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ARTS & HOMELESSNESS COMMISSION Open daily from 1 July 2026 @ ArtBomb KEY DATES: 10 July 2026 [Opening] 24 July 2026 27 July 2026 Anti-Social Housing Agency is a new socially engaged installation by Ciara O’Rourke and Jack Clarke, developed with ArtBomb in Doncaster as part of its Arts & Homelessness programme. The project uses the visual language of housing offices, furnished tenancies, hostile architecture, waiting rooms, domestic interiors and showrooms to provoke discussion around the systems that shape who gets to feel safe, who gets pushed out, and who is quietly designed against. It draws from the strange emotional deadness of places that pretend to offer comfort while keeping people managed: the IKEA display room where nobody lives, the council waiting area where time seems to thicken, the staged tenancy brochure where home becomes a product, and the liminal retail spaces where every sofa, lamp and plastic plant appears welcoming until you realise none of it is actually yours. Through this, Anti-Social Housing Agency looks at hostile architecture, social housing, rough sleeping, temporary accommodation, furniture poverty and the everyday ways public and private spaces can isolate, exclude or control people. At the centre of the project is a body of custom-adapted furniture by Ciara O’Rourke. Sofas, chairs, domestic objects and improvised interiors become part artwork, part social space, part uncomfortable question. These are not just props or set pieces. They are objects that ask what home means when comfort itself has become conditional. From 24 July, the public will be invited to start undoing the room. To take this slightly cold, showroom-like housing office, part IKEA display, part council waiting room, part liminal retail purgatory where a sofa somehow looks both affordable and emotionally dead — and begin making it feel lived in. Through workshops, mural painting, shared artwork-making and other activities, the space will be gradually softened, marked and interrupted by the people who use it. From 27 July, the installation will shift into The Social House: a reimagined version of its anti-social counterpart. Where the first phase looks at hostile design, isolation, staged comfort and the systems that make people feel managed rather than held, this second phase asks what happens when people are invited to actually occupy the room. To sit in it. Add to it. Talk in it. Make something there. The space becomes less like a showroom pretending to sell belonging, and more like a communal room built through use, care and presence. Across the exhibition, the work will shift between installation, conversation, workshop and community gathering, slowly creating a space where people can talk about housing not as an abstract policy issue, but as something lived through bodies, rooms, waiting lists, furniture, debt, shame, care and survival and will evolve through the exhibition life into The Social House. Anti-Social Housing Agency opens from 1 July @ ArtBomb, Doncaster. Want to get involved? Email jennie@artbombuk.com

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) https://www.instagram.com/p/DXNUqkWDWIg/?hl=en-gb&img_index=1 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. #artbombuk #Skintoneuk #olamidesax #communityart#communitymusic 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

Tendresse by Matthew Humphreys started with an artist trying to figure out what to do with 20+ years worth of film footage, decades of intimate family moments captured with a variety of digital and analogue cameras. When an artist exhibits work at ArtBomb for the first time, we invite them to walk across the street and look at the building from a distance. We encourage artists not to read the shop as a conventional white-walled gallery space, but rather to see the entire building (its interior, exterior and the symbols of commerce and transaction implicit in its retail shop facade) as the artwork, as a creative intervention into public space. When members of the public step into the building, or even just walk past it, they are implicated in the art. As such, for many visual artists who are perhaps used to presenting in more traditional art spaces, exhibiting a show at ArtBomb is a chance to entirely reimagine what shape their work might take. For Matthew Humphreys, exhibiting Tendresse at ArtBomb presented the challenge of lifting his moving image works from the screen and realising them as an eclectic series of sculptural, painted and interactive works. The result was a 12-week project which saw Matthew collaborate- both directly and from a distance- with school pupils, local poets & creative writers, each of whom were invited or inspired to make their own contributions to the exhibition. Local poet Ian Parks wrote a brilliant history of the pinhole camera to accompany Silent Light (2026), the walk-in pinhole camera fabricated by Doncaster residents, which in turn inspired yoga teacher Melissa Martin to host a creative workshop for 8 participants within the exhibition space (read more below). For Matthew, presenting such an intimate body of work so far away from his home in London, and not being able to physically be with the work all the time, meant handing over a lot of interpretive agency to both ArtBomb's curatorial team and visiting public. Matthew's openness to local creatives translating the work in their own way and to these translations becoming part of the work was a huge leap in trust. It allowed the work to breath and grow on its own terms, whilst sustaining the tender intimacy of the family memories at the core of the work. This idea of a London-based artist creating space for collaboration with strangers feels like an invaluable lesson for ArtBomb in terms of how we ensure that any work by non-local artists we present in Doncaster still offers a degree of creative ownership and opportunity to local residents. Matthew's reflections: a voicenote (May 2026) You know, the project initially started out as a moving image piece. I’ve talked about how the footage was quite overwhelming and I felt I had to remove myself initially and start making things. It was through conversations with Mike [ArtBomb’s Curator] that all these ideas around object-making and bird motifs, bird boxes and carving and stencilling came about. I remember mentioning that my mother went to the Deaf school [Doncaster Deaf Trust]. I didn’t want a collaboration with the Deaf school to feel arbitrary, you know? My work has Deaf themes but I think it’s important not to focus the whole work around that. I needed some time to think about it, and what came out was the wonderful bird boxes and stencilling of my father's drawings. It was strange actually, having this intimate body of work sit away from me. As an artist most of my work has been moving image- just single moving image pieces, which have typically either been presented in a cinema or in a gallery on a screen, and I can be removed from it. But with Tendresse, there was a lot of sculptural and conceptual elements in this show that require the viewer to interpret. It was really wonderful that Ian, the local poet who visited the