Current Exhibitions and Events
| Gallery | Artist | Dates |
| Focus Wall | Vibe Arts | 4th Apr – 27th May |
| Upstairs and Mosaic Gallery | Louis Benoit | 28th Mar – 31st May |
| The Crossley Gallery | Philip Booth | 21st Feb – 24th May |
| Fletcher’s Mill | Brightside Arts Club Café | Monthly, 1st Thursday |
| Installation D Mill | Lost Workers | Permanent |
| Lego Brick Gallery | Lego Model | Permanent |
| Short Link Gallery | Dean Clough Photography Collection | Permanent |
| Long Link Gallery | Dean Clough Earnshaw Collection | Permanent |
| D Mill Reception and Long Link Galleries | Ian C. Taylor – The Mantlepieces | Current |
| D Mill | Dean Clough Art Collection | Permanent |
The Brightside Arts Club Café
ACDC, Fletcher’s Mill
First Thursday of each month
The Brightside Arts Club Café, hosted by The Arts Charity at Dean Clough, is a unique arts club for people living with dementia and their companions. Members enjoy café-style refreshments followed by a relaxed taught art activity.
Brightside takes place on the first Thursday of each month in Fletcher’s Mill, home of The Arts Charity at Dean Clough.
Membership of Brightside is via Age UK for either the 10.30 -12.30 or 2.00 – 4.00 pm session please contact:
Lisa Berrett
Community Engagement Officer
Calderdale Dementia Hub
Age UK Calderdale and Kirklees
Email LBerrett@ageukck.org
Telephone 07513727441
Vibe Arts
Fur and Feathers
The Focus Wall
4th April – 27th May 2026
Vibe Arts are an art collective of three ladies who not only share studio space and a love of art but also share their love of natural health and wellness, all three being holistic therapists. Bringing these practices into their art and allowing the power of peacefulness, and a little serendipity, to guide their art flow. They take every opportunity presented to them to immerse themselves in art and <healing> adventures.
Connecting with nature and with each other brings them inspiration for their creativity. Each artist has an individual style which can be discovered in their themed collection, Fur & Feathers, which brings together their love of the animal kingdom, folklore and the spiritual meanings each animal brings.
One of their shared <loves> is reflecting on spirit or totem animal meanings. Whether spiritually or symbolically, the animal kingdom offers us a way to connect more deeply with nature and our own instincts, reminding us that meaning can often be found in the natural world around us.
Through this body of work, they also explore the idea of hunter and hunted – the instinct to survive within a world that can be both beautiful and unforgiving. We are reminded that – unlike humans – animals hunt solely for survival, never for excess or personal gain, honouring a balance that nature instinctively protects.
These magnificent animals represent more than beauty – they reveal the intricate interconnectedness of all life on our precious planet – physically, spiritually and symbolically.
Vibe Arts are:
- Adele Doxey – Adele’s Art & Soul
- Christine Martin – Christine’s Creative Moments
- Debra Lumb – Calm Art
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.
Philip Booth
Breathing Out Slowly
The Crossley Gallery
21st February – 24th May 2026
In Zen, full attentiveness is found in the slow exhale — a principle mirrored in my work, which invites sustained looking and rewards repeated encounters. Rooted in early conceptual art, lightly baroque in tone, and with an inherent critique of the purely gestural, the work explores our layered and often fractured relationship with nature. It challenges the perceived divide between humankind and the natural world, while also celebrating nature’s richness.
Drawing is often the starting point, especially in landscapes with an “edge of the world” quality—places of collision and tension. These encounters evolve through a process of invention and integration, resulting in abstract forms that suggest geology and natural forces without replicating them. The work engages myth, assemblage, and makes reference to an expansive range of material, creating a space that moves outward from the wall toward the viewer, echoing the experience of landscape.
Meticulous and contemplative, yet intricate and dynamic, the work seeks to express vital matter beyond anthropocentrism—foregrounding nature’s agency over human control. It operates in the space between mathematics and art, geometry and flow, abstraction and figuration, experience and myth. My practice is primarily studio-based, with additional work in commissions, landscape design, and public art. My work is held in private collections across the UK, EU, and Japan, and in the British Museum.
