Lecturer Tony Charles and fellow artists Nick Kennedy, Annie O’Donnell, Will Hughes and alumni John James Perangie recently took part in a residency culminating in two exhibitions entitled GROUNDHOPPERS in Germany Kunstraum Ortloff a non-profit space for contemporary art in Leipzig and art gallery Glue by Dag in Berlin. The installations examine connections between industrial landscapes in Middlesbrough and East Germany.

This project has identified a natural connection between the industrial environments of Middlesbrough and East Germany. Through the exchange, the opportunity arises to share ideas and conversations between artists from two vastly different regions with parallel industrial identities. Through investigations using methods from industrial, scientific and socially relevant sources, these artists visually unpick and synthesise their geographically diverse relationships. This amalgamation of visual creativity is intended to reduce the barriers in communication that come with physical distance and present the potential to emphasise shared societal concerns.

Nick Kennedy seeks order in a chaotic world and his experiments often parody scientific processes to examine the relationship between intuition and logic. The use of clock mechanisms which are visually structured yet chaotic in the sound it creates is crucial to the work. The freedom of responding to the GLUE space has enabled further experiments with LED lighting.

Tony Charles’ practice involves industrial concepts, processes and materials with an interest in the relationship between two and three dimensions. The work for this exhibition, ‘Direction of Flow’, is a three-dimensional drawing inspired by industrial piping isometric drawings. These technical drawings rely on symbols that depict components such as valves, reducers, flanges etc. The symbols have been constructed using jigs that have enabled the possibility of a small production line that will consistently produce, and grow. Importantly, ‘Direction of Flow’ invites two interpretations. For a regular art audience that may not have had the experience of industrial practices, an appreciation of an abstract visual language may be appreciated. For many industrial viewers, this universal industrial visual language can be understood and appreciated for its literal meaning. The result invites conversation between both sectors of society and encourages both visual and social synthesis.

Will Hughes deals with concepts surrounding aspiration, queerness and glamour. By exploring the seductive nature of glamour, Will’s work fuses the tangible object and the intangible discourse surrounding queerness and pop culture building weaving new narratives that simmer beneath a glossy or glistening surface.

Annie O’Donnell’s work navigates displacement and belonging through spatial experiments influenced by her background in choreography. Her materials, including the plastics once researched, developed and manufactured in her hometown, reference the economic drive to replace the natural with the synthetic that is emblematic of post-industrial Europe and globalisation. A recent visit to Chicago has fuelled a response to the photographer Matthew Kaplan to demonstrate the fluidity of identity across international settings. This combination of Kaplan’s photographs and O’Donnell’s collages urge a re-evaluation of how certain regions are perceived in the hierarchy of spaces and places. Calling into question the geographical and industrial nature of settings often considered to be in the periphery, once they are brought into the centre.

John James Perangie’s pop approach to their practice involves sculptural responses and performance using found clothing and object and is currently concerned with touch, feeling and action through an exploration of queer bodies and experiences. John James responds to the nightlife in Berlin by exploring their surroundings and interacting with its queer culture. The objects created consist of pillows embellished with make up, belts and jewellery to represent the experience and is augmented and amplified by a performance.

GROUNDHOPPERS, Kunstraum ortloff, Leipzig Germany – by Donagh Mcnamara

Nick Kennedy, Tony Charles, Will Hughes, Annie O’ Donnell/Mathew Kaplan, John James Perangie

Industrial spaces are of huge interest to this group of artists. The region in which they practice was built on the heavy industries of steelmaking and chemicals. The social pub culture is integral to these industries.

“I was married at 16 and had two children by 20. As long as my lace curtains were the cleanest, my children were immaculately dressed, their hand-knitted clothes made with love, I was happy.” — Siân Catherine James, Welsh politician, reflecting on her time as a young miner’s wife in the 1980s.

