Image: Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
Castlefield Gallery in Manchester will present ‘Supermedium: Kelan Andrews and Petra Szemán’ from 11 October 2026 to 31 January 2027, bringing new commissions and existing works by the two artists into dialogue with material from the Cosgrove Hall Films Archive. The exhibition will span stop-motion animation, sculpture, video, digital animation, augmented reality and animatronics.
The presentation takes its title from a term used by theorist Debora Levitt to describe animation’s expanded role across contemporary culture. At Castlefield Gallery, the format will connect analogue processes and digital technologies, examining how animated worlds are made and how the boundaries between representation, creation and reality have shifted. The gallery describes the exhibition as a conversation between animation’s past, present and future.
Archive material from Cosgrove Hall, the Manchester studio associated with hand-drawn and stop-motion productions, will include items connected to ‘Danger Mouse’ (1981–92), ‘The BFG’ (1989), ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (1983–90) and ‘Postman Pat’ (2004–08). The new works by Andrews and Szemán have been developed in dialogue with the archive, placing contemporary approaches to moving image and constructed worlds alongside objects from British animation history.
Andrews will show life-size animatronics and new stop-motion works addressing aspects of lived experience, including mundane daily routines and living with chronic illness. The artist’s sculptural works incorporate recordings of his parents’ voices, sections of a model railway and an unwanted vending machine from his workplace. The gallery identifies the vending machine’s unilluminated window, which reflected Andrews as he waited for work, as part of a wider set of connections between mirrors, screens and windows—places where identities, bodies and worlds meet and are manipulated.
Szemán is known for video works featuring a digital avatar moving through combinations of real-world footage and animated environments. Their ‘Anime Pilgrimages’ visit real locations that appear in animated films and television programmes. For ‘Supermedium’, Szemán will introduce sculptural elements on a larger scale, combining video with ceramics and large hand-painted transparent screens. These screens reference the celluloid layers traditionally used by animators for backgrounds, characters and foreground objects; visitors will be able to move between them, changing how the imagery aligns from their position.
Castlefield Gallery, an organisation focused on contemporary art and artist development in Greater Manchester, will also host a free tour and discussion on 10 October from 2pm to 3pm, the day before the exhibition opens. Rosy Whittemore, curator and archivist of the Cosgrove Hall Films Archive, and Matthew Pendergast, the gallery’s head of programmes, will lead the event as part of Art History Festival 2026, organised by the Association for Art History. A preview is scheduled for 8 October, from 6pm to 8pm, with a quieter preview on 10 October from noon to 5:30pm. The exhibition will be free to visit at Castlefield Gallery, 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, during Wednesday-to-Sunday opening hours.