Ian C. Taylor
The Mantlepieces
D Mill Reception and The Long Link Gallery
Current
Carved from an old limestone mantelpiece, these figures evoke Picasso’s observation that “to make a figure from a cubic volume is the most difficult thing in art.” Taylor’s characters often avert their gaze, absorbed in their own acts of looking – quietly reflecting our own presence as we observe them.
AgeUK Exhibition
The Focus Wall
26th January
This group initially began as a 4 week course funded by Age Uk early in 2025. Once the 4 weeks were completed the learners were keen to continue to develop their art skills and so the Thursday Night Group has become a regular feature in the Arts Charity Dean Clough Art School. The group is a sociable and relaxed environment in which people can enjoy engaging in creative work, with all the benefits that brings, developing their artistic skills. This exhibition represents some of the work produced over the last 10 months.
Fiona Edmondson
The Iron Man by Chris Mould
The Iron Man is currently on show in the entrance to The Dean Clough Galleries. Chris said “My interest in Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man began when I first found the book in the school library at a young age. It had been published in the year before I was born (1968) and continues to be a strong selling title in the children’s market today.
After being asked to produce my own illustrated version of the story I became fascinated with the idea of taking the artwork to the next stage and building the character three dimensionally.”
Copies of The Iron Man, Illustrated by Chris Mould are available in the Design Shop at Dean Clough.
The Lego Model
Visit the Lego model of the 22 acre Dean Clough site situated in the Lego Brick Gallery in D Mill next to the Upstairs and Mosaic Galleries. This model, constructed out of approximately one million Lego bricks has been created by Lego artists Michael Le Count and Tony Priestman.
Also displayed in the gallery are artefacts and photographs of the Crossley Carpet era and of the renovation of Dean Clough in the 1980s.
The Dean Clough Photography Collection
The Short Link Gallery
Permanent
The Dean Clough Photography Collection includes work by Martin Parr, Kate Mellor, Charlie Meecham and Ian Beesley, among others. It reflects the breadth of photographic practice exhibited at Dean Clough over several decades, with many contributors having long-standing or regional connections to the site.
The Dean Clough Earnshaw Collection
The Long Link Gallery
Permanent
Anthony Earnshaw’s irreverent wit and anarchic Surrealism have a permanent home at Dean Clough, where a significant body of his work—generously entrusted by his wife, Gail—is now displayed in the Long Link Gallery. Celebrating his self‑taught brilliance, fluid draughtsmanship and embrace of chance, the collection reflects Earnshaw’s distinctive contribution to post‑war British Surrealism and his long, creative association with Dean Clough.
The Dean Clough Art Collection
D Mill
Permanent
The Dean Clough Art Collection is on permanent public display in D Mill. It brings together works by artists such as Willy Tirr, Norman Ackroyd, Tom Wood, Joe Tilson, Derek Hyatt, Jake Attree, R. B. Kitaj and The Art Junkies, alongside many others. The works offer a rich and varied encounter with late‑20th‑century British art.
As one of the most substantial private art collections in the UK, the Dean Clough Collection provides public access to a wide range of artistic practices, with a particular focus on work produced in the 1980s and 1990s. Eclectic in scope and representative of a broad spectrum of mediums, the collection offers a vivid snapshot of artistic output.
The Piano Club
The Piano Club started over 30 years ago, a forerunner of the many piano meet-up groups found throughout the UK. Based at the Crossley Gallery in Dean Clough, The Piano Club offers a forum for pianists to play, perform and develop within a sympathetic and friendly environment and the opportunity to discuss aspects of piano playing and repertoire with fellow musicians. Our aspiration could be summed up as mutual self-improvement through the knowledge and experience to be found within the group.
The group meets on the first Sunday of each month from 10am to 1pm. Membership is free and meetings are open to observers.
The Crossley Art Gallery at Dean Clough has a beautiful Fazioli grand piano and seats 150. It is situated close to Halifax Bus Station, and the Dean Clough car parks are free on Sundays.
The Piano Club is run by David Nelson, formerly the Artistic Director of the Hebden Bridge Piano Festival. Please contact David by phone or email for further information. Tel. 07704 873 894
FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/pianoclubhalifax
Purchasing Artwork
Purchase exhibited items by debit or credit card from the Design Shop next to the Dean Clough Main Reception. When the exhibition finishes purchased items may be collected by arrangement.
Prints of some artists’ work are also for sale in The Design Shop.