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Articles by Peter Shukie
STRATA - Corridor8
STRATA is the 2026 postgraduate Fine Art exhibition at Newcastle University, bringing together work by students across the department’s new one-year MA, two-year MFA and PhD programmes. The exhibition reflects the breadth and depth of contemporary practice within the department, foregrounding a richness and diversity that speaks to its distinctive history of fostering experimentation, independent studio practice and interdisciplinary approaches.
The Fine Art Degree Show: Lancaster University
A digital print of a fallen arm resting on a bedsheet, poised somewhere between surrender and death, bears the words ‘Shared Skin’ across the flesh. This was the first work I encountered in the LICA Building: Nico Sharma’s ‘I knew you under its touch, and it knew us (Mud poem)’ (2026). I noted the phrase without knowing it would become a fitting reflection for the exhibition itself.
The complexity of class: artist Jamie Holman’s red glass and resistance
Driving into Blackburn in May, the election aftermath still spills from the airwaves, the tremors of the night before continuing to unfold as presenters attempt to narrate a country shifting beneath them.
Borrowed voices, open doors: Manchester Film Festival 2026
Manchester Film Festival closes with exactly the right kind of film. Not something inflated for the sake of a finale, but a work that catches hold of one of the festival’s deeper currents. California Schemin’ arrives at the end of 11 days of screenings, conversations, applause and immersion. In its story of borrowed voices and improvised entry points, it reflects something larger about the festival itself. This year’s edition has been the biggest yet.
Gods, grapples and guffaws: Mythos Ragnarök at the Floral Pavilion
The Floral Pavilion sits out on the edge of New Brighton, facing the Mersey with Liverpool’s docks looming across the water. Around it, the place holds that familiar seaside mix: arcades, food stalls, families drifting, a slight wear that never tips into decline because there is too much life moving through it. It feels right that this show lands here. It would lose something in a cleaner space. Mythos Ragnarök arrives with talk of madness. It is that, but not in any loose sense.
Gods in the ring: punk theatre, working-class wrestling and Ragnarök
I should probably admit that my knowledge of wrestling is not contemporary. It lives somewhere back in the strange, televised world of the 1970s with characters like Catweazle and Kendo Nagasaki, looming out of World of Sport broadcasts with their beards, masks and half-mythical personas. Modern wrestling, for me at least, remains largely unexplored territory. As it turns out, this is not a bad place to start.
Jim Cartwright’s Two pours a strong night in Prescot at Shakespeare North Playhouse
My first visit to Shakespeare North in Prescot felt oddly close to home. It’s not far from where I grew up, though Prescot itself always felt like another world. Jim Cartwright’s Two has also travelled a long road since its first staging in the 1980s, but for me and the artist I went with it was completely new. We walked in without history, meeting the play as if it had just been written. The building, though, carries history everywhere.
Joy Division & New Order: Album by Album by Mayer Nissim
Most people already know this story, or think they do. The history of Joy Division and New Order has been told so often that it’s hardened into one of Manchester’s defining narratives, both a starting point and a long-lasting presence. Mayer Nissim’s Joy Division & New Order: Album by Album quietly unsettles that certainty, reopening familiar material from new angles. Structuring the book album by album imposes a logic on what often feels like an unspooled life.
Bringing elsewhere with you: Fearns at Leeds Dock
They used to call this place Tatty Dock. That was the name Chris Bonner used, almost in passing, standing in his bookshop Hold Fast on a repurposed coal barge moored across the water. Potatoes — mountains of them — once passed through here, and kids would dive into the navigation to grab the loose spuds floating past. Fallen from sacks, fair game. Cold water, sharp edges, real risk. Northern pearl diving.
'manic, generous and utterly alive' Stereo MC’s, O2 Ritz, Manchester
Returning to Manchester’s O2 Ritz after more than two decades carries its own charge. The street is famous now, polished by memory and tourism, but once felt darker, riskier, electric with possibility. In the late 80s and early 90s, nights here were routinely either the best of your life or barely survivable, often both. The Haçienda up the road has vanished and become myth at the same time.
'warmth as resistance' Rob Birch from Stereo MC's on being connected
I’ve been speaking with friends about the last time we saw Stereo MC’s, somewhere and sometime in the early 1990s, and how the way we talk about that era now has been flattened into myth: the cool shoes, the rising music moguls, the glamour of the underground suddenly made palatable for wider consumption. But the truth we remembered was different. Those years weren’t a celebration of slickness. They were a time of uncertainty, threat, and invention.
Jason Wilsher-Mills: Jason and the Adventure of the 254, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool
Contemporary art sits between two forms of repetition. One is the tired canon that keeps circling familiar movements, the other is the endless stream of algorithmic images that look perfect but feel empty. One is weighed down by inherited meaning, the other carries none at all. Both leave the viewer untouched. Jason Wilsher-Mills stands apart from both. His work is not about prestige or technology. It is lived experience turned into colour and form.
Kindness as resistance: Jason Wilsher-Mills at the Grundy, Blackpool
When I meet Jason Wilsher-Mills at the Grundy, he greets me with a line that sets the tone for everything that follows: “Welcome to the inside of my head.” Walking into the gallery, it becomes clear what he means. The rooms are vivid, strange, playful and political — a world of memories, jokes, tenderness and working-class imagination built into bright, bustling pieces. But what strikes me first is Wilsher-Mills himself. He has a calm steadiness, a gentle voice with purpose behind it.
Cracks, beauty, and belonging: The Nature of Gothic, Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery
Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery is not often the centre of national cultural attention. Yet this autumn it hosts The Nature of Gothic, an exhibition that would be at home in any major city. Developed with the Institute of English Studies, it brings together treasures from Blackburn’s own Hart Collection with loans from the British Library and the V&A. Visitors can see William Morris’s Strawberry Thief, Rossetti’s monumental Astarte Syriaca, and rare medieval books once handled by kings.
‘The Nature of Gothic’: Cracks, Silence, and the Knowledge That Survives
At Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery until 13th December By Peter Shukie Blackburn Museum’s The Nature of Gothic offers up treasures of heritage: William Morris’s wallpapers, Rossetti’s goddess, medieval manuscripts from the Hart Collection, and a white deerskin book that once belonged to Henry VIII. It is a celebration of Gothic revival and artistic splendour.
A working-class artist is something to be
Abstract The creative and cultural sectors in the United Kingdom largely exclude the working classes. Even the small number of working-class people who do ‘make it’ into these sectors often find themselves and their work badly treated by those who hold the real power. This article explores some of the experiences of working-class artists navigating the cultural sector and how exclusion, prejudice and precarity impacted and continue to impact them.
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