Art in Manufacturing is the headline commissioning programme of the National Festival of Making.
From artisan makers to some of the UK’s leading manufacturers, artists enter into dialogue with spaces of making and create new work with and alongside skilled workforces and making communities.
This season, we welcome three new artists to the Art in Manufacturing programme, alongside the continuation of a two-year residency between Matter at hand and Darwen Terracotta.
These collaborations will come together with a series of new installations, films and participatory experiences at the National Festival of Making on 4-5 July 2026.
Abigail Hampsey is a multidisciplinary artist, painter, and baker. Born in Lancaster, she gained a first-class honours degree in Fine Art from Newcastle University in 2019. After being awarded the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award in Painting (2020–22), she completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.
Alongside her artistic practice, Abigail Hampsey is a business owner, baker and market trader. Carving out an artistic practice in the North of England as a working-class woman, her studio has no threshold, seeing no delineation between the types of places or spaces in which her work can be made. Her process is fluid, fundamentally shaped by her lived experience of daily life. Her paintings reflect a lived reality rooted in the outdoors, a rural upbringing, and a slowly urbanising environment. While somewhat autobiographical, her work often references imagery from the art historical canon, drawing on allegory and archetypal narratives. Abigail has a deep interest in indexical language, modes of display and object associations, seeing academic as well as whimsical language as equal modes of communication.
Hampsey has taught at both Newcastle University and Lancaster, and has exhibited across the UK with Liminal Gallery (Margate), Abingdon Studios (Blackpool), Workplace Gallery (London), and the Saatchi Gallery, as well as internationally with Monti 8 in Rome and in Rotterdam. She became the first recipient of the Rebecca Scott Award, spending three months at The British School at Rome.
Hampsey will work with smaller scales of industry through a network of artisan food producers and within her own Lancaster-based bakery and studio.
The work will trace the rhythms and rituals of production and preservation, from breadmaking to beekeeping, positioning these acts as forms of cultural and sociological forms of preservation through the literal act of consumption (eating) to knowledge sharing and elementally driven food preservation techniques.
This project is a Co-Commission with Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council and University of Lancashire.
Alina Akbar is a Manchester based Visual Artist and Storyteller working across film, photography and spatial installation. Her practice is rooted in both personal and collective experience, often developed through conversation, collaboration, and being chronically online. She intuitively detangles the complexities of working-class representation and questions of diversity, amplified through a cinematic eye that captures raw reality intertwined with poetic narratives.
Akbar’s recent work expands beyond the screen into immersive environments, using spatial installation and sound to explore how stories are held, shared, and felt within physical space. Through layered audio, objects, and site-responsive interventions, she creates atmospheres that mirror lived experience. Blurring the boundaries between memory, myth, and everyday life. Her work bridges worlds that rarely meet, inviting audiences into her lived experience of class divide through street documentation and the archiving of cultural moments.
Her work has been shown at The Whitworth, Touchstones Rochdale, Harlesden High Street, Aviva Studios, and Victoria and Albert Museum Late. Her most recent film Pardesi Raga is a permanent part of the Manchester Museum South Asia Gallery, commissioned for its project space, and was also featured in the CIRCA Art Prize 2024, with screenings across London, Milan, and Berlin.
Akbar will work with the car manufacturing sector and motor vehicle making industries that exist in local industrial units, framing small scale, behind-the-shutters garages as contemporary artisans, operating in dialogue with the visual language of luxury and aspiration within working class contexts.
Through moving image and sound composition, the commission will explore autonomy and resistance expressed within the cultural and aesthetic modification of manufactured objects.
This project is a Co-Commission with Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council and University of Lancashire.
Matter at hand is the design practice of Lewis Jones, a designer working across architecture, material science and hands-on construction. His work is rooted in an investigation of the materials and processes that shape our built environment. Through deep material research and hands-on experimentation, he works with waste, industrial by-products, and natural resources to develop more resourceful and equitable ways of building. Lewis has a background in architectural practice and material production, co-founding the Turner Prize-winning architecture collective Assemble and the design-led ceramics manufacturer Granby Workshop. He is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University, where his teaching and research explore material reinvention and re-use. Across research and design practice, Jones explores how inventive and unexpected solutions to the problems at hand can be found in a deeper understanding of the materials and resources around us.
Jones began his Art in Manufacturing commission in 2024 and this year sees the development of his ongoing work, Poured Earth. Over the last 18 months, he has been developing earth building techniques that draw on Darwen Terracotta’s expertise in casting liquid clay, presenting a field of architectural and material experiments at Blackburn Cathedral as part of the National Festival of Making programme in 2025. The ambition of Poured Earth continues to grow; Jones is developing new work for Art in Manufacturing Season 8, as well as exploring a longer-term collaboration between Matter at hand, the National Festival of Making, Darwen Terracotta and new project partners, The Super Slow Way through their Linear Park project.
Darwen Terracotta is a leading manufacturer of architectural terracotta and faience, specialising in both historic restoration and new-build projects. A double winner at the Red Rose Awards 2025 for the “Made in Lancashire” and “Export” categories, Darwen Terracotta continues to showcase the excellence of British manufacturing on a global stage by blending traditional techniques with modern design.
This is the fourth Art in Manufacturing residency hosted by the industry leaders, who have supplied products to international artists including Grasyon Perry’s A House for Essex, and Richard Deacon. They have been involved in prestigious architectural projects internationally, from the Natural History Museum and the Royal Albert Hall to The Londoner at Leicester Square.
The Super Slow Way is an arts programme based in East Lancashire shaped by the local community working alongside artists. Founded in 2015 as one of Arts Council England’s Creative People & Places projects, it supports people who have little or no experience of the traditionally subsidised arts sector to weave the fabric of a future cultural landscape in Pennine Lancashire along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal Corridor using its rich assets of environment, heritage, and community.
Penelope Payne’s artistic practice is rooted in the exploration of social history. She explores female narratives, particularly the often overlooked and unrecorded stories of the working class and ‘women’s work’. From her studio in Cullercoats, North Tyneside, she creates sculptural pieces, site-specific installations, and performative moments. Works are often situated within non-gallery settings using the history of place to layer the work with significance. She has been the curator of the North East Open Call since 2023.
Payne’s Horizons Performance (2022) explored the female condition through the lens of place with a historical representation of the fish wife community. Filmed on Cullercoats Beach, the work features over 60 volunteers who, at sunrise, obscure the horizon with hand-sewn banners. The performance became a significant moment in the history of Cullercoats. It was covered by the BBC and went on to be featured on Bloomberg Connects and as part of the National Gallery lecture programme. The banners were integrated into Sonia’s Boyce’s work In The Castle of My Skin, MIMA and at The Factory, Iceland.
A Grade II listed building, Haworth Art Gallery is a country style Arts and Crafts house.
The gallery is best known for its collection of Tiffany Glass, and also houses a permanent collection of fine art and hosts a range of temporary exhibitions throughout the year.
Haworth Art Gallery, in Accrington, is itself a place of making, with a history connected to cotton manufacturing and a unique connection to Tiffany Glass. In response to time spent at the Gallery and in conversation with the team, volunteers and Youth Panel, the artist will present a new contemporary work that uses the historic domestic setting as a lens to explore how personal stories, social structures and inherited values continue to shape one another over time. The work will be exhibited at the National Festival of Making in July and at Haworth Art Gallery in August.
This project is a Co-Commission with Haworth Art Gallery.
National Festival of Making is supported by Arts Council England, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, Brian Mercer Trust and Foundations and Partners. This project is part-funded by the UK government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