exhibition, contributed a descriptive history of the camera obscura to be displayed on the entrance to the walk-in camera. I'm really fascinated with the histories of things and I think the camera obscura for me was an important part of my creative practice- not only for being the birth of photography, but more so because of my father's condition- his blindness, his Deafness, his disorientation with Alzheimer’s. When Melissa came in, looked at all the pieces in the exhibition, and was inspired to host a writing workshop within the space- that felt really good. I often think about my father's internal monologue, what he’s perceiving. It’s interesting for people to go through that experience of sensory deprivation. It’s interesting as well having all these intimate works there [in Doncaster] away from me. In a way it mirrored how I felt sometimes. My father was in a care home for 11 years before he passed and every time I left him there was a sense of not knowing, but feeling safe. My mother’s in a care home as well, and I feel a lot safer knowing she’s there. In a way, knowing that the work is existing, is being looked at or passed by in Doncaster, feels a bit similar… I’m struggling to find the words to describe what I mean. That’s why I create these pieces actually- I’m often trying to articulate my experiences. There is a lot of work that didn't make it into the show- works that are still being processed. I think there was around 14 potential works that could have been in the final exhibition. I think only two or three of these were moving image pieces or moving image sketches. I think going through this creative process made me realise the bigger picture- not of what I was trying to make, but what was appropriate for me to make in the form of my moving image piece [i.e. deciding which clips of family moments should be translated for audiences, and which should remain private]. That is my role as translator. Initially, I moved away from signing dialogue in the film. They [Matthew’s parents] were talking about everyday things that I have explored in Goodbye (Selected Videos 2010-13). But there were some heavier issues they were talking about- there was a lot of worry for my mother about illness and old age and the anxiety of not seeing family. I didn't want to make it [the exhibition] about that. But through people viewing these works, it’s all about the space that appears between language and communication and I've been looking at the footage a lot differently now. I’m finding the gestures, the punctuation, these delicate moments throughout the work and now I'm collecting all these together and reforming. It’s still based around the garden and the passage of time, but the work feels a lot lighter now. I feel a lot more confidence moving through the footage and finding my way to what will be the piece that brings the works that I made for Doncaster together as an accomplished accompaniment to the wider film work that I'm making. Its been a wonderful process, and the ArtBomb space has allowed me to explore. I'm just walking towards Finsbury Park- gotta pick up some fruit and…yeah I'll sign off now. Thanks for everything guys, and I'll speak soon. Doncaster Deaf Trust collaboration Back in Febaury 2026, Matthew & ArtBomb spent a day with pupils at Doncaster Deaf Trust. Matthew hosted a morning birdbox making class for Year 8 pupils and co-created a custom wallpaper with KS1 & KS2 pupils, the design of which was inspired by his father's sketching of bird species native to Doncaster. You can read more about what we got up to in our March 2026 blog post here. In April 2026, 60 pupils and teaching assistants came down to ArtBomb to see their work featured in Matthew's exhibition. The wooden birdboxes have been installed in various locations across ArtBomb's shopfront and in the courtyard area, remaining in-situ over the coming months. This will serve as a lasting legacy of our collaboration with Doncaster Deaf Trust and long-term, a means for the ArtBomb team to monitor bird activity from our urban location. As a continuation of the wallpaper design project, pupils were invited to participate in a large-scale drawing & finger-painting activity in the Doncaster Unitarian Church hall, bodies sprawled on the floor around long streams of paper. The group also had the opportunity to experience the immersive camera obscura installed in one half of ArtBomb's shopfront, offering an insight into the history of the pinhole camera & the chance to see a subverted image of the street outside. Here's what the school had to say about the experience: We had a fantastic visit to ArtBomb in Doncaster last Friday as part of our collaboration with artist Matthew Humphreys. Pupils from across the school had the chance to see their own work exhibited alongside Matthew’s. This included Year 8 birdhouses and artwork created by pupils from KS1 to KS4 - such a proud moment for everyone involved! During the visit, pupils explored the exhibition and took part in creative activities like stencil printing and drawing, responding to the artwork in a fun and hands-on way. It was lovely to see pupils so engaged, inspired and proud of their work. A really special experience for all involved. A big thank you to ArtBomb and Matthew Humphreys for this opportunity! Head to Doncaster School for Deaf Children's Facebook page for more snaps from the school trip! Dark Chamber by Melissa Martin: Creative writing inside the camera obscura Building a walk-in camera obscura- something which Matthew had not initially planned to bring to the space, but an idea which came out of conversations with Mike Stubbs - is no small feat. The camera was designed to present an upside down image of the street outside. It did indeed do this, but under a set of specific conditions. To view the clearest image, the audience member was invited to step inside of the blacked-out room, take a seat on a chair or on the carpeted floor, and allow for at least 15 minutes to adjust their eyes to the darkness. Out of these more durational and functionally precarious conditions for a traditional walk-in camera obscura emerged an entirely different audience experience. People found that the blacked-out space, in combination with the conscious adjustment to darkness required to see the image, manifested an deeply meditative and sensory deprivation experience. Melissa Elaine Martin, a Hull-based yoga teacher and therapist, interpreted the camera obscura as a human-sized birdbox, establishing a novel connection between the wooden birdboxes exhibited on the interior and exterior of the ArtBomb building and the camera obscura. Out of Melissa's visit to the Tendresse exhibition emerged a new point of speculative enquiry: what might it feel like to be a bird nesting in a birdbox? What would that smell. sound, look and feel like? To explore this question, Melissa hosted a surrealist writing workshop on Saturday 18 April 2026. The 2 hour session for 8 creative writers, titled Dark Chamber, began with a guided sensory and sitting meditation in the camera obscura, followed by free writing exercise and a reading share. Melissa has since written a poem called Birdsong, which you can listen to via the video below!

