Beyond the Scroll: Best Bits
- Jun 13
- 6 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
On 16 April 2026, ArtBomb hosted Beyond the Scroll: Rethinking Socially Engaged Practice, a one-day symposium including art interventions, workshops and an evening social filled with live music.
We welcomed over 150 artists, activists, college students and the curious public to a free day of talks, workshops and live interventions exploring how socially engaged practice can reclaim focus and meaning in an age of distraction.
As part of our pledge to make bold, boundary-pushing cultural experiences accessible to everyone in Doncaster, guests were invited to attend Beyond the Scroll entirely free of charge.
Galvanized by the success of Beyond the Scroll, ArtBomb is piloting a new donation scheme. If you attended Beyond the Scroll and would like to see more events like this in Doncaster, you can now help us make that happen by making a small donation! All contributions will feed directly back into ArtBomb's programming.
In Review
Here's what press had to say about our Beyond the Scroll event:
JACK CLARKE (ED. BY CIARA O'ROURKE) // CULTURE MATTERS
Beyond the Scroll: Doncaster, Doomscrolling, and the Strange Old Art of Paying Attention
28 April 2026
Beyond the Scroll was never going to work in a conference centre or some polished black box that smells faintly of grant money and institutional ego stroking. It needed the ghost of Flares nightclub to sit shuttered just opposite. It needed vape shops nearby, the rumble of traffic, the sound of ping pong upstairs and the constant possibility that someone might walk in halfway through a serious conversation.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed fascinated by ArtBomb. It is one of the few places I know trying to produce a different social space in real time, and doing so in a town centre that still carries all the usual British symptoms of hollowed-out civic life.
CHARLIE WATERHOUSE // ABSURD INTELLIGENCE
Beyond the Scroll: Real art is alive and well, and it's plotting the fightback in South Yorkshire. Shit Tech watch out, Donny's here.
22 April 2026
Beyond The Scroll was blessed with inspiration. From countercultural crocheters Mother Hookers to Sally Kindberg’s Museum of Dust; the Little Anarchist Bookshop to Matt Redfern’s painting this was creativity waybeyond both the scroll and the highfalutin Art World – and all the better for it. It’s the kind of Art Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse talk of so eloquently in their book What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory.
Highlights
Eelyn Lee delivered a brilliant keynote, offering an analysis of their own socially engaged creative practice as something inseparable from place, migration and the digital present.
Eelyn wrapped up their talk with a powerful invitation: "...when AI does all the work, let's dream".
Meanwhile, Darren Cullen (aka Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives) delighted everyone with a brief foray into the world of subvertising art. Tracing his early aspirations to join the ad industry and his swift pivot into subvertising, Darren showcased an impressive archive of projects and gave some practical tips on how to create your own satirical adverts. such as how to access brand fonts vis open source resources.
Guests enjoyed the courtyard, animated by Terry Hudsons' Little Anarachist Bookshop, Project 6's mobile coffee cart, live music by local musicians and spraypainting by Squiggle Gang.
Sally Kindberg presented the travelling Museum of Dust, a collection of dust presented in miniature bottles, gathered on adventures, including a walk along the Great Wall of China. Sally explains: "Dust is fascinating. Apparently we’re all made of dust from ancient stars, once responsible for the elements that make up our human bodies. Can these tiny specific samples evoke their origins, of locations, events and the characters connected to them?"
At Beyond the Scroll, Sally asked others what they would collect and pop in a bottle, bottling their responses with pen and paper.
Artwork by local artists & makers Matt Redfern, Diane Wells and Mother Hookers adorned the room, visually translating the Doncaster Unitarian Church's emerging status as the city's destination for original art.
Nine students from Doncaster College arrived in the afternoon, their faces concealed by Diane Well's crochet masks, an ongoing textiles project exploring identity, social masking, and the liberating effect of shrouding one's face in public spaces.
An impromptu conversation took place between Jack and the students, discussing AI fruit, doomscrolling, mental health and emotional flattening.
You can watch clips from the discussion over on Jack's Instagram (@clarkeofsalford).
