Designed by artists Especially for you

Based on Abingdon Street, above Blackpool’s vibrant market, Abingdon Studios is the only contemporary visual arts studio in the town – a centre for talent development with 10 studios and a dedicated project space. Its directors are Garth Gratrix – a Blackpool based artist and curator and one of the art commissioners for the work in Art B&B – and Tom Ireland – who also founded the long-standing and influential visual arts programme Supercollider and works at The Grundy Art Gallery, a stones throw from Art B&B on Queen Street. A slice of Abingdon Studios can be found in Art B&B’s Reading Room.

The artist behind Art B&B’s Moon Room, Blackpool-based Adrian Pritchard’s work has a significant interest in physics and a scientific approach. His pieces often attempt to redefine our relationship with matter by using gravity. Just as a research scientist sets up the parameters of an experiment, he sets up the ground upon which the interaction of self-regarding man and nature can take place, and the resulting work moves from matter to metaphor.

Andy Hazell is a talented maker of large-scale metal and mechanical installations as well as detailed automata, filmmaking and photography. Paying homage to the traditional B&B fry up, his two-metre powder coated backlit aluminium Fried Egg sculpture features a blown yellow perspex yolk and is flung against the rear exterior wall of Art B&B.

Augusto Corrieri is a performance artist, writer, academic researcher (and magician!) working at the crossroads of performance art, dance and ecology. He spent a lot of time in his youth training in sleight of hand magic and has worked and performed across Europe and the UK. His magician alter-ego is Vincent Gambini.

Catherine Mugonyi, the artist behind The Cinema Room, is a founder-director of Aunty Social, a community arts organisation that gives people opportunities to develop their creativity, learn new skills and connect with others. You can find Aunty’s shop and workshop space at 28 Topping Street. She also co-founded and runs Blackpool Film Festival. A long-time resident of Blackpool, Mugonyi specialises in organising and co-producing projects that strengthen and empower marginalised communities through social justice, local history and the arts. She is a trustee of Creative Lives and a member of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, North Committee.

Catherine Peters is a designer and Claire Griffiths is a photographer – both based in Blackpool and the pairing behind Art B&B’s Badge Room. Griffiths photographs a variety of Blackpool subjects including a series on Blackpool’s Retired Performers and Blackpool’s civic architecture alongside a group of learning disabled photographers. Catherine Peters is a neighbourhood producer for socially-engaged arts organisation LeftCoast and creative director of Mint and Mamma. Read about Claire Griffiths’ work exploring Blackpool’s civic architecture on Blackpool Social Club.

Christopher Samuel is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Leicester. The context of his practice is rooted in identity politics.  He seeks to interrogate his own understanding of the factors that play a role in our identity and how they contribute to the way we act and feel as a person or a collective. He explores universal themes that arise from an analysis of the psychological dynamics of relationships and how people interact with each other.

Designed by Marisa Carnesky, this evocative and spacious room is adorned with showgirl and show woman-inspired ephemera including pieces of costume and artefacts that embody the experiences of women performers, past and present. Through montages of imagery, collections of objects and oral history recordings, Carnesky’s room tells the story of minority women performers who have appeared in Blackpool shows, and the politics that surrounded them. There is an installation of four telephones which tell the stories of Blackpool’s palaces of entertainment and the women who made them come alive from the 1950s to the present day.

A socially-engaged artist with a background in architecture, Helen Stratford uses workshops, site-specific interventions and video-works to question and expand what we think of as conventional architecture. Her work challenges how urban and rural spaces designed by city planners, authorities and architects can be changed through informal occupations or actions. You can stay in The Life Room at Art B&B to get up close with her work.

Hunt & Darton is a Live Art Collaboration between Jenny Hunt and Holly Darton. The pair work across mediums with a sculptural approach to performance, choreographing words and movement in a sensory way and setting up alternative spaces. The have created a series of handmade motivational flags to adorn the walls of our cafe bar – each contains a comedic slogan to motivate, inspire and encourage people to get through the day.

Jenny Gaskell works in Manchester as an artist and a producer of contemporary performance. Lisa Mattocks is a creative technologist and freelance artist with experience in theatre production, performance and project management. The two of them form The Future – as an artist-centred development collective driven by activism and a desire to support artists ethically, and the duo behind Art B&B’s Comfortable Room.

Jenny Steele is a Scottish artist based in Manchester whose work references coastal inter-war architecture and design. Jenny is interested in the permanence of architecture, and in particular how inter-war period design embodied a utopian hope for the future. In the coastal context she sometimes refers to this style as Seaside Moderne – where modernism and Art Deco coalesce in architecture of pleasure and leisure. 'The Sea Front' is a bespoke carpet in the main entrance, stairs, and upper corridors of Art B&B. It features motifs from the exterior and interior of Blackpool Casino and Pleasure Beach’s iconic red wheel, the Winter Gardens’ exterior half-moon windows and the Tower Ballroom’s stage steps. They form a semi-abstract repeat patterned Axminster carpet, manufactured by North of England-based carpet Gaskell & McKay, who Steele worked closely with to interpret the design.

