Don’t knock Sheffield: “There’s a sense that everything in the arts is closing, but we are just opening up”

Sheffield isn’t much known for its art. For most people who have never been, what probably comes to mind will be somewhere between dreary smoke over the long-closed steel mills and spit-and-sawdust locals where you might run into a bedraggled Jarvis Cocker nursing a pint of bitter. Little colour. The most celebrated painter to come out of the city over the last century is John Hoyland, a dynamic figure in the postwar scene of lyrical abstraction, but who made his name down in London. As I went up to see a new exhibition of Hoyland’s work at the Millennium Gallery, I looked at my hometown with a kind of hazy nostalgia: glad to go back, but pleased I had a different life. I thought about why there had been so few great artists to come out of the city, and about why someone like Hoyland felt he had to leave to make it. But I was also hopeful. I’d been to a handful of D-I-Y shows over the last year and had a hunch that there was something happening on Sheffield’s contemporary art scene. Perhaps the issue wasn’t that nothing was going on, but that its story just hasn’t been told. And why would it have been? Post-industrial cities like Sheffield are often ignored or dismissed as parochial. “They don’t have art scenes there”. “It’s grim up north.”

I whizzed around the Hoyland show. It was magnificent and weird, with work sprawling across two spaces. In the main gallery, there was an eclectic display – These Mad Hybrids – which showed his lesser-known sculptures and beautifully bizarre ceramics alongside works by Caroline Achaintre, Phyllida Barlow and Hew Locke. A smaller display next door showed some of his more familiar large-format paintings, in all their brutishly dolloped and poured glory. It was great. But Hoyland wasn’t why I made the journey. I wanted to find the artists who were sticking their flags in the city despite its lack of commercial galleries.

Through Tatiana Cheneviere, director of Pipeline, a London-based gallery which mostly showcases artists based outside the capital, I had an introduction to artist Conor Rogers. Rogers works from Bloc, a handsome brick-fronted studio complex with a courtyard and a gallery space called Bloc Projects next door, which runs an ambitious programme for the local community on a shoestring budget. Rogers meets me outside. He’s an imposing figure; he’s eloquent and warm.

Rogers grew up on the notorious Manor estate, the sort of place that even Ken Loach would drive through and get nervous if he had to stop at a red light. Artists and storytellers don’t come out of the Manor, but Rogers did. He started out customising trainers, a means of making “intimate paintings onto materials that aren’t the norm” and wanted to know how we relate to the objects around us, the kinds of things onto which we ascribe no artistic value but might have the capacity for poetic meaning. When Rogers crossed town to the art school at Sheffield Hallam University in 2011, he was the first in his family to go to university, and felt like “an imposter in [his] own city”. He started making pictures about what he knew, and any lecturer worth their salt will tell you that is the bread and butter of finding one’s subject at art school. Rogers gives an example: once, in a painting workshop, he intuitively took a crisp packet, primed its surface instead of a canvas in a gesture worthy of Duchamp, and made a painting on it. Soon his lecturers and classmates started telling him his subject was “very working-class”. Rogers didn’t know what this meant at first – he hadn’t really met anyone of a different class until then – but he didn’t totally embrace the label. “If you are working-class you often feel that you must wear it like a badge of honour, or else you hide it and pass”, he tells me. “I sit beside both”.

Rogers’ work has the power to speak to you even if you’ve never been to a place like the Manor. “I wanted to investigate why I am here, in this life; and I just so happened to be living on a council estate, and so that became my subject”, he tells me. “When I was a young lad on the estate, I was very curious and attentive: these are environments of deprivation and high crime, it’s a volatile place to live, but I found some liberty in properly paying attention and recognising the nuances and the poetry of this world.” Rogers talks about his work with a straightforward sincerity, the kind of artist who can make you look at something you’ve seen a thousand times and see it completely new.

After a few moments in Rogers’ studio, it was immediately clear that he was an artist of rare resourcefulness. Inspired by Hurvin Anderson’s Salon Paintings, which were exhibited at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2023, Rogers has made a series of fascinatingly tactile works using Rizzla papers, all carefully glued together like a medieval tapestry, which document the architectures and communities of his early life on the council estate. He turned a migraine-blue paddling pool on its side and mounted it on the wall, a format which reminded me of Daniel Spoerri’s startling, upturned tables of ephemera, and painted children playing on the interior surface. Rogers was recently commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to create a work of socially engaged portraiture in collaboration with Sheffield Park Academy, his alma mater on the Manor. The results were extraordinary. Rogers hauled and installed an old bus shelter – a symbol of transience and often working-class transportation – into the Millennium Gallery, inside which he displayed a series of portraits alongside works by the school children.

Rogers shares Bloc with several other artists who combine conflicting materials and embed their research-based practice in the local landscape. Heavy Water Collective is made up of Victoria Lucas, Jo Whittle and Maud Haya-Baviera, who came together after showing at Site Gallery in 2021. While they work in very different media (Victoria in sculpture and photography; Jo in small oil paintings; Maud in film and photography) their practice collectively aligns by mythologising local spaces – coalfields, quarries, post-industrial sites – and utilising untapped resources in archives across the north. Like Rogers, Heavy Water Collective participated on the Platform residency, a two-year mentorship programme culminating in an exhibition at Site Gallery and funded by the Freelands Foundation. Platform had its final cohort last year. Elsewhere in the city, multimedia artist Sophie-Nicole Dodds’ practice bridges fine arts and tailoring. A member of the Working Class Creatives Database, and inspired by the methods and practices of Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops – a laboratory for modernist thinking about artistic materials and the bridging of art and life – Dodds elevates stitching to an artform. Her work thinks through processes of mending, repair, and care in our oversaturated age of fast fashion and faddish art.