RETHINKING MIGRATION COMMISSION Filming is taking place on 17-18 June 2026 during Refugee Week (15-22 June 2026) @ ArtBomb About the project My Home in Doncaster is a documentary film project by Darshan Gajjar exploring what it means to call Doncaster home. We're inviting people from all walks of life — whether you've lived here your whole life, moved here recently, come from a migrant background, are seeking asylum, or simply have a story to share. Participants will be invited to sit in a cosy living room setting, settle into a comfy armchair, enjoy a cup of tea, and take part in an informal filmed conversation about home, community, belonging, identity, and the experiences that shape our town. By bringing together a range of voices, we hope to celebrate both the differences and shared experiences that make Doncaster the place it is today. The project is a critical response to ArtBomb's Rethinking Migration commission, and aims to highlight both the differences and shared experiences that exist within Doncaster's communities, creating space for people to share their perspectives in their own words. By listening to stories from people of different backgrounds, histories, and experiences, we hope to encourage greater understanding of one another's lives and challenge assumptions about who belongs here. Ultimately, My Home in Doncaster is a celebration of the people who make up our town and a reminder that, despite our differences, we all share a common humanity. Want to get involved? We're looking for local residents to take part in the filming of My Home Doncaster. Filming will take place on 17 & 18 June at ArtBomb, Doncaster. Conversations will last approximately 30 minutes. Participants are warmly encouraged to bring along a small object that reminds them of home. This could be anything meaningful to you - a photograph, mug, book, piece of clothing, keepsake, or everyday item. Click here to book a slot or find out more, please email: admin@artbombuk.com Participant Wellbeing We recognise that conversations around home, belonging, migration, and identity can sometimes bring up difficult memories or experiences, including experiences of discrimination, racism, displacement, or loss. Our aim is to create a welcoming, respectful, and participant-led environment. Before filming begins, all participants will be informed that: You are welcome to share as much or as little as you feel comfortable sharing.• You do not have to answer any question you do not wish to answer. You may take a break at any time. You may stop the conversation at any point without explanation. There is no expectation to discuss traumatic experiences, migration journeys, or experiences of racism unless you choose to do so. The project is designed as an informal conversation over a cup of tea and biscuits, with the intention of creating a space where people feel heard, respected, and able to share their own experiences in their own way.

Thursday 16th April from 10am-4pm FREE ENTRY @ ArtBomb & Doncaster Unitarians ArtBomb is delighted to welcome you all to Beyond the Scroll, a day of conversation, live art interventions, film screenings and workshops exploring how socially engaged practice can reclaim focus and meaning in a digital age of distraction. Taking place on Thursday 16th April (10am–4pm), we're bringing together artists, activists and curious minds to offer a wide range of perspectives on the role that technology plays within contemporary arts practice and our everyday lives, and how this is shifting our understanding of what socially-engaged art practice is, or what it could be. With activities taking place throughout Doncaster Unitarian Church, ArtBomb's lab space and our courtyard—a hidden oasis in the heart of the city—you're invited to take the day at your own pace. Explore, debate and connect. We expect the forum to end around 4pm, after which you are invited to stay for our evening social, featuring live music performances and poetry readings. Here's a sneak peek into some of the wonderful people featuring in our programme! Jack Clarke HOST @clarkeofsalford Jack Clarke is a Producer, curator and cultural theorist from Kersal in Salford. Background across film exhibition making and socially engaged cultural practice. His work is rooted in Northern DIY traditions and focuses on working class history, community memory and political storytelling often developed within collaborative low budget and grassroots contexts. He has worked with Factory International as a Young Curator, Bury Art Museum as Moving Image Curator, and Working Class Movement Library through the Big Flame Project. He co-curated Keep The Flame Burning with 16–25 year old working class volunteers and produced and co-curated Nothing About Us Without Us the national Big Local Legacy exhibition. With bylines in Culture Matters, Savage Minds, Z Network & STAT Magazine, he writes against the grain of polite arts discourse pulling apart the language of institutions and academia with a mixture of humour frustration and refusal often fucking up the idea that legitimacy only comes through degrees funding or institutional approval. Eelyn Lee GUEST TALK @eelyn.lee.film Eelyn is an award-winning artist and filmmaker based in Sheffield who has exhibited across UK including Barbican, Tate Modern, National Portrait Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery as well as internationally in Paris, Berlin, Bogotá and Toronto. In 2021, Eelyn co-curated Parallel State, a speculative project responding to a provocation; “What Does a Northern Town Look Like in the Parallel State and what happens in it‘s public spaces?". 5 years later, Eelyn returns to ArtBomb to offer fresh provocations on what social art practice looks like in a place like Doncaster and more broadly, within today's digital culture. Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives SUBVERTISING DEMO @spellingmistakescostlives Darren Cullen is a satirical artist, illustrator and writer, born in Leeds to Irish immigrant parents and currently based in London. Cullen initially thought he wanted to go into advertising as a career, but became steadily horrified at the ethical implications of manipulating people's desires inherent to the industry. In May 2025, Darren transformed ArtBomb's shopfront space into a satirical estate agency on the Gaza strip, a razor sharp, anti-war assault on consumer culture. For ArtBomb, this installation—and the positive conversations it prompted with local residents—felt like a real turning point in the type of work we can present on a northern high street. For Beyond the Scroll, Darren Cullen (aka Spelling Mistakes Costs Lives) is hosting a ‘subvertising' demo. Using examples of his own ad hacks, Darren will guide you through simple ways to “hack" print adverts in real-world public spaces, and how disrupting consumer culture can begin by simply replacing ads with art. Shannon Chambers MEDITATION @flowwithshan Yoga & meditation teacher and founder of FLOW Studio in Doncaster, Shannon Chambers, invites you to “The Space Between Stimulus and Self". This 20-minute introspective meditation invites you to notice your patterns of attention, disconnect from digital stimulation, and reconnect with your inner world and senses. John Ledger & John Wright PERFORMANCE @jb_ledger @johnwrightretrobaruniverse Coming out of Straight A's, a 3-month immersive exhibition (17 Jan–11 April 2026) at the Cooper Gallery, bringing together 25 years of his work, Barnsley born artist John Ledger joins his long-time collaborator John Wright to perform Non-stop Inertia (I'm too busy to meet you). This performance-based text discussion illustrates