Exhibitions and Events
| Gallery | Artist | Dates |
| Upstairs & Mosaic | Louis Benoit | 28th Mar – 31st May |
| Focus Wall | Pinc College | 27th Feb – 29th Mar |
| Photography Gallery | Royal Photographic Society | 18th Apr- 21st Jun |
| Upstairs & Mosaic | Claire Murray | 27th Jun – 16th Aug |
| Crossley Gallery | Stephen Pinnell | 4th Jul – 27th Sept |
Louis Benoit
Mechanical Animal
The Upstairs and Mosaic Galleries
28th March – 31st May 2026
Preview 31st January 12-2pm All Welcome
The idea of a mechanical animal suggests a kind of uneasy fusion—creatures shaped by instinct but held together by something more rigid, more imposed. It’s a title that speaks to adaptation, survival, and the tension between inner life and external structure.
Louis Benoit’s drawings are immediate, instinctive, and deeply personal. His animals, often hybrid, often uneasy, feel like they’ve been pulled straight from the gut. There’s no polish here, no attempt to smooth things over. Instead, Benoit leans into the rawness: the awkward limbs, the tangled expressions, the sense that something is trying to make itself understood.
There’s something of Ralph Steadman in the energy, ink that feels flung rather than placed and forms that resist containment. But where Steadman’s chaos is often satirical, Benoit’s is quieter, more internal. His experience of autism shapes the way he sees and communicates. Rather than working through conventional language, Benoit builds a visual vocabulary that’s entirely his own. The drawings don’t explain themselves. They don’t need to. They speak in gesture, in texture, in the space between control and release. There’s a quiet dignity to the work. It simply exists—honest, unresolved, and full of life.
The Pinc College
Ey Up, It’s a Pop Up
The Focus Wall
27th February – 29th March 2026
Pinc College, an independent specialist college offering unique creative study programmes located in galleries, museums and heritage buildings across England and Wales, including in our inspiring setting at Dean Clough. We will be presenting a selection of students’ works produced during so far during the academic year 2025/2026. Ey Up, It’s a Pop Up is mid-year selection from our Dean Clough students.
The Royal Photographic Society – Analogue Group
The Royal Photographic Society – Analogue 10
The Photography Gallery
18th April – 21st June 2026
Preview 8th April 12-2pm. All Welcome.
The Analogue Special Interest Group of the Royal Photographic Society is one of the fastest growing parts of the RPS and the largest formal group dedicated to analogue (film, darkroom and alternative processes) in the UK. This exhibition shows this dynamic group’s work and showcases the qualities of traditional photography techniques that many photographers are now either returning to from digital or discovering for the first time.
Analogue photography is thriving in 2026. More than 2 decades ago the digital camera became a ubiquitous artifact, and predictions were made that “traditional” photography would simply disappear. In fact, during those 20 or so years analogue photography has evolved into a separate art form, where “seeing the image” isn’t enough, the photographer also must “see the way” of producing that image.
In this exhibition we see the work of some of the best practitioners of analogue photography, not only traditional silver gelatin prints but also cyanotypes, wet plate images, intaglio, kallitypes and salt prints, lith prints and the more accessible hybrid (film to digital) images. We see the work of photographers who have recently discovered analogue techniques as well as those of us who remained faithful to our art.
For anyone wanting to see first-hand and understand the attraction of analogue processes then this exhibition is a must for them, but also of great interest to other photographers and the general public.
To miss-quote Mark Twain: “Rumours of the death of analogue photography have been greatly exaggerated”.
Claire Murray
A Light to my Path
The Upstairs and Mosaic Galleries
27th June – 16th August 2026
“I have been painting the landscape for many years now, and my last exhibition in 2025/26 was titled Grounded, a reference to the natural and elemental appearance of the earth and our environments. In this exhibition, A Light to my Path, I explore the earthly and spiritual aspects more deeply, searching ideas of lightness and darkness using landscape as a metaphor. Binaries such as hope and despair, belief and non-belief, sickness and health, or even perhaps good and evil are addressed. The depiction of traditional British landscape in paintings has evolved according to artistic movements, shifting aesthetics, tastes, as well as cultural and political changes. My paintings can’t help but pivot somewhere on the knife-edge between beauty and oblivion, utopia and apocalypse.”
Claire Murray is an expressive painter based in Fletcher’s Mill, Dean Clough in Halifax. Claire has been painting for 37 years, teaching art, exhibiting and running her own studio practice, and has work in private collections internationally.
Stephen Pinnell
The Cunning of 10,000 Little Kittens
The Crossley Gallery
4th July – 27th September 2026
Looking back at the last decade and a half’s work by Stephen Pinnell, we see an artist seeking to construct a visual language from found objects, clipped quotations and images taken from a multitude of sources. His influences range from Robert Rauschenberg to T. S. Eliot and David Shrigley.
Variously described as paintings, collages or assemblages, the work is underpinned by Pinnell’s sense that the shared visual frameworks that once anchored meaning have become increasingly untenable in contemporary Western culture. We are left to construct a language of fragments. This is not without its advantages.
The philosopher A.N. Whitehead notes (writing in this case about The Wasteland by T.S.Eliot, Process and Reality, (1929)
The poem is more than it’s fragments and the fragments are more than the whole. The many become one and retain their multiplicity… At every moment in our lives we are gathering the many many fragments into a whole through juxtaposition, not ‘explanation’.
Perhaps more to the point, if you’ve never seen a jammie dodger used to articulate the problem of human existence, then you might want to come and have a look at this exhibition!
