Jamie Holman ‘Contagious Acts’ Launches at The Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery
A brand new, free exhibition by acclaimed artist, Jamie Holman, is set to launch at local museum and art gallery
Contagious Acts is a brand-new exhibition by acclaimed artist, Jamie Holman, which is set to open at The Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery on Friday 28th February 2025 and will run until Sunday 1st June 2025.
To celebrate the launch, Holman will hold an exhibition preview event on Friday 28th February (6PM – 9PM) at The Whitaker.Prior to the preview event, The Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery will hold a free public installation event on Wednesday 26th February (10AM – 3PM). This immersive public installation will ask the public to fill gallery space with marbles to make up part of the Contagious Acts exhibition.
Contagious Acts interrogates the heritage, rituals and aesthetics of gathering—whether on the medieval battlefield, the dance floor, the factory floor, or the football stadium. These spaces remain battlegrounds of power and protest while also functioning as sites of cultural production and resistance.
A timely exhibition; Holman explores the intertwined histories of class, governance, and the politics of collective gatherings—across the two fundamental spheres of working-class experience: Labour and Leisure or Work and Play. Connecting a heritage of English subjugation; to its ongoing state in the present.
Drawing from an unlikely collision of cultural references, in Contagious Acts, Holman seamlessly bridges medieval art history with contemporary iconography, where record sleeves and song titles hold equal significance to illuminated manuscripts, tapestry, and post-Reformation painting.
The works in this exhibition are primarily a response to the Whitaker collection, but include works made with communities in Pakistan, Rossendale, China and across East Lancashire.
The gallery works across The Whitaker are narrated by alternative historic chronologies that are performed by Christopher Eccleston and Rawtenstall native, Jane Horrocks, who will attend the public opening on the 28th.
Artist, Jamie Holman, said: “Having the space and support to realise this work at The Whitaker is important—not just for me, but for how Lancashire is seen in the cultural landscape. It proves that ambitious, challenging contemporary art can emerge from places like this.”
Creative Director of The Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery, Gaynor Seville, said: “It has been a pleasure to work with Jamie Holman on this ambitious and important cross site exhibition. It is a culmination of several years’ work and brings together a range of artistic processes and outcomes, experienced throughout the museum. Jamie worked closely with our collections and has animated and shed new light on these, and shown how contemporary art can give us new perspectives on how we view our histories, and our place in this ever-changing cycle of ‘resistance’.”
Holman’s work is multi-disciplinary and is often fabricated using industrial processes or with heritage crafts makers and artisans.
His works have been acquired by The Government Art Collection, Manchester Museum, Soho House and Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery. Jamie Holman is represented by The Second Act.