the inability to stay with the trouble and the issue of burn out, followed by a short introduction to their collectives and how things have changed since their first performance of Non-Stop Inertia in 2015. Other art & activities to explore at Beyond the Scroll: Matthew Humphreys EXHIBITION @_mjhumphreys_ In Translation (in ArtBomb's lab space) Matt Redfern EXHIBITION @mattredfernart Complexities of the Broken Mind & the Broken Vases (church balcony) Terry Hudson INSTALLATION Little Anarchist Bookshop (in the courtyard) Sally Kindberg 1-2-1 INSTALLATION @skindbergia The Museum of Dust (main church hall) Mother Hookers CIC CRAFT TABLE @mother_hookers Local crochet social group, Mother Hookers, will be bringing along some of the collective's crochet creations & will be offering scrap materials to be repurposed for your own projects! Church of Ping Pong TABLE TENNIS Pick up a paddle and have a go at table tennis in the upper hall of the church. Church of Ping Pong host sessions here weekly every Monday and Thursday. Squiggle Gang CUSTOMISED SPRAY PAINTING (Pay What You Feel) Bring along a piece of clothing, tote bag or accessory to be custom spray-painted by local street art collective Squiggle Gang! Live music by a roster of local talent will soundtrack the event from day to night: The Skintones Anarcho-confusion band, a blend of reggae, funk, ska, trance, hip hop and ancient vibes, straight out of Doncaster. Olaniyan Olamide Olamide Sax (Olaniyan Olamide Phillips) is a professional vocalist and instrumentalist whose work spans gospel worship. African contemporary music, and cross-cultural repertoire performance. Bioni Samp Artist, producer & beekeeper will be bringing an array of mini synth instruments to take us into the Beyond the Scroll evening social. WHAT TO EXPECT As with all of ArtBomb's programming, we want to make this event as accessible and inclusive as possible. Please email jennie@artbomb.uk.com if there's a way we can make this event more accessible for you. The event is entirely free, including a hot lunch and drinks served throughout the day. Some activities are pay what you feel (please see above), and any donations made will be used to support ArtBomb in growing its creative community here in the heart of Doncaster. We're expecting around 80 guests to be joining us for Beyond the Scroll. There will be 2 dedicated quiet zones: one on the ground floor of the church and upstairs in the ArtBomb building, where there are comfortable couches and chairs. There are also benches and chairs in our outdoor courtyard area. Team members supporting the running of the event will be wearing coloured lanyards or badges. They will be on hand to offer support throughout the day. We will be serving a buffet-style vegetarian lunch in the rear room of the church. For anyone wanting to purchase their own food, there are several great spots within a 5 minute walk of ArtBomb: The Jazz Café 5-7 Printing Office St, Doncaster DN1 1TJ A cosy, colourful cafe with a great selection of sandwiches soups and other hot dishes. The Glass Strawberry 48-50 Printing Office St, Doncaster DN1 1TR A lunch spot with an extensive vegan menu Sterling Foods 118 French Gate, Doncaster DN1 1QQ A popular spot to grab a ready to eat lunch on the go – lots of options for a fiver, including jacket potatoes, wraps and hot sandwiches. The Wool Market Market Place, Doncaster DN1 1NG A modern market hall with a range of food vendors. GETTING HERE Address: Doncaster Unitarian & Free Christian Church, 60a Hall Gate DN1 3PB ArtBomb is located at 60 Hall Gate, Doncaster city-centre: a 10 minute walk from the train station. For anyone travelling by bus, please be aware that Doncaster services are expected to be disrupted by industrial action on 14th, 17th, 22nd and 24th April, and so may have an impact on services running on 16th April. If you have any questions about the event, please email admin@artbombuk.com

Written by Ian Walker as part of In Translation by Matthew Humphreys. This is a camera obscura, the name comes from the Latin and means ‘dark chamber' Step in and sit down. Turn off any phones you have, as the screen light will destroy the effect. Do not turn the screens on; to take photos. This is an experience, just enjoy it. Then use your words to tell your friends. This physical media, not AI slop for the algorithms. IMPORTANT First close your eyes for about five minutes to adapt to the dark. To fill the time I am going to tell you a story. Once Upon a Time… It is not a bedtime story so NO SNORING! As you will notice the camera obscura you are in: is a large black box; big enough to walk into, as they have been for hundreds of years; often as with this one it is just a curtained off part of a room, where light can on only come in through one small hole, on one side. In this case window of the gallery shop front into the street. On the opposite side to the small hole is a black stretched cloth: The viewing screen! This is a lensless camera obscura and is also referred to as a ‘pinhole camera’; you can make one with cereal box and a piece of tracing paper. Camera Obscura have been around for a long time probably right back into Prehistory in cave paintings and from that and sacred underground spaces, such as Göbeklitepe, as signs of divinity and the powers of priest, priestess and shaman. The earliest known written records of a pinhole image, is found in the Chinese text called Mozi, dated to around the 4th century BC western calendar, to a Chinese philosopher Mozi (c.470 BC—c.391 BC), a Chinese philosopher and the founder of Mohist School of Logic. This is earliest written record of light rays. Other philosophers expanded on this. From Aristotle onwards to Ptolomey and the Han Chinese polymath Shen Kuo. They were used to study sunspots and eclipses, without going blind. The Muslim physicist Ibn al-Haytham; one of the creators of the Scientific Method, critiqued Ptolemy's Almagest, Planetary Hypotheses, and Optics and after experiments inspired by Shen Kuo gave us the first modern scientific description of light rays creating the modern concept of optics used even to this day. Painters since the cave times had realised they could get accurate images by tracing them from images through a small crack on to a stretched skin in a cave or tent, such paintings would have made the painter seem magical. We know that after reading a translation of Ibn al-Haytham’s works Leonardo da Vinci started experimenting with camera obscura. In this lensless camera obscura as Ibn al-Haytham proved. If you follow the light ray path of the light reflected from the objects outside the camera obscura, you will see they result in a projected image of the scene outside the chamber on the viewing screen opposite to the hole, that is inverted and reversed. When you open your eyes as they adjust and your brain begins to process the image; the first thing you will notice on the bottom right of the viewing screen is a white oblong. That is the shopfront sign opposite, after a moment you will realise the road and path are at the top of the viewing screen and that the traffic is moving the wrong way on Hall Gate’s one way street and you notice people walking along the paths, they are actually moving in the opposite direction to what is projected on the screen. This then with the invention of lenses became more common in art and lead to discoveries about perspective and massive improvement in the quality of images in paintings that began in the Renaissance. Later in the 19th century Fox Talbot using Silver Nitrate to fix the images to glass plates invented the modern camera, but that is a whole other story.