It is difficult to avoid sentimentality or nostalgia when discussing chemical synthesis or sheet-metal fabrication in the North of England or East Germany. In 2025, both regions are defined by red-brick buildings, towering chimney stacks, cobbled streets with tram tracks, and an abundance of the finest beers, ales, wines, and spirits. Giant, immovable structures continue to dot these landscapes.

In the early 1980s, the workers of Northern England were, in the eyes of the authorities, too socialist—perhaps even communist. At the same time, the workers of Saxony were seen as not communist enough. By the late 1980s, both regions witnessed the sudden and almost complete collapse of heavy industry. Communities were shattered, and the inherited meanings of these areas were no longer relevant in a landscape of decay and remnants of what was once fresh and vital.

It is unsurprising that artists from post-industrial zones have sought to decipher the intergenerational consequences of living in an industrial worker’s landscape and culture—now devoid of the industry that once defined it. Many of these artists approach the problem using industrial and scientific methodologies.

Nick Kennedy is a cross-disciplinary artist, working with drawing, painting, sculpture, print and digital media. At the root of his practice is an altered notion of drawing, through which he develops objects and performative experiments that often playfully recall and parody scientific process. Kennedy deploys technology and materials systematically to examine human constructs, such as time, that measure and shape our understanding of the world.

In a recent series of paintings, Kennedy has begun to honour his artistic influences, playfully reconsidering ideas and motifs from key works of 20th century abstraction. Loopy Doopy Boogie Woogie II combines computer aided vector drawing tools with traditional painting materials and techniques to continue this body of work.

Similarly, Tony Charles employs a distinct approach with his angle grinder-marked aluminium wall pieces. The challenge of controlling an angle grinder on a flat surface evokes not only factory work —such as in a steel fabrication plant—but also suggests a freedom from the repetitive, precise physical tasks of such work, or alternatively, a distorted echo of them. These pieces serve as ritualistic echoes of obsolete actions. When viewing the works, the absence of the deafening sound of an angle grinder scraping aluminium is not merely a reference to the repetitive clang of steel fabrication but also to the loss of those sounds and everything that once surrounded them.

The paradox of control and disruption in both Kennedy’s and Charles’s practices references not only the industrial past, with its expectations for workers, their families, and society, but also the socio-cultural consequences of societies that have been left in ruin.

Will Hughes deals with concepts surrounding aspiration, queerness and glamour. By exploring the seductive nature of glamour, Will’s work fuses the tangible object and the intangible discourse surrounding queerness and pop culture building weaving new narratives that simmer beneath a glossy or glistening surface.

Annie O’Donnell’s work tackles themes of displacement and belonging through spatial experiments influenced by her background in choreography. Viewers must physically navigate the space around her large-scale wall and floor-based objects. Her materials, including synthetic fibres and dyes, reference an economic drive to replace the natural with the synthetic. Textile production, emblematic of post-industrial Europe and globalisation, forces viewers to confront their own dispensability within such a discourse.

John James Perangie adopts a pop approach to sculptural and performative work. His interventions on found objects, such as clothing, recall a community-driven cottage industry or handcraft culture. Perangie’s work brings the personal and emotional aspects of repair and renewal to the fore, focusing on the politics of clothing and other objects physically or culturally tied to individuals within their communities.

The early scientific and industrial spirit—the search for the hidden in nature—and its epistemological reverberations remain self-referential in the inquiry presented by these exhibitions. The catastrophic loss of socio-cultural meaning still resonates today and has catalysed a new search—not for chemical formulas or automated efficiency, but for their very absence.

Given that much of the population in both regions may turn to dangerous politics or dubious art for answers, an exchange of ideas between this group of English artists and their German peers is both timely and significant.

Visitors will have a chance to view  The Leipzig exhibition during its tour to Oshatz in Saxony in August, Platform A Marking Officer and Fine Art Alumni Olivia Askwith is also producing a documentary of the work, details to follow. Find out more about BA (Hons) Fine Art here.