Spring 2026: BSL Gallery Tour with Martin Glover (No Spoken English)

A tour designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing BSL users

Join us at HOME for an exclusive BSL tour of Nicola Ellis: Exercises in Knowing and Gabriel Kidd: I found the giant and he was dead

Presented by art guide Martin Glover, this is a BSL tour with no spoken English that is designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing BSL users.

Exhibitions of new large-scale sculpture by Nicola Ellis: Exercises in Knowing and Gabriel Kidd: I found the giant and he was dead, celebrate the work of two outstanding North-West based artists. Both practices express a reverence for materiality, the processes of production, natural evolution, and our cultural and social relationships to them.

What to Expect from the BSL Tour:

Martin will guide you to create connections, explore your own interpretation of the work, and challenge perceptions through engaging conversation.

Attendees are welcome to join Martin after the tour for an informal discussion in the café-bar.

Nicola Ellis: Exercises in Knowing

Ellis’ work is often created in response to contexts outside of traditional art environments, using discarded or overlooked materials, substances or subjects within industrial or

scientific contexts. By combining sculpted, found and digitally manipulated materials, she creates forms that retain the traces of their origins exploring their ecologies and legacies.

For this exhibition Exercises in Knowing, Ellis will create three new bodies of work that extend her ongoing collaboration with the steel enclosure manufacturer Ritherdon & Co in Darwen, Lancashire. This work explores how we relate to industry, materials, and labour, highlighting the role of sensory and tacit knowledge in these relationships, as well as the ways such knowledge is communicated.

Gabriel Kidd: I found the giant and he was dead

Through sculpture, drawing, sound, and writing, Kidd’s work utilises queer tactics of parody, fluidity and vitality, to explore mythology, ecology and history.

In this exhibition, Kidd’s first institutional solo show, they have created an immersive work of figurative and sound pieces inspired by local folktale, landscape, erosion, and medieval notions of time. Naturally dyed silk (with weeds, wayside trees or healing herbs), whittled pine arrows, poured/cast latex skin and eggs, and Kozo paper architectural forms are painstakingly crafted and stitched together with mass produced sequins or acrylic nails. In a series of vignettes, emotionally suggestive human forms appear in the ruined remains of a hilltop domestic dwelling.