Debut Solo Exhibition by Matt Redfern Saturday 4th April 2026 11am—6pm Doncaster Unitarian Church, Doncaster, DN1 3PB FREE Matt Redfern’s practice has developed through a combination of a part-time degree in painting and professional experience supporting individuals through challenging moments. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, his figurative practice explores male mental health through intense, narrative-driven imagery, balanced by colourful and visually engaging compositions. Influenced by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Peter Howson, Aly Helyer and Egon Schiele, Matt's work uses the male figure to convey emotional tension and psychological depth. A distinctive use of an ultramarine line is employed to define form and heighten mood, creating visual contrast within the work. Each piece presents an open-ended narrative, inviting interpretation and encouraging conversation around vulnerability, resilience, and the often-unspoken realities of male mental health. This exhibition, presented on the balcony of Doncaster Unitarian Church, brings these themes together in a direct and uncompromising exploration of emotional struggle, identity, and resilience from a male perspective. Through a series of figurative works, which present an honest reflection on lived experience, challenging traditional expectations of masculinity and the culture of silence that often surrounds it. The exhibition insists on attention rather than avoidance, using painting to confront stigma head-on and to invite empathy, understanding, and open engagement with men’s mental health. The exhibition will remain open until 16th April 2026, for a private viewing as part of ArtBomb's Beyond the Scroll forum event. If you would like to arrange a group visit or private viewing between 4th - 16th April 2026 please email admin@artbombuk.com Please note that the exhibition is only accessible via a staircase. Instagram: @mattredfernart

Launch Event: Friday 20th March 2026 (5pm-7pm) Exhibition Opening Dates: Friday 20th March– Sunday 26th April 2026 (open daily 10am-5pm) FREE In Translation is a new exhibition by London-based artist Matthew Humphreys exploring memory, family and the fragile ways we communicate and remember across time. The exhibition brings together five new works created from fragments of the artist’s personal archive – home videos, drawings and photographs more than twenty years old. Through film, installation and collaborative works with local students, Humphreys translates these fleeting moments into artworks that quietly explore care, loss and the ways memories are shaped by both technology and human touch. Central to the exhibition are the artist’s parents, Mervyn and Betty. In the film Tendresse (2026), they appear in intimate family footage, while Sweep (2026) retraces the artist’s father’s working life inside a factory where he once worked. Other works extend these personal stories into the public realm: bird boxes built with Doncaster Deaf Trust students are installed on the building, while a walk-in camera obscura invites visitors to experience the street outside in a new way. Humphreys, a Child of Deaf Adults (CODA), often explores communication beyond spoken language. In Translation invites audiences to slow down and experience memory through gesture, touch and image. Everyone is welcome to attend the launch event on Friday 20 March, 5–7pm. Words by Jennie Gilman It's 3pm on a Friday afternoon in Doncaster, and Matthew Humphreys is giving ArtBomb's shopfront a fresh lick of paint. “The paint is from a photograph of the last blue sky my father saw," explains Matthew, dipping a paintbrush into a freshly unlidded can of paint. Matthew has travelled up to Doncaster from London to start prepping for his forthcoming exhibition, In Translation. Earlier that day, Matthew had taken a digital photo of the final blue sky his father had seen to be developed at Boots in French Gate. He then took the photo to the local B&Q and had the sky colour-matched and developed into a bespoke paint. The shade is a vast, infinite blue. A blue that recalls those rare, long hot summer days spent playing out with mates during half term. Watching Matthew apply strokes of the paint to the wooden window trim, I almost get a whiff of sun cream, conjuring memories of family holidays, mum plastering yet another layer of SPF 50 onto my arms and legs before I scramble out of her hands to water bomb into the pool. These childhood moments, unlocked from somewhere in deep memory by this blue paint, make me think of family, of home and the ease of being a kid. It also reminds me of how much I seem to have forgotten from my childhood. I wonder if this is just an inevitable aspect of getting older, or in part due to too much partying. Perhaps it's because the Cloud promises to save decades worth of videos and photos somewhere in the digital realm, archiving a lifetime of memories so that my brain doesn't have to. I sometimes worry that my dependency on technology has damaged my ability to remember, an anxiety about what we might have lost to digital technology culturally echoed by the ongoing physical media trend. The retro revival of collecting CD's, DVD's and print zines seems to be an attempt to get to grips with who we are in the digital age through the objects we collect. But as Zarah McIntosh cautions in her analysis of physical media, this search for self perhaps risks a culture of over-consumption no different to the Stanley cup and Labubu doll hype. Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool. The Flares chain nightclub opposite ArtBomb, one of six branches in the UK promising a one-night hedonistic trip back to the 70's and 80's, has built its commercial success on it. Reform UK, who hold 37 seats on Doncaster's city council, have built their Trumpian campaigns on it, or at least a pseudo variety which makes people, disappointed with how things are today, long for a way of life which never really existed. Matthew's latest body of work, In Translation, takes an altogether different approach to memory, explored through gesture, touch, image-making and collaboration. He does so with a tenderness which throws the violence of nostalgia and miscommunication in a forgotten, post-industrial place like Doncaster into sharp new relief. In Translation consists of five new works, each a multimedia translation of ephemeral moments recovered from Matthew's personal archives that are over 20 years old, fragments of home videos, old drawings and stories distilled into visual artworks and released into the public sphere. Betty, in Tendresse (2026) At the heart of these works stand Matthew's parents, Mervyn