The more conversations I had, and the more studios I visited, the more the dynamism of the artistic scene was revealed. I didn’t want to leave.

Despite these boundary-pushing artists, and amidst all the hot air from central government, the story of arts funding in Sheffield can feel more like it’s been levelled as opposed to levelled up. In the last round of available accounts, England’s sixth biggest city received significantly less Arts Council England (ACE) funding per capita compared to other northern cities, with residents receiving a paltry amount of  £6.40 per head, while Manchester was awarded just under £49 and Leeds £34.51 per head, respectively. “In Sheffield, we don’t gloat or brag”, Rogers tells me, “but the art scene here has been a sleeping giant; part of that might be the structures and systems that don’t shine a light on artists like us, but the underbelly of artists here is pushing through all those hurdles.” And pushing through the hurdles they have. One of the most exciting new contemporary art galleries in the country is Gloam, a stone’s throw from Bloc, which together with Yorkshire Artspace forms the triangle of Sheffield’s burgeoning art network Originally set up in 2017, and now led by Thomas Griffiths, Victoria Emily Sharples, and Stu Burke, Gloam puts on an extraordinary programme of emerging artists.

Last year, Gloam staged a group show entitled ‘Embers’ featuring works by Rogers, alongside Sam Blackwood, Grace Clifford and Sam Hutchinson. People turned up and took note. I’ve been following Clifford’s work for some time. Like the St. George’s flags and Royal Mint images of fellow Sheffield expatriate Corbin Shaw, it’s tactile and dirty and visceral and thoughtful – refracted images of England in decline. When a cash-strapped visitor tried to steal the bank note from Clifford’s work Fiver Glued to Floor Prank *Not Clickbait* at her exhibition at the Art House gallery in Wakefield, the artist laughed and said that it demonstrated the very point of the work. In our age of high inflation and stagnant wages, money can be so easily taken away from you. Like Rogers, though, she has sometimes felt pigeonholed. “In terms of representations of class in the arts in Britain”, Clifford tells me, “people want the fur coat but not the knickers.” She’s right: the established art world doesn’t want to talk about class because that art world is not designed for people who might suffer the sharp edge of the cost-of-living crisis. We need artists like Rogers and Clifford because they offer a genuinely fresh perspective.

Blackwood, meanwhile, grew up in Hartlepool and studied at Sheffield Hallam with Rogers; they’re still best mates, even though he’s since moved to London. Blackwood’s work highlights the sensitivity of working-class spaces – the pub, the club, the kitchen table at the afters – with a probing and revelatory eye, attentive to how creativity can be borne out of boredom and aggression. His work is often open-ended and durational, such as Rat Palace (2013 – ongoing), a leaning tower of taped-up sugary drinks bottles, which is currently on show in ‘After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024’ at Edinburgh gallery Stills. In 2023, Jack Ginno staged a solo exhibition, ‘Mirror’, at Gloam. Ginno had helped establish Depot Art Studios on the Maple Industrial Estate, the site of last year’s piece on The Ardwick Realists in Plaster, and is currently in a two-person show, ‘Here, or There, or Elsewhere’, with Ally Fallon, at Heaven 11 on the estate. Ginno is a real star, a kind of Robert Rauschenberg for the left behind, as he too repurposes found objects and makes them glisten with colour. There is no competition between these young artists; everyone’s got each other’s backs. There’s unity here, and a palpable confidence in standing out.

It’s not all doom and gloom, then. Kirstie Hamilton, the Director of Programmes at Graves Gallery, has secured the biggest grant ever awarded by the Ampersand Foundation (£450k over five years) to reimagine and democratise the city’s art collection. Simon Le Ruez, for instance, a Bloc resident for over 20 years, is trying to make a knot out of glass as a response to the sinking feeling you might get in your stomach if you descended Stanley Spencer’s Helter Skelter, housed at the Graves. When I called up Ryan Mosley, one of the few artists in the city to be represented by a commercial gallery (London-based Josh Lilley), and whose work I love, which depicts carnivalesque scenes of island lagoons and enigmatic imagined landscapes, I had a long list of questions to ask about his work. But Mosley wanted to tell me about the future for contemporary art across Sheffield, not his practice. “Sheffield is ten years behind Manchester”, he tells me, referring to the new partnerships between municipal authorities like the council and the mayor, and the organisations of artist-led spaces around the city: “what was happening there a decade ago is now happening here; and Manchester is now one of the most exciting cities for art in Europe”. As a Trustee of S1 Artspace, which will soon move into a Grade II listed site at the former Yorkshire Bank Chambers, and feature “spacious public galleries across two floors, showcasing an ambitious programme of new work by local, national, and international artists across the artistic spectrum”, Mosley is optimistic. He knows the task is to get international artists to Sheffield as well as getting local artists a national profile. S1 Artspace could be a game-changer for the city.

“There was a timidness to Sheffield artists, and for a long time the scene was dormant”, Rogers acknowledged: “But that’s changing now… we have been working through the suffering of being artists, being northern artists at that, and there’s this sense that everything in the arts is closing; but we are only just opening up.” On my way back to London, it was clear that Sheffield has produced many great artists; Hoyland was not a solitary figure, but an early exponent of the kind of object-led engagement with colour and with ideas which pervades the current art scene in the city. I felt a buzz over the grit and purpose of these artists, who had carved out a world made of experiment and endeavour as well as Rizzla papers and crisp packets. It’s high time the rest of the country takes note of these artists centred around Bloc, Gloam, and Yorkshire Artspace, and I know it will. As Rogers implied, it’s just the beginning.