ART IN THE STATION

Collaboration with OH OK (Now Standard Practice) to install contemporary art exhibitions in an empty retail unit at Manchester Victoria train station

Earlier this year, OH OK LTD, the open design studio team behind The Pilcrow Pub, opened a curious new art exhibition in a space within Victoria train station. Its intention? Introducing the general public to free, accessible art in an unlikely setting. Neatly tucked away in a little room by Java Coffee House, it was open to all – but perhaps most attractive to the more inquisitive passer-by.
One of the people to stumble across it was Alistair Woods, an artist born in Guildford and recently moved to Manchester to open Depot Art Studios. Intrigued by the space and the basis of OH OK LTD’s philosophy, Woods tracked down the exhibition’s curator, Neil Greenhalgh, with a proposal. Three months later the second exhibition has opened there: an individual gathering of works by Woods himself.

Fiction and a shrewdly concealed reality play a large part in the work of Manchester-based artist Alistair Woods. Whether it be delicate photographic portraits approached with an enlarger, a scalpel and the precision of a surgeon; or weighty assemblages carefully pieced together from the remnants of garden gates, abandoned railway sleepers or bits of derelict buses combed from the hedgerows of the locale, every piece tells its own story. The weighty burden of history speaks to us from just beneath the surface of the meticulously crafted objects, on display as part of Common Denominator at Manchester’s Victoria Station.

Manchester based agency OH OK LTD. have teamed up with Northern to create a wide-reaching, all-engaging public art exhibition at Manchester’s Victoria Train Station. Aiming to create a fully accessible platform (excuse the pun) for local art, the curators have set up the show in the hope that there will be something for everyone; from Abstract Expressionism to pen and wash scenes of Manchester, the 15 contributing artists cover a range of disparate styles, presented for the first time together in this most unusual of settings.