and Betty, captured in Matthew's moving image work, Tendresse (2026). In other works, Matthew walks in the footsteps of his parents, retracing their movements with his own body. In a second moving image piece titled Sweep (2026), a cavernous factory is shot from a wide lens. Matthew steps into frame, wearing traditional dark blue overalls, sweeping sawdust from the factory floor where his father once worked. Matthew collected this sawdust, a by-product of the timber goods being made at the factory, and has repurposed it to fill the holes in ArtBomb's well-loved shopfront, faintly fragrancing the space with the warming smell of wood. This patched-up job on ArtBomb's facade is symbolic of Matthew's approach to art: seeking out the empty space that exists within our memories and filling these narrative gaps to create something new. This act of tracing someone else's steps as a form of remembering, of walking in someone else's shoes to feel the things that they once had, is echoed through Flock (2026), a bespoke wallpaper of bird drawings, traced and finger painted onto plain white wall lining paper by students from Doncaster Deaf Trust. I had the pleasure of accompanying Matthew on this trip to the school back in February 2026, one of the oldest deaf schools in the country now increasingly referred to as a “school of communication". Rolling out metres of plain paper spanning the width of the school hall, we invited students from different year groups to trace a selection of bird drawings from Matthew's father's portfolio of birds using pencils and carbon paper. Together, bodies sprawled on the floor, we traced and retraced and traced again Mervyn's robins, blue tits, magpies and house sparrows, birds native to Doncaster, forming a kind of human production line and enacting a somatic form of remembrance for Mervyn. This felt particularly resonant within the setting of the school hall, where Matthew's mum, as a student at the school 70 years ago had once performed in plays. Earlier that morning, Matthew invited Year 8's to build their own birdbox, using an AI-inferred design based on a timber birdbox—one of many which Mervyn would make using off-cuts from the factory- which Matthew spotted in the blurry background of a photo of himself and his brother sitting in the family garden, smiling in front of a white canvas tent. The collection of birdboxes, titled A Reprise for Birds (2026), are mounted onto the front of ArtBomb's building and in the courtyard area, providing new nesting places for Doncaster's native birds and speaking to the themes of migration being explored within ArtBomb's wider programming. Matthew is a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), and his work is largely inspired by the role that he had as a communicator and translator for his parents. Growing up in a Deaf household, Matthew would act as a mediator between his parents and the hearing world, communicating through a combination of BSL (British Sign Language), lip reading and spoken language. Deaf communication is highly visual and very physical, requiring a fluency in reading other people's body language and facial expressions, and at the most basic level, an ability to maintain eye contact when making conversation. In his work, Matthew exercises a flare for visual communication and an attunement to the quiet, fleeting moments which may otherwise get lost within an attention economy in which those who shout the loudest and dominate our screens the most are the ones that get heard and seen. Later in his life, Matthew's father developed blindness and Alzheimer's. When a person's capacity to see, hear or remember the world around them becomes less clear, touch becomes everything. The value of touch as a way to both create and experience art is communicated beautifully through Beyond the Visual, the UK’s first major sculpture exhibition in which blind and partially blind practitioners are central to the curatorial process, currently being shown at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. As someone who thinks and writes about art as part of their job, a question lingers in my mind after experiencing this exhibition: “How would you describe an artwork to someone who cannot see it?". This provocation is making me think differently about how to write about art without relying on ocularcentric language, instead considering how an artwork might feel, sound and smell. Matthew (right) and his brother (left). In the top right corner of the photograph, you can see the bird box which inspired A Reprise for Birds (2026) Matthew's approach, however, is slightly different. Mervyn's gradual loss of sight and memory prior to his passing in 2021 prompted Matthew, foremostly a filmmaker, to think deeply about the role of photography and video as a conduit for memory. Harnessing a range of analogue and digital cameras to produce the moving image works within In Translation, Matthew invites the audience to view the world through a kaleidoscopic, slightly blurry lens. He visually translates the world as his father might have experienced it: as non-linear fragments of beautiful, touching moments. The presence of loved ones helping Mervyn to navigate what could be a very disorienting world can be viscerally felt by the audience through the sheer devotion Matthew has committed in creating this body of work in his parent's honour. Encapsulating the artists' fascination with the mediating role played by technology in shaping the relationship between humans, memory and reality, Matthew has built a walk-in camera obscura entitled Staying with Light (2026), using the same techniques used to create the first camera 200 years ago and which will be installed in one half of the ArtBomb shop. ArtBomb's visitors are invited to step inside of the camera and see an upside down image of the street outside projected back to them. This rendering of Doncaster turned on its head is emblematic of the shift in perceptions of the city that we try to encourage at ArtBomb through our commissioning, inviting local audiences to see their environment in a slightly new way, or through a stranger's eyes. In a moment captured in Tendresse, Matthew can be seen guiding his father through the garden, heading out arm in arm to feel the warmth of the sun and fresh air outside. This moment, I think, captures the essence of In Translation: Matthew gently guiding the public through these incredibly personal, tender moments, moments translated into a silent poetry which reaches out into the high street and touches people, shifting something in them as they go about their everyday lives. List of Works A Reprise for Birds (2026) Reconstructed bird boxes from AI-inferred plans, student-built structures, timber, printed plans Flock (2026) Student traced stencil drawings, finger paint on paper, installation Sweep (2026) Single channel video Staying With Light (2026) Camera Obscura, Matt Emulsion Paint colour matched to final sky in Tenderesse, Sawdust from factory floor Tendresse (2026) Single Channel Video Links to Matthew's Work Website: mjhumphreys.com Instagram: @_mjhumphreys_

