Interviews with Artists
Joe O’Rourke
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Interview by Chris Alton
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Published in May 2026
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In early-spring 2026, I travelled to Levenshulme in South Manchester to visit the studio of Joe O’Rourke; ahead of his forthcoming solo exhibitions at Pipeline (4 June - 25 July 2026) and Castlefield Gallery (30 July - 30 August 2026). I’ve known Joe’s work for over 6 years and used to have a studio in the same building. He is one of the most prolific artists that I know and I’ve often envied his energetic and intuitive making process. The following conversation took place surrounded by new and old works, which spilled out of his studio and into the adjoining gallery.
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Joe O’Rourke in the studio. Image by Jake Harrison
Your studio has always struck me as an archetypal artist’s studio, in that it's overflowing with materials, work in progress, reference images, and there’s little room to move. What role does this space play in your process, how does it enable you to make the work you do?
I was watching an interview with William Kentridge last week and he talks about the studio as an expanded brain. I try to set myself up to be in a place where I'm thinking through making. It's an idea that's come to me from listening to other artists talk about how they make work, but separating thinking and research that happens outside the studio. So that when I'm in the studio, it's a place where I'm set up with lots of materials and lots of stimulus and I can think in a different way, responding intuitively to what's around me, and the materials are kind of speaking to you. But that's the ideal state, it doesn't always happen like that.
My own version of the studio-as-expanded-brain is my notebook. But I always feel a bit odd when someone looks over my shoulder; it's like “stop looking inside my head!” How do you feel about people visiting your studio? You've always seemed very open about inviting people in to see works in progress.
It's always good to hear other voices. It often provides a bit of clarity...getting other people's opinions in. But I do know what you mean. I suppose it's a private space, sometimes you don’t want anyone to visit because you're in the midst of something
Perhaps it connects with what you were talking about with that separation of thinking and research during your making process?
Yeah, you go through cycles of creative process where there's thinking and gathering and making and researching and acting and sharing and looking and teaching and showing. There's a sort of a cycle of repeating activities and sometimes you feel certain, sometimes you feel doubtful, sometimes you feel excited. Sometimes you feel impatient or bored. So, it's a cycle of activities and quite a lot of changing emotions on a daily basis…Monday you doubt everything, then Tuesday feels like it was meant to be.
So, I think inviting other people in, a conversation with someone, it can help you...I don't know...feel connected through an exchange or dialogue related to the work.
Yeah, I often find that people see things in my own work, which I didn't intend to put there or haven't noticed myself. Those can lead in interesting directions…
Yeah, definitely. You pour all these ideas into making the work. All these contexts go into the work that are filtered through you, but then it's always interesting to see what someone else sees first or connects with the most.
I Want You Here, 2025, oil, emulsion, acrylic, pastel, spray paint, black-out curtain, bleach, pastel, vinegar bottles, found notes, dead bee, hand sanitiser gel, magazine clippings, speech therapy prompt cards, watch strap, map, powder filler, chalkboard paint tin, tape, plastic signage, draft excluder, canvas and wood, 99 x 244cm. Image by Michael Pollard
Yeah, I'd like to pick up on what you said there about things filtering through you. In your studio there are so many different things. Beer matts, bluebacked advertising posters, magazine pages, DVD cases. Do they all play an equal part in your process; do you see any hierarchy between those materials?
Definitely not. I remember my tutor at Edinburgh College of Art, John Brown, talking to me about the infinite world of images and listening to him get excited by that...and the glee on his face was quite inspiring and made me realise...this kind of infinite world of images and stuff that's all up for grabs and can be equally interesting.
I think anything that catches my eye or I feel a material connection to...I grab. I don’t remember the quote exactly but Lubaina Himid talks about her use of found materials and familiar connections… she likens it how everyone has their favourite mug at home, and bringing this affinity to materials into your art. Sometimes the collecting of things is thoughtless, and other times it's thoughtful. I think it's recently become more thoughtful as I'm losing space in the studio.
Some things I know exactly what I’ll do with it, other stuff sits there for years, before finding itself in a painting. It's quite an open process of moving things around. And I think you can see that moveability more in recent paintings where bits of tape are visible or work isn’t contained to the stretcher bars...there's a feeling of temporariness where part of the painting feels like it's only just stuck to the frame and it could easily move.
That temporariness is quite unusual, it’s certainly not what one might expect in a ‘traditional’ painting. Could you say more about that approach to making, where works are always evolving and parts are temporarily attached, moved and sometimes reconfigured into new works?
I think, often there's that end part of painting where you fiddle around quite a lot. And sometimes you can be at risk of over-resolving things for exhibitions. Often editing is useful to clarify the work, perhaps hone in or amplify an aspect, but it rarely gives the work any energy. There’s a fine balance in refining where you don't want to strip away the energy that first went into making it.
With my making process, a lot of it is very collage-based and moving things around and that's perhaps where the energy lies. Sometimes objects and images and words are very embedded in the painting and other times they're sitting on the surface as if they're floating around. There's a bit of both.
I think there's an influence of other art forms as well, I'm often motivated a lot by music and films. The influence of those art forms becomes a productive force when faced with the limitations of painting as silent, flat, and still.
