The National Festival of Making, including the Art in Manufacturing programme, returns to Blackburn on 4-5 July, bringing a celebratory and immersive programme that combines art, manufacturing, film and screen, making and communities.
Art in Manufacturing pairs artists with manufacturers and spaces of making across Lancashire and beyond. Collaborative residencies lead to groundbreaking installations, films and participatory experiences presented throughout the weekend.
The 2026 Art in Manufacturing partnerships are:
- Multidisciplinary artist, painter and baker Abigail Hampsey is presenting new film, sculpture and paintings that will trace rituals of production and preservation, from breadmaking to beekeeping, positioning these as acts of cultural and sociological preservation. Alongside her artistic practice, Abigail is also a skilled artisan baker, and in many ways these two areas of her making practice – baking and art making – are uniquely intertwined.
- Through working with the automotive industry to explore how modifying cars influences culture and identity in working-class communities, artist Alina Akbar (who recently won the inaugural Football Art Prize) has created a new sound work heavily influenced by northern bassline, which becomes a score that celebrates a subculture that is deeply creative but rarely represented in contemporary art.
- Matter at hand, the design practice of Lewis Jones, Co-founder of Turner Prize-winning architecture and design collective Assemble, is developing an experimental approach to earth-based construction through a two-year collaboration with Darwen Terracotta, the UK’s largest manufacturer of architectural terracotta and faience. Across two sites, Lewis will be exhibiting new architectural models as well as workshops exploring place, community, land and architecture as part of new project partnership between the National Festival of Making and The Super Slow Way.
- Penelope Payne, artist, shares hidden stories of philanthropy and social mobility and an unexpected connection between Accrington and Tiffany Studios in New York in new installation Canon, a co-commission with Haworth Art Gallery in Accrington. Canon draws on the lives of siblings William and Anne Haworth, who gifted the house, gardens and art collection to the people of Accrington in the early twentieth century.
Developed through research inside the house itself, Payne’s installation which combines sculpture, sound and architectural intervention to reimagine the emotional life of the house, centres on the Billiard Room — a space through which servants, family members and visitors once moved alongside one another — and the traces of care, labour, class and social aspiration embedded within it.
Held annually in Blackburn, Lancashire since 2017, the National Festival of Making is a celebration of making in all its forms — from the kitchen table to the factory floor. The free weekend festival attracts over 40,000 visitors and features more than 150 artists and makers across 25+ venues, bringing together contemporary art, craft, performance, design, manufacturing, and communities through a dynamic town-centre programme of exhibitions, workshops, talks, markets and installations.
Manufacturing accounts for up to 18.7% of Lancashire’s total economic output, double the national UK average and employs over 80,000 people; roughly 13% of Lancashire’s total workforce. The Festival is just one part of the wider effort to revitalise Blackburn as a town of cultural production, not just consumption.
Since 2017, Art in Manufacturing has partnered with more than 26 factories and manufacturers including Cardboard Box Company, Cookson & Clegg, Crown Paints, Darwen Terracotta & Faience, Forbo, John Lewis & Partners Textiles Factory, The Making Rooms, Standfast & Barracks.
To date, Art in Manufacturing has commissioned in excess of 35 artists to create exceptional artworks, made collaboratively with workforce communities. The residency programme facilitates access to cutting-edge technologies and unearths hidden heritages – all resulting in remarkable, contemporary artworks. Full programme details are available here.
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