June Newsletter: we have been awandering

Post-strawberry moon and summer solstice tidings ~

Jun 30, 2025

We hope you celebrated this year’s longest day with gentleness and care, even amidst the raging world.

June has been a month of connections and adventures for us, with our regular coverage of exhibitions across the North and Midlands of England, and even a little writerly foray to Scotland, so keep reading to journey with us!

Some of the Corridor8 team at Primary, Nottingham. Photo by Kevin Hunt.

We thoroughly delighted in holding our annual team away day at Primary in Nottingham this year, who were kind enough to donate use of their sunny meeting room so we could catch up, meet the newest members of the team in person and hatch some grand new plans and announcements (watch this space). Beautiful building, excellent people, enticing art, delicious food and miraculous coffee, and we even had the pleasures of a performance by Jaap Blonk in the evening. 10/10 will definitely recommend!

Up in the North West we also revelled at the return of Liverpool Biennial and the many treats it has on offer — keep your eyes peeled for our forthcoming article on ‘HERE WE ARE’ (2025), the new film by Elizabeth Price on show at The Black-E as part of the festival.

The last iteration of the Biennial was the catalyst for one of our first ever paid Substack posts, which means we’ve been publishing here for nearly two years! As well as supporting our Substack articles, your paid subscriptions also enable our independent commissioning strand over on the main site, like Bob Dickinson’s review of Air Gallery’s Dis/Connect and Mia Stoces-Brown’s article on Monster Truck at CBS — subscribing will help us continue to cover artist-led and grassroots projects around the North and Midlands.

This month we also published a remarkable text by artist, filmmaker and writer Eloise Oui, responding to Emily Speed’s Women in Print Residency at Artlab Contemporary Print Studios in Preston. A dreamy, inventive and inquisitive piece that explores ‘how architecture moulds the body and how the body shapes architectural form, in a continuous exchange of movement and meaning. In Speed’s world, buildings do not hold us upright – they bend, they reach, they embrace, they trap, they fail the bodies they’re made for…’ Read it here:

Subscribe to read our new article by Peter Mitchell.

“I like the little head you sent verry much”: Encountering the encounters in the archive of the Natural History Society of Northumbria

Lesley Guy and Corridor8

Jun 30

“I like the little head you sent verry much”: Encountering the encounters in the archive of the Natural History Society of Northumbria

Archives, if you spend long enough in them, have a fantastic effect of bending history around their own gravity. I did research for years in the archive of the East India Company and the India Office, and I learned very little about South Asia but an awful lot about administrative deskwork: I began to conceive of the British empire as an immense network of rooms, candlelit or shaded from a punishing sun, in which men sweated or shivered over the scratching of their pens while violence happened invisibly somewhere nearby. Working on an oral history archive about the NHS, I got to realise that if you want to understand a British person’s most intimate relationship with the state, or parse how the politics of hatred latch on to the soft underbelly of people’s most private vulnerabilities, or properly understand a prisoner’s experience of incarceration, you should talk to them for three hours about their health. Now I work in the archive of the Natural History Society of Northumbria (NHSN), so my entire sense of the past two centuries of the North East’s history is filtered through drawings of birds and flowers, dissection diagrams, daguerrotypes of trees, and minutes of meetings where heavily-whiskered prosperous men displayed the skeletons of extinct creatures to each other. This isn’t at all a bad thing.

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