Lots of my paintings are made from bits of old work, so going back to your question, lots of exhibited work becomes something else. They've since been cut up or reused as part of a different painting… as a way of being resourceful, but also as a making process I find interesting.
Somethin’ ain’t right, 2025, oil, acrylic, emulsion, pastel, spray paint, canvas, wood, plastic, grass, magazine clippings, metal, tape, cardboard, floor paint, paper, synthetic fabric, 200x373cm. Image by Michael Pollard
I'd like to acknowledge what you've just said about resourcefulness. Making art is largely an expensive thing to do. It takes money, time, and space. But many people who do it don't make much money at all. I'm aware that a lot of this material comes to you via friends or are things that you've found on the street, or out of skips...does this strategy enable you to keep making at the rate and scale that you do?
I buy very few art materials, I feel like there's so much stuff around us ready to use. I'll buy my paints and brushes, but normally not the surfaces I work on or images I collage with, or else they’re very cheap - for example these DVDs are from a charity shop.
People in the Manchester artist network often hand me stuff, because they know I like working with found materials. Then there's things that I collect, my Granddad's old tools from his shed where he used to make model boats are stencilled into this painting. And vinegar bottles from an old Cafe I worked at. Speech therapy cards from a friend’s mum. Magazine pages from Tesco. Yeah, all sorts of things. Some of them are quite personal, but normally they're quite generic. The stuff that surrounds us.
In terms of being the stuff that surrounds us, to me, it feels like the stuff of a city and of contemporary urban life. I think there is something about living in a city that reverberates through the things that you make.
Yeah, yeah, the stuff that's around us but not necessarily stuff that supports us; or supports life. There is that theme through my work; some kind of journeying through life. And also some of the hidden systems or mechanics. There's motifs of pipes and networks. And water that's not the colour it should be and clouds that are toxic yellow. So there's familiarity but something's not quite right...That's the world.
I Want You Here (detail) , 2025. Image by Michael Pollard.
Somethin’ ain’t right (detail), 2025. Image by Michael Pollard.
Your works are typically so visually dense, although some of the newer paintings have more space or ambiguous areas. How do you know when to stop adding to them, what’s your rationale?
There was an interview with Nick Cave, and he was talking about his song lyrics being something that could collect meaning over time. I think about that sometimes when I’m painting, and stopping at a point where the painting says something, but not too much, leaving space for the painting to collect meaning.
Because people bring their own associations to the works? As you mentioned before the materials you work with have their own histories, and as a consequence your paintings are very layered (physically and metaphorically).
Yes exactly, for the painting to collect meaning from the viewer.
There is a lot of layering in my process, partly because a lot of my making is intuitive; layering is the result of a free process, but also one that is often dissatisfied, so I add more. Then there is a stage of editing, sometimes adding and sometimes stripping back. There is a layering in painting and combining found objects and materials. I’m interested in the idea of palimpsests - my process reflects a physical and psychological world where our present is physically layered and built upon the past.
There are some themes in my work to do with facade, surface, illusion, interior and exterior. I think this has partly developed from growing up and working in Manchester and watching it dramatically evolve. Especially evident is the reduction of public space in favour of private developments and buy-to-let apartment blocks. Lots of aspirational facades, sugar-coated offerings, astroturf, ginger shots and deck chairs. You kind of forget what the spaces you live in are meant to look like, until you go on holiday and see how different cities' urban life is a lot more communal, affordable, natural, and welcoming.
But my work is not about Manchester, that’s just the environment that I've been making work in.
This is something I’d also been thinking about in relation to your work. The idea of the city in flux is reflected in your approach to image making. I think you go well beyond them being about Manchester, they’ve reached a place that speaks to a much broader contemporary experience.
It’s like what I said before, where research and ideas are with me until I arrive at the studio, and then ideally I’m just responding to the making process. So they’re a prompt and a starting point, but then the work doesn’t have to answer to those themes. They're normally so contaminated with multiple ideas or conflicting thoughts.
New People, 2024, oil, acrylic, emulsion on synthetic fabric, 150 x 100cm. Image by Michael Pollard.
You’ve spoken about the influence of the city and your dialogue with its changing nature. A great example is the painting right by us, which declares ‘New People Want Windows’. Lots of your works use text, which I often read as humorous; where do these phrases come from? And what is the intention behind it?
Quite simply put, I’m interested in words as much as images. So often a painting starts with words, it might have been a song lyric or something I’d overheard - something I want to visually get down.
I see words as images. I think they can be used in the same way as a material. I also think people are so used to seeing text with an image, if you think about how we encounter images in the world; surrounded by…subtitles on a screen, advertising signs. So in my mind…why wouldn’t I use words when they’re all around us. Within painting, sometimes they’re a way in for me to make the work and I also think sometimes for the viewer they can be a way into reading the work.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how much value or truth you give to a word over an image. I don’t deliberate about this whilst making, though, rather using words like any other material, moving it around and seeing where it settles, seeing what kind of position it holds within a painting..some words or images might set themselves in a place and others might be more fleeting or move around.