One-Day Symposium, Workshops & Evening Social Thursday 16 April 2026 10am–4pm, followed by evening social (4pm onwards) Doncaster Unitarian & Free Christian Church, 60a Hall Gate, Doncaster DN1 3PB FREE ENTRY ArtBomb invites artists, activists and the curious public to a day of talks, workshops and live interventions exploring how socially engaged practice can reclaim focus and meaning in an age of distraction. Taking place in ArtBomb’s high street hub — hosted in partnership with the Unitarian Church — Beyond the Scroll examines the double meaning of the “scroll” — sacred script and endless digital feed. Against a backdrop of algorithmic attention, anxiety and cultural noise, the forum asks how artists can interrupt habitual ways of seeing and speaking, and how creative practice can be genuinely of service. Building on recent commissions including Apartheid Apartments by Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives, and upcoming 2026 projects addressing homelessness and migration, the day brings together quick-fire provocations, open discussion and hands-on workshops in painting, zine-making and subvertising. The evening continues with film, spoken word, drinks, a private viewing of Matthew Humphreys' Tendresse exhibition in the ArtBomb shop and informal conversation. Themes include digital addiction, commodified attention, surveillance culture and the risks of “cultural welfarism.” Contributors will explore slow practice, critical digital literacy, hybrid spaces and art as shelter — strategies for sustaining care, agency and collective imagination beyond the feed. Working from a messy, mixed high street rather than a sealed cultural venue, ArtBomb insists on art as interference: negotiated in noise, grounded in place, and open to friction. Join us. Let’s go beyond the scroll. Spaces are limited, please email admin@artbombuk.com to reserve your spot! Messy Provocations: Art, Authenticity, and the Age of Endless Feeds By Mike Stubbs Let’s drop the polish and start with doubt. After the war, certainty felt dangerous. Science had already begun to loosen its own foundations — relativity bending time and space, quantum mechanics insisting the observer interferes with what is observed. Knowledge became provisional. Systems became relational. You couldn’t pretend to stand outside what you were measuring, and there seemed less time for simply being in life. Art moved in parallel. Post-war modern art practice dismantled orthodoxy because orthodoxy had proved lethal. Grand narratives — religious, political, aesthetic — had marched people into catastrophe. So artists fractured perspective, loosened authorship, displaced meaning from object to encounter. Deconstruction wasn’t fashion; it was structural scepticism — whether expressed through punk, hip hop, conceptualism or community action. It was a refusal to inherit belief without interrogation and the promise of democratised interaction. I grew up around that kind of scepticism. A science technician dad fascinated by modernity, wary of faith, suspicious of piety. At school I wanted to talk about evolution. I prodded at the edges of what was presented as obvious. It leaves you with a taste for the awkward, the experimental — and a suspicion of anything too neatly packaged. Which brings me to the scroll. The scroll used to be sacred text — doctrine, instruction, order. Now it’s the feed. Endless, algorithmic, persuasive. It scripts authenticity, packages outrage and joy, instrumentalises connection. It tells us how to perform ourselves. It feels fluid, but it’s another orthodoxy — softer, more seductive, a kind of cultural managerialism. ArtBomb sits awkwardly against that smoothness. We’re based in a shop on a busy mixed high street. Not picturesque. Wedged between vape shops with fluorescent signage, barbers with constant churn, bars pushing out the same playlist — “all night long, all night…” — delivery drivers idling, people shouting across the pavement. It’s messy, ordinary, sometimes abrasive. It’s also a place where people meet, argue, laugh, share common ground. ArtBomb, situated in a former estate agents on Hall Gate. To the right of the shop space is the entrance to Doncaster Unitarian Church (Image Credit: Matt Hass) Our landlord and partner is the Unitarian Church — historically a place dedicated to belief, dissent and radical thought. That history lingers. A site of sermon making space for creative and cultural experimentation. There’s nothing romantic about who comes in. Some step through the door out of curiosity. Some by accident. Some don’t come in at all but watch from the pavement. Plenty walk past without a glance. You’re competing with beer, disposable vapes, shifts at logistics hubs, Uber routes, racegoers, those without a regular place to sleep, people in transit. ArtBomb is situated in an in-between place. The city centre demographic shifts constantly; Doncaster has become, once again a market again, a destination for those priced out elsewhere or seeking accessible labour. One doesn’t get to curate that public — unless you want to live in a gated community. That’s precisely why it’s compelling. Argue with a Woman by Anouchka Grose, ArtBomb Festival 2025 (Image Credit: Matt Hass) The work we host — and the projects that spill into the street during the ArtBomb Festival such as Argue with a Woman by psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose — don’t float above the public realm; they rub against it. They interfere with the choreography of consumption and leisure. They introduce subjects that aren’t easily reduced to content. When Fiona Cahill brought Rendition into the shop, the focus was on extraordinary rendition — Irish state detention, disappearance of babies, the bureaucratic language that sanitises violence. Legal texts, redactions, testimony. In a church on a high street concerned with transactions. It wasn’t decorative; it was forensic. Apartheid Apartments confronted spatial segregation head-on — how housing policy and architecture encode racial and economic division. On a street in Doncaster where housing pressure is lived daily, global histories of apartheid collided with local realities. It wasn’t metaphor. It was structure made visible and immediately and