Jez Dolan is a Manchester based artist whose practice explores sexuality, queerness, identity and memory with a specific focus on the codification of language. These interests are expressed in a range of mediums including, drawing, installation, printmaking and performance, and in Art B&B’s The Purple Room.

Keeley Bentley is a fine art photographer and lecturer based in Blackpool who draws influences from vintage films, adverts and her own family’s archive which is built on a foundation of strong independent women who have lived in Blackpool for over 90 years. Titled ‘The Vegas of the North,’ her photographic works are displayed in lightboxes on the ground floor of Art B&B.

Kristina Veasey, whose The Secret Room is hidden within Art B&B, is a visual artist who likes to flip negatives into positives and find beauty in the mundane. She is drawn to the things most people pass by and is interested in detail. She was also part of Britain's wheelchair basketball team at the Paralympics in 2000 and 2004 and some of her work is influenced by the barriers she faces as a disabled person.

Lisa Wigham from Two AM Press makes work that creatively plays with language and typography and uses creative writing to compose thought-provoking art interventions. She has created the hotel’s bespoke front window signage to engage passers-by, and ‘a suite’ of hand painted poetic messages inside the hotel that explore where Blackpool exists in people’s imaginations. She has collected lettering styles and motifs – from jaunty ‘60’s Illuminations posters to remnants of elegant Edwardian gilded shop windows and integrated them into her hand painted signs using traditional gold leaf signage techniques. The mirrors on either side of the foyer were found in the attic of the Ocean Hotel (now Art B&B) and were originally dressing table mirrors in guest rooms in the 1940s.

A Glasgow-based artist originally from Sweden, Louise Ahl creates both solo and collaborative multi-art-form pieces under the guise of Ultimate Dancer. Her work centres around the metaphysical and mystical, utilising movement, voice, light, sonics and language. Her artistic outputs are often trippy, colourful and idiosyncratic performances with meditative qualities that have been distilled in Art B&B’s Soundscape Room.

Little is known about the French artist-activists collective known as Lumiere, after the famous French brothers who developed the early cinématographe machine (from which cinema takes its name). Their practice revolves around curating films which distil the essence of a particular time and place. They have created the Cinéma de Danse room for Art B&B.

With a background in visual design and working with wood, paint and other materials, Mark McClure – the artist behind The McClure Room – collaborates with interior designers, architects and public bodies to bring his bold, geometric works alive in both private and public spaces. His work builds on the idea of a graphic landscape, drawing on the structural shapes of the built environment and combining them with graphic motifs such as signage, letterforms, chevrons and other markings. The result is his own unique distilled visual language.

Mark Titchner is an artist living and working in London and was a nominee for the Turner prize in 2006. His work explores the tensions between the different belief systems that inform our society, be they religious, scientific or political. Focusing on an exploration of words and language, his work is often based in the public realm but can also be found in Art B&B’s Room of Plenty and Progress.

Mel Brimfield’s energetic collaborative work intersects live art, theatre and moving image. Her wide-ranging multimedia works draw on photography, experimental theatre, writing and painting to build alternative realities, often using fake documents and records to bring to life a fictional universe populated by her performances and collaborations with other artists. The Willy Little Suite is her invention for Art B&B.

Specialising in site-specific sculpture and installations, Noah Rose’s work is fundamentally interested in investigating the nature of what defines a place and its specific qualities within a geographical, cultural and socio-historical context. Peep Fiction is his innovative room installation for Art B&B.

A trans disciplinary artist whose work centres around a queer disabled perspective on the fragility of the body, Romily Alice Walden’s ‘Remedial Geologies IV’ is a series of light art works depicting natural rock formations in clear glass and noble gases displayed in the events space of Art B&B. The work was inspired by a rock formation in North Wales – an area that can be seen from the Blackpool coast. The work seeks to explore the link between natural landscape and wellness.

Tim Etchells, the artist behind Now You See It…, uses strong, simple, sometimes comical means to get to serious ideas. He is an artist and writer based in the north, whose work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. He is the leader of the world-renowned Sheffield-based performance group Forced Entertainment and collaborates with a range of visual artists, choreographers and photographers.

Tina Dempsey is a Blackpool-based artist whose work examines sorrow and joy, exploring what triggers them and how they affect us. Her work incorporates humour, honesty, reality and the ridiculous. Dempsey’s Art B&B installation is a series of painted wooden shapes that aim to generate a sense of joy and excitement through the use of colour, pattern and form, creating a feeling of movement and play throughout the atrium spaces on the second floor.