years, the residences of Hannah Leighton-Boyce, Liz Wilson, Nicola Ellis, Jacqueline Donachie and Raisa Kabir were developed through the National Festival of Making’s commissioning programme, Art in Manufacturing, conceived in 2016.

Art critic and writer, Elizabeth Fullerton, was invited to document these artists’ residencies, resulting in the essay Artists and Factories Make Radical Pairings. Discussing their practices and the unique nature of working as an artist within the industrial setting, Fullerton introduces work created in response to and alongside workforce communities.

Providing introduction, context and conversational insights to the publication are pieces by Director and Programme Curator, Elena Jackson, Director and Curator of theCOLAB, Claire Mander and Artist and Chair of the Festival of Making CIC, Jamie Holman. From short term residencies to long term collaborations, each artist embedded themselves within a manufacturing environment, working closely with skilled labour forces, specialist materials and industrial processes.

These residencies offered an unusual but generative context with the factory floor becoming an extension of a studio, the rhythms of production informing new ways of making and thinking.

The works presented here include pieces developed during these residencies as well as those made beyond this, tracing how time spent in the industrial realm continues to shape each artist’s practice. Radical Pairings, gestures not only to the innovative collaborations forged between artists and manufacturers but also to the deeper reimagining made possible when these encounters are shaped by openness, experimentation and care.

In doing so, it invites us to rethink the boundaries between industry and art as co-creative forces with the potential to shape new cultural, material, and social futures.