Art & Abolitionist Futures - Leeds 2024
photos: Fenia Kotsopoulou
ally, Dalton and Phoenix collectively created a project in collaboration with Abolitionist Futures fusing creative workshops and art, with abolition. Running workshops across Leeds on transformative justice, they used activities like collage making with editions of The Abolitionist (an abolitionist journal created in the 1980s that you can read our archived editions of here).
As part of this project Dalton collaborated with Bent Bars, a collective that he was in touch with during his own time in prison. You can read his blog post about this here.
We also put out a call out for five poster commissions, inspired by themes explored in The Abolitionist. We were overwhelmed by the amazing submissions we received and are excited to launch the final commissioned artworks below!
On 29th June 2024, we facilitated an Arts & Abolition event in Leeds, where the five posters were unveiled and people engaged in a day of creative workshops and abolitionist exchange.
Through this project, we hoped to build on a creative abolitionist tradition and stimulate more collaboration between art and the abolition movement in the UK and Ireland.
We invite you to enjoy and spread the word of abolition with these images of hope and imagination.
The project was seed funded by Sapling – an initiative from the University of Leeds Cultural Institute and the Leeds Arts & Humanities Research Institute.
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The posters below are from artists that have shared their work under creative commons licence.
Creative commons licence: CC BY-NC-ND This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.
Artist bios
Kyle Lee-Crossett is a printmaker and mixed media artist based in London who primarily organises with Bent Bars, an LGBTQ+ penpal project for prisoners in Britain and Northern Ireland. The print, “We are each other’s Business” was inspired by lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem ‘Paul Robeson’ in memoriam of the singer and activist.
Pear Nuallak was dug out of the side of Shirley Hills in the late 20th century. They are an artist and writer currently based in all the bogs of London. After attempting to have an ‘art career’ and sneezing from the dust and neoliberalism, Pear discovered a hatred of boredom, exited the art studio, and took up a creative practice where they mess around with textiles and words. They enjoy causing mischief in places between the country and the city while playing with the relationship between the land and the body. Their first book, Pearls from their Mouth, was published in 2022 with Hajar Press.
Dudley Walsh Underclass artist and writer who co-foundered and is living at The Field, a semi-mythical DIY horizontal residency program for artists in their hometown- Ilkeston, Derbyshire. Was recently on a panel at Wysing Arts Center about art in the rural, plus DIY Art and underground conference at Nottingham University. Spoke at the exhibition RABBIT at Bury Museum Manchester. Pervious duo shows with Lisa Selby, Jake Kent, Leomi Sadler and Sam Hutchinson. First solo show at Screw Gallery Leeds 2021. They are alumni of School of The Damned 2017. Forthcoming projects include; poetry in Sissy Anarchy, speaking at Watery speculations conference of wet feminism at Greenwich University June 2024, working with Mayday Rooms, and Museums of Justice with Oscar Wilde’s prison door from Reading Gaol.
rosa is a nonbinary autistic illustrator, educator, and quiet activist based in Brighton. This poster explores the potential of compost and decomposition as a metaphor for growing abolitionist futures. The poster is an opening and invitation; by scanning the QR code viewers are invited to contribute to an online abolitionist compost heap. The QR code/ online compost heap will be an open source tool and gathering space for radically imagining, dismantling and world-building beyond carceral capitalist logics.
Leela Keshav (she/her) is an artist and writer completing graduate studies at the Architectural Association in London, where her current work examines plant-human relationships and imagines reparative futures. She was the writer-in-residence at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in May 2024, and her writing and illustrations have been featured in ROOM Magazine, London Festival of Architecture, The Architectural Review, and Chutney Magazine, among others.