An object that interested me recently was a pack of speech therapy cards that I’ve been inserting into paintings. I liked how they are images that are embedded with language. Because they’re meant to be the most iconic version of that image. Like that toaster there…it’s meant to be the most toastery toaster.
I’m interested in images' relationship to language…language being on the edge of image. People want to describe what they can see…so I like that idea, the boundaries and borders between language, image, and space.
Disc Unknown (install shot), 2025 - ongoing, mixed media on DVD cases. Image by Michael Pollard.We’ve spoken a bit about where your practice has been and where it’s going now, perhaps this would be a good time to hear about the two solo exhibitions that you’re working towards? What will feature in them and how will they differ from each other?
It's a project which unfolds over two spaces, two separate spaces, two exhibitions. Some things will repeat in both exhibitions and some things will be unique to each space. Because they’re very different spaces. Pipeline, being a contemporary commercial gallery in London; and Castlefield being a larger public gallery with two levels, in Manchester.
There’s a consideration of responding to each space. The starting point for both exhibitions was the series Disc Unknown, which is the name I’ve given to the continued project of the works on DVDs.
I said a bit before how they’re gathered from charity shops or started from my own DVD collection. They’re painted and collaged over, there's some of the original film title, staying there, some being removed. They’re just a space…I liked them as a space to collage where you could insert things into the sleeve and you could place things on top.
And I was using that series as a starting point for imagining an exhibition that expands on them. This was inspired by the way that other people engaged with them at my solo exhibition last year at Paradise Works, where they were sort of guessing or thinking about the worlds that they might refer to.
They’re compact worlds or small fragments. So I started thinking about how they could be used in relation to the larger paintings. The exhibition at Pipeline will be a specific selection of the DVD paintings series. This time shown in a linear sequencing that wraps around the space. So it's an opportunity to think about how much you build a narrative or a sequence through them. This sequence will be punctuated by a couple of larger mixed-media paintings that point towards the expanded world to come at Castlefield.
At Castlefield Gallery, the world that is introduced at Pipeline expands utilising the space of Castlefield Gallery, which has two levels. Perhaps bringing paintings off the walls. Perhaps utilising lighting to amplify or obscure certain structural components of the paintings. But really, I don't know what's going to happen, because I'm going to be working there in the week before the install. Figuring out the space and responding to it, maybe making some work in there.
So you'll be coming with a lot of finished work, but also maybe work in progress and additional materials, to build out something that is custom in response to the space? Rather than going in with much of a plan.
Yeah, Castlefield is an opportunity to experience exhibition-making as a creative stage of making the work. I'm thinking about the environment of the gallery space as a painting itself, and how people move around it. With Castlefield Gallery having two levels, there’s an opportunity to create different kinds
of encounters with the work, perhaps areas that are calmer and quieter, and others that are expansive or overwhelming.
A Second Body, 2026, oil, acrylic, spray paint, photographs, magazine clippings, speech therapy prompt cards, billboards, tape, charcoal and pastel on canvas, 169 x 249cm
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Joe O’Rourke lives and works in the Manchester, UK. He graduated with a BA in Painting from the University of Edinburgh in 2017. Recent awards include the CreaTech CoLab, University of Salford (selected artist, 2025); Waverton Art Prize (shortlisted, 2024); and the John Moores Painting Prize (prize winner, 2018). He completed a residency at PADA Studios, Lisbon in 2021. Solo and duo exhibitions include Coming Soon, Paradise Works, Salford (2025, solo); Half Awake with Parham Ghalamdar, Bankley Gallery, Manchester (2022, duo); The Hole, Bankley Gallery, Manchester (2017, solo); and GIANTS, TENT Gallery, Edinburgh (2017, solo). Recent group exhibitions include Mezzanine Studios, London (2025); Seesaw Space, Manchester and Boisdale of Canary Wharf, London (2024); Murama Gallery, Marple; Longsight Art Space, Manchester; Make CIC, Liverpool; and Rag Gallery, Manchester (2023); as well as presentations across London, Sufolk, Salford, Swansea, and Lisbon between 2020–2022, including the John Moores Painting Prize China at Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum (2020) and the Young Contemporary Artist Award at The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle (2020).
Additional links:
Castlefield award announcement
Pipeline exhibition interview and announcement
Chris Alton is an artist living and working in West Yorkshire, UK. He was part of Syllabus III, an alternative learning programme (2017-18). Exhibitions & commissions include; Grief Must be Love With Nowhere to Go, Warrington Museum & Art Gallery (2026) and Bloc Projects (2024); Exeter Contemporary Open, Exeter Phoenix (2025) Tied to Everything Else, Paradise Works, Salford (2023); Survey, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Bluecoat, Liverpool; g39, Cardif; & Jerwood Space, London (2018-19); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery; & Liverpool Biennial (2018-19). Awards include; Exeter Contemporary Award Winner 2025 (jointly awarded), The 6th John Ruskin Prize 2024 (Shortlisted), a-n Artist Bursary 2022, Jerwood Bursary 2020.
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︎ @joeor_
josephorourke.co.uk
︎ @chrisalton
chrisalton.com
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If you like this why not read our interview with Alana Lake.
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