Common Ground

Common Ground brings together new and previously unseen work — painting, textile, sculpture and audio — around the resilience and shifting identity of working-class communities in Britain and beyond, and Holman’s habit of setting traditional craft against industrial production.

The exhibition is curated by Hope Gallegos and shaped by something the two of them found they shared: both are the children of military fathers. That unlikely common ground became the premise of the show, and the route by which Gallegos reads Northern England’s industrial heritage as a story of community, transformation and inherited strength.

It unfolds across the three floors of Saan1, each given over to a different register of Northern identity — from pub culture and the public street to civic power and governance.