uncannily presenting a double take on Gaza. The Bare Project explored care and food – sustenance distributed through a temporary and hyper local food distribution network and production space occupying the shop, this exemplifies many of the interventions which have experimented with the space as somewhere to take a risk and treat the shop as an artwork, in itself. Terry Hudson's The Little Anarchist Bookshop reintroduced the printed word into a site once structured around sermon, but without nostalgia. Shelves of anarchist theory, critiques of capitalism, histories of mutual aid and direct action. Kropotkin next to contemporary pamphlets. You could browse, argue, disagree, learn how to organise your own festival, make your own zine and program a Raspberry Pie and Linux. Political philosophy at street level, between vape advertising and bar promotions, a hack like Apartheid Apartment, but more friendly. These takeovers insisted on reflection, contemplation and curiosity — not as mood, but as method, slowing the tempo, asking for sustained looking in a culture trained for reaction. Deep engagement in that context isn’t cosy. It’s not just a tidy workshop with a sign-up sheet (though we also do that). It’s sustained presence in noise. It’s returning when turnout is thin. It’s listening to someone as interested in arguing as agreeing. It’s accepting that co-production is uneven and that power doesn’t dissolve because you’ve invited participation. The "Care" Trap: There is a risk that socially engaged art becomes a, "cultural welfarism" or "therapeutic" tool for institutions, focusing on superficial well-being rather than confronting systemic issues and looking at systemic causes of inequality, mental health and hardship - this demands addressing issues of class and owning politics for the common good long term. If quantum theory taught us that the observer alters the experiment, then a high street setting makes that alteration unavoidable. The street alters the work. The work alters the street — even if only slightly. The artist is implicated in the noise, the commerce, the tension of the place. Presidential Wheelbarrow by Chris Dobrowolski, ArtBomb Festival 2025 (Image Credit: Matt Hass) And all of this unfolds against broader instability. Since Trump, distortion has become tactic. “Fake news” operates strategically. Truth becomes performative and the work of The Yes Men, Maverick and Led by Donkeys essential in an era ICE raids and the global drift toward authoritarian postures, and shared reality feels under pressure. In that climate, authenticity is slippery. Disruption can be commodified. Engagement can be instrumentalised. Dissent can be branded, so provocation must be more than surface shock. On a high street like this, provocation might be as simple as holding space for complexity where everything else is immediate and transactional. Allowing disagreement rather than smoothing it over for optics. Acknowledging that some projects will fail to connect. Understanding that collaboration with others — artists, neighbours, institutions — is vital but never neutral. Socially engaged practice, at its strongest, builds situations slowly, through repetition and friction. It recognises that authorship is shared and therefore complicated. With this in mind, we are progressing our Oasis Garden, an outdoor project called "Stories Grow Here" that draws on our research and practice commissions: The Anti-Social Housing Agency by Ciara O’Rourke and Jack Clarke and Refugee Dreams by Angela Robson. The relationships developed will feed into new designs for the Unitarian courtyard, a secret urban garden hiding in plain sight on Hall Gate. Bringing together street art with an edible gardening scheme, we plan to develop a vibrant outside space for those who wander in through the gates to experience painting, music, film and conversation- an informal space for chance encounters and alternative forms of "community outreach". Beyond the Scroll isn’t about romanticising the street or imagining spontaneous awakening. It’s about choosing to work in friction. To occupy a site layered with belief — from Unitarian sermons to vape promotions — and test what art can do there. The inheritance from post-war doubt still holds: question the frame. Expose the structure. Accept instability and find new ways to counter anxiety, addiction and widespread issues with mental health. Let the work be messy. Let co-production tangle authorship. Don’t pretend it’s utopian. It’s negotiated in noise. Shaped by commerce. Interrupted by basslines and football chants. In a culture addicted to seamless feeds and controlled environments, there’s something quietly defiant about insisting on art as interference — in the middle of a loud, imperfect, very real street — and refusing to let the script, sacred or digital, have the final word so that conversation can resume and the small child (pictured in lead image above) gets a chance to make eye contact with the father on his phone.

We've won an award! On 28th October, ArtBomb was delighted to be invited to the UCDon Graduation Ceremony, to celebrate the achievements of Class of 2025 and to receive the University Campus Doncaster 2025 Community Award! This award recognises the contributions of local organisations that enrich and inspire the wider community. ArtBomb was awarded this year's Community Award for our positive impact on the city’s cultural life, by activating public spaces as hubs of conversation and experimentation through the ArtBomb Festival, and using our high street space to supporting artists at all stages of their careers. ArtBomb has become a dynamic platform for emerging artists, including many UCDon students, as well as a home for grassroots creative initiatives. Through street-art workshops, collaborative growing projects, and imaginative community programmes, ArtBomb fosters creativity, participation, and connection across Doncaster. Its open, exploratory environment invites people of all ages to experiment with new ideas and engage in meaningful artistic dialogue. Reflecting on why ArtBomb was shortlisted for a UCDon Community Award, BA (Hons) Fine Art & Craft Programme Leader Andrea Sutton noted: “Through their generosity, innovation, and unwavering passion, Mike and Jennie have created opportunities that genuinely transform the lives of our students. Their commitment to nurturing emerging talent and opening up space for creative risk-taking is leaving a lasting impact not only on our learners but on the cultural life of the wider city. We are incredibly grateful for their partnership and proud to celebrate the difference they continue to make.” Read the full article here.