Linda Cassells, Sue Hare and Lyndon Watkinson, working under the moniker, Futures Past Coalition, gathered everyone in the uppe hall for Tolerance is a Paradox, an Orwellian-inspired call-and-response participatory performance exploring division, control and the paradox of tolerance.
By evening, that very ArtBomb thing happened. On one side of the main hall, members of the weekly Church of Ping Pong group played table tennis, adding a new rhythm to the live, impromptu jam session happening on stage between local anarcho-fusion band The SkinTones and Nigerian-born saxophonist, Olaniyan Olamide Phillips.
It felt like one of those uncurated, unplanned moments that happen when you leave space for just the right amount of chaos. College students came along to see their mates play in their band, members of the local community farm hung out in the courtyard (not a phone in sight), street artists sprayed custom designs on people’s clothes.
A lot of our thinking for Beyond the Scroll was based on the assumption that most people are in the grips of doomscroll culture- disengaged with “real life”.
ArtBomb's event painted a pretty different picture. As Charlie Waterhouse puts it in his review. “real people in real places”. We had invited people to join us in going “beyond the scroll", but it felt like a lot of the people who joined us- the artists, activists, communards living off-grid & super switched on teens - are already halfway there.
Igniting Debate
The objective of the forum event was to spark conversations and honest debate between strangers around the prevailing force of arts and culture in an age of digital distraction. We wanted to create a relaxed space where, in-between inspiring artist talks and performances, people could talk openly with one another about how their personal relationship with everyday technologies actually makes them feel.
To facilitate this, we designed a 5-part series of provocations:
Human vs Platform
Who are you actually making work for people or algorithms?
Presence vs Documentation
Have you ever missed something real because you were trying to capture it?
Access vs Overload
When does “access” just become dependency?
Community vs Audience
Are we building something together, or just gathering attention?
Care vs Content
When does storytelling tip into extraction?
Ciara O'Rourke - who is working alongside Jack Clarke on the Anti-Social Housing Agency as part of ArtBomb's Arts & Homelessness project - was commissioned to work with us on the design elements of Beyond the Scroll, including transforming the above provocation into rich visual graphics.
Audience Feedback
We've received some incredibly generous feedback from many of the guests who attended.
Here's what some of them wrote in:
Olaniyan Olamide Phillips
Video & reflection on Instagram (@olamide.sax)
Tonight at @artbombuk , I stepped into a different current of energy with theskintones_uk , a space where reggae, funk, folk, ska, trance, hip hop and ancestral vibrations collide into one living sound.
No rehearsal. No limits. Just connection.
I brought the sax into their world, and somewhere between rhythm and freedom, everything aligned. What happened on that stage was more than music, it was conversation, it was trust, it was culture meeting culture without resistance.
Moments like this remind me that music is a universal language, it doesn’t ask where you’re from, it responds to what you carry.
Grateful for the energy, the openness, and the shared vibration.
This is how we grow. This is how we connect. This is how we create.
Matt Redfern
Dear Mike and Jennie,
Thank you for you invite to Beyond the Scroll.
This was an amazing opportunity rarely seen in Doncaster where a group of creative minds can meet together.
The timetable offered lots of perspectives and views that opened my mind to how an artist voice can be developed and effective. This has given my loads of inspiration for the future. The artist talks were informative and delivered in a friendly environment. The performance art was powerful and has stuck with me. My work is based on mental health, after today I am thinking about how I can step this up.
Art is truly a powerful way of expressing, thank you for providing the variety and inspiration I need to continue to develop.
It was also a great opportunity to meet like minded people, and once again an opportunity for others to see my work.
After today I will certainly reflect on how I can build narrative in my work that includes that way pressures from others, including advertising, can affect the way we live and think.
Thanks once again,
Matt
Others
A huge thank you to everyone who helped make Beyond the Scroll happen!
Jack Clarke - Host, Curation & Project Management
Ciara O'Rourke - Fabrication & Design
Mike Stubbs - Curation & Programming
Jennie Gilman - Curation & Programming
Ruth Harris - Marketing
Dave Hughes - Facilities Manager (Doncaster Unitarian Church)
Paula Lockey - Catering
